Tips on Choosing Drawing Pencils
October 25th, 2007 | by Art Supplies |Pencils are one of the essential parts of art supplies. An artist realize the importance of a pencil in arts, he realizes that his art supplies as well as his art are both incomplete without a pencil. Artists use them to draw their ideas on a paper. There are many instances in the life of an artist when an idea for an art just pops up. In these situations, it comes in handy to carry a pencil. There are different types of pencils available in market and you can use easily buy the type of pencil that best suits your requirement.
- Wood Pencils: These pencils are the most widely available types of pencils. It mostly has graphite composite or some related material that enclosed between two strips of wood. Although, the most commonly used type of wood is the cedar but recently some “rain-forest” wood’s pencils are also being manufactured. The pencils are mostly made of cedar because of its strength to withstand sharpening and other tortures when writing is done.
- Mechanical Pencils: These types of pencils come in many styles. In this type of pencil the lead of pencil is encased between an engineered case. This engineered case is made of metal, plastic or both instead of wood. In these cases the lead is pressed forward through an external gadget.
- Other types: With so much talk being going around regarding saving environment pencils are also being made from recycled materials such as plastics, cloth, sawdust etc.
The pencils are classified in two categories due to there hardness.
- Hard Pencils: The refills of these types of pencils are mostly dry and tenacious. The refills are mostly grayish in color.
- Soft Pencils: These pencils mostly have thicker refills then hard pencils. They are oily and must be handled with care due to there fragile nature. These are dark colored pencils.
Within these two classifications is the widest variety of pencils available. The hard pencils are assigned the letter H that helps them in differentiating them from the soft samples, which are assigned letter. Each of these further has pencils of different thickness and application purpose available. For example, you can choose 2H, 3H, 4H in case of hard pencils or 2B, 3B, 4B and so on. Out of these the most commonly used pencils is the 2B.
It is extremely important to choose the right type of pencils. Pencils help the artist to convey their inner most feelings and ideas to a paper. Even if the artist does not have his other art supplies available, he can still convey his thoughts to the world. Some artists use colors to convey their message but there are others who do not depend on colors to say what they want. Pencils are the only tool of such artists and if it is said that pencils are the only art supplies of these artists then it won’t be far from truth.
