Pencils
All about this essential item
Pencils are perplexing. Why is there a #2, a 2H, a 2B, but no number 1? What is an HB? Why are school buses and school pencils yellow?
Well, like most things that have been around a long time, different people have contributed to its development over the years. If you like fun history stories you’re in luck. Pencils are a black and white tool with a colorful past.
In ancient times the romans discovered that metal made marks on tablets and paper. They made a stick of metal and called it a stylus. Lead and silver was used for centuries to draw and write.
Then a huge graphite deposit was discovered in England but they thought it was a rare form of lead. Hence we have pencil lead. For many years it was highly valuable and simply sawed into rectangular sticks.
The wooden case was added later to prevent breakage but most graphite was not solid or strong enough to hold up even in wood. Only the English had this special graphite.
In the late 1700s Napoleon had gone to war and trade blockades caused a severe shortage of the important English graphite. Everyone else had poor quality powdery graphite. Nicolas Conté, an inventor and chemist, was tasked to find a substitute. In only a week he came up with a clay and graphite combination which he had fired in a kiln. It worked so well that we are using this basic process even today. Conté is even still in use as a brand name over 200 years later.
As he continued his work, Conté discovered he could control the clay formulas to produce lighter or darker lines from his leads.
This is where we get the number and lettering system we use for art pencils - and most every pencil in Europe. Sadly, Conté was a chemist, not a marketer, and scientists love organizing things in excruciatingly meticulous ways. Chemists also don't want to waste time writing long designations so he abbreviated everything as much as possible, making them even more enigmatic.
We think Nic decided to use 2 different scales for his pencils. Hardness and blackness, but this isn't clear. We just know he worked up a system and it is the basis for what we have. The difficult thing to realize about these scales is that they move in opposite directions. More black is darker and more hardness is lighter.
There is the question of why we don't have scales that use opposing characteristics. Why is it not blackness and lightness, or hardness and softness? By the way, it's important to note that the more Bs you have for blackness also means the lead is softer and more likely to break.
Back to our story. Just 7 years after Conté invented his pencil, a Bavarian company patented a similar process and they claim the H for hardness scale is short for their family name: Hardtmuth. It does make sense.
Either way we have 2 scales, going from B to more Bs, and H to more Hs. BBBB was shortened to 4B and so on. The scale goes up to 9B and 9H, because who wants to write 3 whole digits like a 10B? What a waste of effort that would be.
So there is also an HB that stands in the middle as a kind of balancing point. I like to think of it as if HB was zero and hardness are positive numbers while blackness are negative. It works for me.
At some point (yes, I like this pun), someone realized there were just too many levels and they ditched the odd numbers. Well, except for the single H and the single B. Now we have 2, 4, 6, and 8 in each scale, and B, H, and HB.
But wait, then there's also F. That was inexplicably tossed in by Conté meaning fine point, but really is just slightly harder than HB yet softer than H. Kind of a 0.5 H you might say.
Got it? There's more.
In walks the Americans. Henry David Thoreau to be exact. He looked at the mess I've described and decided to fix it because his family owned a pencil factory. Henry decided we should only have 4 pencils. Or maybe 5. Because writing is all we need them for. And boy wouldn't that make it cheaper to run a pencil factory?
I'm not sure why, but even as he sought to simplify, he made all kinds of new complications. His scale has numbers 1, 2, 3, and 4. Sounds good. But then he felt the need for at least one more and... should we call it 5? No! Let's call it 2.5, kind of in the center, like the HB is.
But is 2.5 the same as HB? No! Is a #2 like a 2B or a 2H? No!
A number 1 is like the B, a number 2 is an HB, a number 2.5 is an F, a 3 is an H and 4 is a 2H. So clever. It's not hard to understand why this never really caught on except for school kids.
All you need to know though, is that in America we use #2 pencils in schools almost exclusively, and it is the same as an HB. These are for writing.
All you need to know
In art, we tend to use 2B as the best all-around drawing pencil and a 4B or higher for darker and softer techniques.
Every pencil manufacturer will have slightly different values but you shouldn't notice. And you know why American #2 pencils are yellow? Because quality lead came from China a while back and a manufacturer decided to paint their pencils glossy Chinese-nobility-yellow as a marketing message.
A couple of other things to know and then we're done.
Graphite sticks are really nice to work with, especially if you can't stand the feel of charcoal.
If you want a 9B (the darkest, softest lead out there), Prismacolor makes a pencil called Ebony, that is the equivalent.
In my set, I use a 2B, a 4B, an Ebony, and a stick. I also use a mechanical pencil with 0.5 mm 4B polymer lead for designing, sketching, and writing.
Thanks for reading. The world needs happy artists.
Dennas
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