Pencil is mightier

A pencil is as readily available as a ball point pen. Maybe even more so. There was an old Cold War joke about Americans trying very hard to develop a pen that would work in space, in the absence of gravity. Meanwhile the Soviets chose to just use pencils. They work in space and also underwater!

If you’re new to drawing I still recommend you start working with pen before doing pencil. It will be easier to move from pen to pencil and you will immediately appreciate the increased range of expression that a pencil offers. I am going to do a Drawing Tuesday demo on this.

The most common question about pencil has to do with the numbers and letters. In writing this, I also learned something I didn’t know. H stands for Hardness and B stands for Blackness. The code on pencils is a number and one of the two letters with the most common, average pencil being HB. There is also F for Fine, which I didn’t know either! The pencil ‘lead’ is made of graphite and clay in a certain proportion: more clay moves the pencil farther toward H.

So, what is the point of all these pencil grades? As you can see above, you can get a range of values but I don’t think you need more than 3 pencils. If you want to do a drawing that is detailed and you want to build up over time, then it’s a good idea to start with a harder pencil which will keep the line work light to start. Once everything is established in your drawing, you can switch to some softer pencils for the areas where you want to generate darker values. With practice though, you can become more aware of how much pressure you apply on the pencil and be able to modulate that. In this way, you can use a soft pencil and start with light pressure/light lines and then press harder where needed to get darker values.

If you are looking to bring your drawing to the next level and incorporate better technique into your work, then consider upgrading to a paid subscription so you can watch demos like this one:

https://open.substack.com/pub/artonthebrain/p/draw-less-say-more-the-art-of-the?r=83yei&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=true