Mount Vision Pastel Company 15-Piece Dark Earth Set

Mount Vision pastels are thick, soft and provide rich colors. I've been working on landscapes that require earthy colors ranging anywhere from stark white to dark browns since the scenes are mountains and lakes in the snow. MV pastels lay down thickly and are as high a quality as the pricier Sennelier and Schmincke brands. Quality and reasonable price - very good product.

Beautiful color selection in this set! High quality soft pastels similar to more expensive Unison but do not crumble as easily. Well with the price. Will be buying more sets, love them.

Wanted to try this brand. Great price offered...nice size, color combination, quality. Not a broken pastel in the box. Well packaged!

I would have given this shipment a minus 5 if I could have. It arrived in a large box "2B4" on the flap; shipped from Amazon Fulfillment Services at 172 Trade Street, Lexington, KY. When I opened the box I found a small box of Mount Vision Pastels (5 pieces in greens, see my review elsewhere) which, other than being covered in brown pastel dust, was intact and properly closed. There was a strip of 9 feeble little air bags. And then there was my box of 15 Dark Earth pastels, properly packed and boxed by the manufacturer. BUT. The 15-pastel box was hanging open and some of the pastels had fallen out in the shipping process; being soft pastels they are very fragile and crumble easily (one of their features in pastel painting is their creaminess and ease of application), and these were in partial shards all over the inside of this FAR TOO BIG shipping box. Any movement at all just made it worse, especially in the box with all that extra space to crash around in. The manufacturer provides the product in snug fitting foam panels with cutouts for each individual piece. The box has a tab and slot arrangement to prevent accidental opening. The tab was intact and the lid was fully open inside the shipping box. A competent shipping person and supervisory personnel would have checked the box as it was placed in the shipping box, and corrected the problem before sending the box down the line. If this is done robotically your robot needs a new circuit board.Amazon's shipping personnel, on this occasion, failed miserably and it should be brought to their attention. The packaging for this sort of shipment should also be more carefully chosen. I receive Amazon shipments on a frequent basis, mostly books (always safely and snugly packed); but in the same time frame I received about 5-6 other shipments with pastels in them, from Amazon and from other sources, and all the rest were perfectly and safely packed for shipping, and arrived in perfect condition.Again, LOVE THE PRODUCT, WOULD GIVE IT 6 STARS; BUT HATE, HATE, HATE, THE WAY IT WAS SHIPPED BY AMAZON. TERRIBLE PACKAGING CHOICE.I may or may not try again for another Mount Vision color assortment through Amazon; then again I will probably go to another source and give them my business, knowing they will double check that boxes are closed and that the outside shipping box isn't so cavernous that things can flop and bang around.I am used to getting my Amazon shipments decently packaged but this one was a total failure in my book.

Often things online seen don't meet my expectations in regards to color. Shoes I have purchased seem to most often look brighter than they do online. I was pleasantly surprised when the image matched the actual item. Mount Vision Pastels are smooth and buttery and a pleasure to work with. The reason for the 4 star rating is that one pastel was broken which is a minor detail and given all the activity in shipping a delicate thing such as a pastel, I am pleased.

I am enjoying these. They have a bit more grit/tooth than some of my other pastels but they are wonderful for the "in between" layers -- over the underpainting and under the final stages with the super soft pastels. The colors are rich and luminous even in the darker shades.

Really nice pastels, go on smoothly. Great color ranges and a real asset to my pallet. Great that they are an American product!

Great product and gives me more flexibility for dark areas of my pastel paintings. Thanks.