Originally published at: Learn to sharpen pencils | Boing Boing
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/cough/ mechanical pencils /cough/
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Great! Thanks :-/
First they take away chalk boards and brushes and now I’m sharpening pencils wrong… remind me why I went to school at all…?!?
You’re ruining my childhood…
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My old biology teacher showed me how to correctly sharpen a pencil with a (properly sharpened, natch) penknife. I actually got credit for having a knife in class. Never happened again mind.
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You know, what I need and can’t find are the pencil sharpeners like the ones that we had back in drafting class. They only sharpened the wood, and you used a pencil pointer to sharpen the lead.
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The only time I use pencils is in the garage for wood working. I hate carpenter pencils, I can never keep my #2 pencils sharp so I just use black sharpies. Bonus is I can see my marks.
I’ve tried mechanical pencils but they never work out, at least the cheap ones.
I do have a 30 year old electric sharpener that found it’s way home from my dad’s office at Ford when he retired.
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I love mechanical pencils for writing. But they aren’t great for drawing. You get much better line weight with regular pencils.
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Blackwing and others sell two-stage sharpeners. Side A only removes wood, and side B sharpens the lead to a point. I really like it, and it works great.
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I admit carpenter pencils are a little like coffee for me: something that habit made better with time, until it has its own patina. I have one in my toolbox because it’s so darn robust and I don’t feel bad about it looking all beat up by rattling around with spare screws and other junk.
It’s just my personal nostalgia and not any sort of recommendation, but not everything has to be perfect. For drawing I have three different mechanical pencils from Rotring: one fine and soft, one thicker and soft, and one thicker and hard. And a mechanical sharpener for regular pencils lying around the house, so I am inconsistent and contradictory, but I am comfortable with that.
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Yeah, but… Amazon?
Then you get onto charcoal. I have seen people in an atelier spend half an hour getting a “blade” on Nitram charcoal that you could slip between the ribs of a rival, and lose half the charcoal in the process, personally I use willow charcoal at different widths and let it reach a point while drawing.
I had a typography tutor who spent sometime teaching us how to sharpen chisel points for grid drawing and how to sharpen another point to hand render type.
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Exhibit C: A longpoint pencil sharpener [Amazon]
Did BB start a sudden run on these, or is Rob just being Rob, again? 
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just having a pencil and not losing it is a foot… feet… feat…
spelling is my best and worst subjectercon
Yeah, that. The moment I saw the photo of these longpoints I could mentally hear and feel the crunch of the point breaking off
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I had an art instructor, an old school illustrator, who had us sharpen Wolff carbon pencils in this way. I grew to like it, especially for life drawing. You could get broad areas of tone and fine detail in one package. You place the forefinger on the backside of the point to prevent it breaking. BTW, the charcoal from the sharpening isn’t wasted–you collect it and wipe it onto the back of a sketch you’re transferring to the final board. Cheaper and easier than transfer paper.
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Now explain how to sharpen Conte pencils without a lot of swearing and the whole thing crumbling.
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With a cast-iron pencil sharpener.
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