The Pencil Test - Part One

OK, fold up that papyrus and put away your stylus and listen up. I'm going to talk about pencils.

Before I get to the test results, let me give you some background information and show off my INTERNET search abilities.

The opening statement would be valid if we were in ancient Rome. That's right, the modern pencil owes it all to some little known and some very well known scribes in ancient Rome.  We've come a long way, baby. Early styluses were made with lead cores and to this day, most people still call pencil cores lead even though they actually are made of non-toxic graphite. 

Thanks to the discovery of a large graphite deposit in Borrowdale, England in 1564, graphite came into widespread use. This discovery is an interesting story in itself and worth the time to google.  It was and still is, the purest and hardest deposit ever found.  So hard that it could be cut into convenient sticks, washed and sent on it's way.   Due to it's ease of mining and manufacture the potential to flood the market was very high.  In order to avoid that and to maintain a high re-sale value, sales agreements included a condition where the proprietors agreed not to open the mine again within an agreed period.  By the mid 1830's the pencil industry turned more and more to a composite mixture of powdered graphite with powdered clay and the demand for pure graphite diminished. 

Graphite leaves a darker mark than lead.  However, graphite, on it's own, is soft and brittle and requires a holder of some sort. Today pencils come in all sorts of holders, the best know being the wood-cased pencil but originally, graphite sticks, were wrapped in string.

Pencils are graded by their degree of hardness. The designations are “H” (for hardness) and “B” (for blackness). Your standard, run of the mill, writing pencil is graded HB. Along with it's alpha designation, a number is also assigned to each pencil. The higher the number the harder or softer the lead is. The various graphite pencil grades are achieved by altering the proportion of graphite to clay: the more clay, the harder the pencil.

9H 8H 7H 6H 5H 4H 3H 2H H F HB B 2B 3B 4B 5B 6B 7B 8B 9B

As artists, we are most interested in creating a full range of tones from light grey to black. Actually, we tend to use the basic 5 grades, HB, 2B, 4B, 2H and 4 H. A wide range of tones can be achieved using just these 5, with the occasional use of a 6B for getting some really dark darks. Due to the wide range of tonal overlap between grades, owning every one is not necessary.

Here's an interesting fact... did you know that pencils graded using this system are used to measure the hardness and resistance of paints? The resistance of a coating, its pencil hardness, is determined by the grade of the hardest pencil that does not mark the coating when pressed firmly against it at a 45 degree angle. Now you know, lol.

Here in the U.S. a common method to designate the grade of a pencil uses numbers. #1 = B, #2 = HB, #3 = H and #4 = 2H.

Two pencils of the same grade but different manufacturers will not necessarily make a mark of identical tone or have the same hardness. That's why I did the Pencil Test. Although individual abilities have a huge impact on results, using the right tools is just as important in art as it is in any other trade or endeavor.

I wanted to find what was best "for me", so I purchased the 5 brands of pencils that I've seen most often mentioned among artists and performed my own un-scientific test. In order to get a fair evaluation of each brand, each pencil was tested using the same paper, the same pressure and because the only way to test an artist pencil is to draw something with it, I tested them all drawing the trusty old shaded sphere.

But, all that's coming up in Part Two :-)

Oh, and if you haven't watched it yet, check out this video on the making of a pencil. How a pencil is made.