Two important points about this set: 1. It comes with a large sketchpad. 2. It comes with three decent quality woodless carbon pencils. It's a great medium very similar to the compressed charcoal. This is a good sketching set. The paper is good enough for graphite and carbon sketching, maybe for thick paints like gouache. You can use carbon pencils with the provided sketchpad, but for actual work you'll procure thick textured paper anyway, so it's normal. The gradation of pencils isn't very pronounced, but for sketching you only need a 2B, which is provided in graphite and carbon, so you're all set.

If I could give this less than one star I definatley would!! It shipped in an envelope the sketch pad was wrinkled on all the corners and all three charcoal pencils were broken!! What a waste of money!!

The wrong artskills item was sent and no way to get what I wanted!