A Stranger Elf in a Strange Art Land: Pencils Part 1

All you need to draw is a piece of paper and a pencil But there are pencils and pencils. So we will talk about one of the main tools of drawing: the pencil. More specifically graphite wood pencils.

My first set of drawing pencils.

I love these Mars Lumograph Pencils. The original content of the tin box was 8B 7B 6B 6B 5B 4B 4B 3B 2B 2B B HB F H 2H 3H 4H 5H 6H, but i have replaced the extra 2B and 4B pencils with an extra 7B and 8B, so i have 2 6B, 2 7B and 2 8B. As you can probably see, i have used mainly pencils from the 6B to H range. These pencils are very smooth, easy to sharpen and to erase and have a very good value range from 6H to 8B.

Lumograph value range

This is how the value range of the Lumograph series of drawing pencils looks. It starts on 6H the lightest one and goes to 8B the darkest one. The HB stands in the middle and is the normal pencil, the one you will find everywhere.

Normally different pencil manufacturers have different ranges of value available spawning from 9H to 9B. I have heard there is also 10H, but I never saw one.

Pencils are made of graphite and clay, The more clay the pencil has the lightest the mark it leaves on the paper. They range from the (H) Hard ones, which have more clay than graphite,to the (B) Black ones which have less clay and much more graphite.

The hard pencils range from H to 9H. The 9H is so hard that I think I will only need to sharpen it only once, and it seems it will never wear off.

The black and soft pencils range from B to 9B. Usually the lead diameter tends to grow with the higher B value cause they are softer and have tendency to break easily. These ones leave the blackest mark in the paper that graphite can do.