4B challenge

I thought I might just do a quick comparison of the 5 or so pencils I found in the attic the other day. I was really pleased to find the Wolff's Carbon as I had recently been talking to Tom Barwick about this pencil, so it was quite a pleasant surprise that I still had one floating about. Technically these are all my pencils but technically I did just find them whilst looking for something else.

What struck me first was the fact that the Faber-Castel 9000 was darker and richer and nicer to use than both the Crayola 4B and the Graphitone 4B. And even though the Faber is hexagonal I much preferred it over the round bodied Crayola. The Wolff's Carbon came out the overall winner using my sliding scale of bias-o-meter but you can't really compare the wolff's to the others as really they are in different categories (so another post just on the wolff's carbon coming up). The Faber though did take some punishment from me and handled it with efficiency we come to expect of German manufacturing. I like the design and colour of the Castell, the green and the gold in classy and you feel like your holding a decent pencil, the lead appears to be pretty central but there is a slight warp on the body as it lifts every so slightly toward the tip, which doesn't really effect the overall performance. The Crayola gets points for being of a round bodied disposition but the graphite stick on the other hand was wholly disappointing.

So hurray for the Castell, it comes out winner of the found 4B challenge.

REEVES? 4B

I found this mystery pencil the other day that just has 4B printed on it in silver emboss. It looks like it belongs to the Reeves family, but I can't be sure. But what I can be sure of is that it is like drawing with butter, it is so nice (although I actually wouldn't like to draw with butter, let's just make that clear). Have you ever seen the Honda ad about drawing on a banana skin with a biro? it's a bit like that - honestly, you can almost see the lead disappear as you glide it across the page. I had a lot of fun drawing with this, but I have no idea where to get another from, as I imagine this one isn't going to last very long. If it were a round body, boy this would be my favorite pencil ever. Definitely in the top 3.

Staedtler Tradition 3B

The Staedtler tradition, let's face it, it is not a Norris is it, but nevertheless the Dennis the Menace of the pencil world does have its pluses. This 3B is a work horse of a pencil. I found it over Christmas and it has been battered around in my bag, dropped and generally abused but it still looks and draws like I got it out the pack yesterday, I am not sure what wood they use, but what ever it is, is good. As a general pencil this works for me, I can't really use it for tonal work as it doesn't really have the consistency over larger areas, but for detail or sketching its fine. I find it doesn't like being sharpened to a fine point and the first couple of millimeter's sort of crumbles off, which can lead to that really annoying double line thing, but now I am being picky.