Graphite Grade Comparison: Four Pencil Brands

My current graphite picks.

A few weeks ago when I talked about what I’m learning in my graphite drawing class, I mentioned that I had discovered immediately how much pencil grades can vary from brand to brand. Later I mentioned that while I’ve always loved Mitsubishi Hi-Uni pencils in the softer grades, I was finding out that they are not as smooth as I want them to be in the harder grades. Since then, I’ve been using a mix of Hi-Uni, Tombow Mono, Staedtler Mars Lumograph and Faber-Castell 9000 rather haphazardly, trying to figure out which I like best.

Now that I’m five weeks into the class, I’m getting to know my materials better and how they perform. I upgraded my paper from student-grade Canson XL Bristol smooth to Strathmore 300 Bristol smooth, which is a slightly better quality. It’s noticeably smoother and without any visible grain. (To see what Canson’s Bristol surface looks like, see my demo showing the difference between using a single grade to achieve a certain value and building up to that value with a wide range of grades used sequentially.)

Instead of continuing to randomly use the various pencil grades among the four brands, I finally decided to make myself a comparison chart of the six grades I use most often. (You’ll notice that I’m missing my Hi-Uni in 2H. It bothers me no end that I can’t find it! . . . did I leave it in Suzanne’s studio? I’m also missing the Tombow Mono in F, but I think I never owned that grade.) The chart was made on Strathmore Bristol smooth.

In every grade, Mitsubishi is softer than the other brands, and Tombow Mono is harder than the others up through B (though it feels surprisingly smoother than the German brands in those harder grades). While my hands-down favorite of the four is Mitsubishi in the softer grades (B and softer), I prefer Tombow and Staedtler in the harder grades, which are noticeably smoother than the Hi-Unis. Faber-Castell is scratchier in every grade and therefore feels harder in application. I find myself avoiding them because of that roughness.

I’ve heard graphite artists say that it’s not necessary to have every grade because there’s so little variation from one step to the next. Once I made this chart, I could see that clearly. I’m hard-pressed to see much difference between 2H and H or between HB and B, although again, that seems to vary among the brands. There’s a larger jump in Hi-Uni between F and HB compared to the other brands. Ultimately, though, one could easily skip every other grade and probably not miss the ones in between.

Another observation to note is that going up through the softer grades (my chart only goes to 2B, but I have grades up through at least 5B in the four brands), there’s less and less difference among the brands in terms of darkness – but the larger difference is in the subjective characteristic that I’ll call “hand feel.” The Hi-Unis feel smoother and seem to glide across the paper compared to the others. (And the Faber-Castell feels rougher even at 5B.)

My last observation is that the specific pairing with paper is an important factor in evaluating how pencils perform. With the lower quality Canson paper, I often had difficulty achieving a uniform value over a large area, and I often switched around pencils in the same grade to see if that would make a difference. It did make some difference, but the larger difference came from upgrading my paper to Strathmore, which makes it much easier to get a uniform value from any pencil. (It’s also possible I’m getting better at applying graphite more uniformly.) 

As is usually the case when choosing among products of comparable quality, there’s no such thing as the “best” pencil. It’s really a matter of identifying the qualities that will do what I want (as well as the more subjective qualities like “hand feel”). My favorites at the moment are shown in the photo at the top.

What Colored Pencils Are Teaching Me

3/18/17 graphite

In the still life I did the other day, I felt like I didn’t do justice to the garlic’s complex, multiple curves (not to mention struggling with capturing its whiteness with colored pencils in four hues). I decided to focus on the garlic alone, this time with graphite. The highlights were much more challenging than a mostly spherical apple.

Working with colored pencils lately has given me ideas about applying what I’ve learned to graphite pencils. In particular, I was thinking about the blending tools I’ve been experimenting with, and I remembered the tortillon I bought a long time ago when a class supply list included it. Just like charcoal, soft graphite can be blended easily with tortillons and stumps (but thankfully, graphite is not nearly as messy as charcoal!). I also used an eraser judiciously when I got heavy-handed with shading in some areas and to clean up smudgy edges after I got done using the tortillon.  

I always think it’s sort of funny that while most beginning sketchers start out drawing with a graphite pencil because they are most comfortable and familiar with it, I went almost immediately to ink. My growing familiarity with colored pencils is, paradoxically, what finally got me interested in trying graphite. Although they are quite different in terms of media, they have similarities in how they can be used, so my learning curve might not be as steep with graphite as it would be if I weren’t immersed in colored pencils right now.

I’d love to take a graphite drawing class someday. When I think of masters like Michelangelo and Da Vinci, there’s nothing quite so exquisite as a well-executed graphite drawing.

Feathery

3/2/17 graphite

Apparently this type of tree is called a weeping sequoia. I don’t know much about it except that I see many intriguing examples all over Seattle – their long, drooping branches are monstrous, messy and strangely humorous. Last year I couldn’t resist sketching one I saw in Maple Leaf, and today I couldn’t resist this one in Wedgwood. I happened to have a freshly sharpened graphite pencil in my bag – just right for all those feathery fronds. 

New Strategy

2/27/17 graphite, white colored pencil, Strathmore toned paper

A few weeks ago we had the first serious snowstorm of the season, which gave me an opportunity to try using gray toned paper to sketch snow. This morning we awoke to a couple of inches of accumulation, but I had a feeling it wouldn’t last (it’s 1 p.m. as I write this, and it’s almost all gone now), so I would have to do it quickly if I wanted another crack at it.

Hmmm. Pull on my boots and hat and gloves and tromp out into the still-falling snow, struggling to sketch on wet paper like last time? Or pour another cup of coffee and sketch through the bathroom window? Yeah, I like my new strategy better! J

Mixed Media at Cannon Beach

2/21/17 water-soluble colored pencils, ink

Possibly our favorite place on earth, Cannon Beach is where we return as often as we can. No matter what is happening elsewhere in the world or in our country, visiting this tiny spot on the Oregon Coast revitalizes our souls and puts everything into perspective. I stand next to monolithic Haystack Rock and feel as small as a sand fly. Then we hike a mile or two down the beach, and Haystack isn’t so huge. We drive to the next beach and look back at Haystack, I see that it’s just another speck on the Pacific’s shoreline, where waves have been crashing in and pulling back out for millennia. At Cannon Beach, I always feel small yet whole.

This week was our fifth visit since I began sketching. Watercolor seems like an intuitively natural medium for capturing water views, so it’s always been my go-to. But the past several months I’ve been focusing almost exclusively on colored pencils, so I decided to leave my watercolors at home. When I was packing, I almost put my watercolors in, “just in case,” but I didn’t want to fall back on an easy old habit. It was an ideal opportunity to face a beloved, familiar landscape with new media.

From the comfort of our oceanfront hotel room (which I was grateful for, since the temperature was down in the 30s), I made my first sketch of Haystack with water-soluble colored pencils (above), which are wonderful for getting both rich color and texture. It helped that the sun came out long enough to put in some shadows. When I got to the partly cloudy sky, however, I switched to ink in a waterbrush. I just haven’t figured out how to make a sky look good with dry pencils (that’s my class homework from last week that I haven’t finished yet), and adding water tends to get streaky.

Later in the day I decided to try the layering techniques I’ve been learning in class using traditional (dry) colored pencils (below). I spent only about an hour on this 4 ½-by-6-inch, not the several hours I would have spent on a class exercise, so I wasn’t able to achieve the depth of tone and hue that I strive for (the overcast sky kept all the shadows away, too). Still, I was mostly happy with the textures (not that gravelly sky, though. . . I have to get to the homework!).

2/21/17 colored pencils

Prepared for rain, I sketched in my waterproof Expedition
notebook (sans glasses!).

 Maybe the most fun I had trying a new medium at the beach was when we thought the rain would continue to come and go as it had all morning. Pulling on my raincoat, I left my bag in the hotel room and stuck only a graphite pencil and my waterproof Expedition notebook in a pocket. Instead of more rain, the sun came out, so I pulled out my tools for a sketch – and I realized my glasses were still in my bag back at our room! No way was I going to hike back up the hill to get them. Not being able to see my small sketchbook well pushed me to stick to the large shapes and tones (below) – and I discovered what a joy it is to use a soft graphite pencil on that crazy Yupo paper! My Mitsubishi Hi-Uni 8B pencil is like velvet on that strangely toothless paper. It’s my designated sketchbook for inclement weather – but who knew I’d enjoy it even in sunshine?

2/22/17 8B graphite pencil, Field Notes Expedition notebook

2/21/17 ink

I also had enormous fun drawing tiny beach-walking stick figures casting shadows and reflections.

During low tide we explored the tidepools surrounding Haystack, where I sketched a variety of anemone, barnacles and other critters clinging to rocks. On a visit in 2014, I had sketched some colorful starfish but didn’t seen any this year, so I asked an Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife staffer about them. He told me that a virus had attacked 98 percent of the starfish on the Pacific Coast during the past few years, and they are only just now beginning to make a slow comeback.

In any weather, in any season, in any medium, Cannon Beach is still one of the most beautiful places on earth. See my posts from previous visits.

2/21/17 brush pen, water-soluble colored pencils

2/21/17 brush pen

2/22/17 colored pencils

2/22/17 colored pencils, ink

Chilly beach

2/22/17 ArtGraf water-soluble graphite pencil

US Bank Centre

2/10/17 brush pen, ink, colored pencil

US Bank Centre, a retail/business office building in the middle of downtown Seattle, was a pleasant indoor space for winter sketching this morning for the small Friday sketch group. Three floors are open to the public with lots of art, seating, small tables and wide windows.

I picked a window on the second floor to sketch a couple of the globe lamp posts on Fifth Avenue and a tree between them. Then when I stopped to chat with Anne on the third floor, I looked down over the railing and spotted Steve Reddy sketching a small sculpture on the floor below. He’s a slow sketcher, so I thought I had plenty of time, but I must have caught him just as he was finishing up because I only had a minute or two to look over his shoulder, literally.

For the last few minutes before the sketchbook throwdown, I pulled out a pencil to sketch the back side of the stone archway on the main floor. (Apparently it came from the old Music Box Theatre.) Staying on the back side kept me from attempting all the ornate details.

2/10/17 ink, colored pencil

2/10/17 graphite

After lunch, a few of us got a bonus treat: David Chamness works on US Bank Centre’s 24^th floor and invited us upstairs. The huge lobby window faces west toward Elliott Bay. Kate and Vivian were happy to simply enjoy the view, but you know me – I couldn’t resist a quick attempt to capture as much as I could without a panoramic sketchbook. My thanks to David for letting me stay a few more minutes to finish up. (In April I’ll be taking David’s 10x10 Urban Sketchers workshop called “Freedom from Worry and Details” to learn how to do this right!)

2/10/17 graphite, brush pen, colored pencils

Mail Truck and Recycle Day

1/20/17 brush pen, colored pencils, graphite

The last time I was able to catch a cute little mail truck in a sketch was more than a year ago. Although ubiquitous, they don’t stop for long, so they’re not easy to capture. This morning I was coming home from an errand in the Greenwood neighborhood when I spotted this one. I pulled over immediately, and just after I finished, the mail carrier showed up and took off.

1/17/17 graphite, colored pencils

Earlier this week I was driving around the Wedgwood neighborhood on recycle and garbage pickup day. As you can see, my standards for inspiring subject matter are low, especially in Winter.

Street View

1/12/17 brush pen, colored pencil

The past couple weeks we’ve had the longest-running streak of cold temperatures I can remember. Most winters we have a few days at a time with temps in the 20s, but it’s rare for cold snaps here to last longer than that. Fortunately, it’s also been sunny on most of those days, which makes the cold a little easier to bear.

My “mobile studio” has been serving me well. I just drive around looking for a street scene that catches my eye, and by the time I find one, my car is fully heated – I’m good for at least a half-hour.

1/16/17 graphite, colored pencil

1/13/17 graphite

A Box of Pencils

No one needs 22 grades of graphite drawing pencils.

I wanted to say that up front so you wouldn’t think this post was about rationalizing why I need a whole set of Uni Mitsubishi Hi-Uni pencils or how I’d use all 22 grades. (This is not unlike why I own entire 120-color sets of colored pencils when 24 or 36 would be plenty, especially when I’ve lately been trying to use only three primaries at a time. But that’s the subject for a different post.)

Perhaps some graphite artists use several pencil grades to achieve the fullest range of tonal values, but even so, I doubt they would use 22. For most of the sketches I do, I find that I can get by with two pencils at a time – one mid-range (such as HB or F) and one soft (such as 4B or 6B). I’ve also done many sketches with just one relatively soft pencil (maybe a 2B or a Blackwing). After all, one of the virtues of graphite is being able to create a variety of tones simply by layering or varying the pressure.

1-14-17 Hi-Uni H, 9B

I already knew from my experience with a few individual Hi-Uni pencils that the line is excellent – the core, the wood casing, the finish. Smoother than any pencil I have used, the softer grades write and draw almost soundlessly. Esthetically, they are lovely – the shiny maroon lacquer is imprinted with gold, and the end has an elegant divoted yellow dot. They have become my favorite pencils. What would it be like to own an entire extravagant set?

Divots of yellow on the ends.

When I ripped the wrapper off the metal box and opened it for the first time, I was immediately taken back to my mom’s traditional cedar chest. Kept in my parents’ bedroom, the chest stored silk kimonos, dark wool sweaters and other clothing and accessories that rarely saw the light of day. It seemed she lifted its heavy lid only a couple of times a year, so as a child, the scent of cedar told me I had an opportunity to peek inside at the otherwise hidden treasures.

 

Take a sniff of that cedar!

At the same moment that I inhaled this memory-infused scent, I saw the most extraordinary sight: Shipped all the way from a vendor in Japan, all 22 pencils lay in their slotted tray with their logo side facing up. Now, I’ve opened plenty of flat packages of colored pencils to find them randomly and haphazardly in their slots and thought nothing of it – I’m not so fussy or OCD to be bothered. But when I saw every Hi-Uni lying so perfectly, even if the pencils had been placed in the tray mechanically (though I doubt it), I had to believe that a human at the end of the line was responsible for making sure they all faced up by the time the lid was closed. (I immediately took a photo so that I could bear to take them out.)

The next marvel was examining their unsharpened ends. From using a 10B previously, I knew that it had an unusually thick core; how thick would the cores of the other grades be? It turned out that the full range includes three sizes: 10B and 9B have the largest; 8B through 3B have a medium-sized core; and 2B and harder have a small (standard-size) core.

 

Left to right: 5B, 4B, 3B, 2B, B

Left to right: 10H, 9B, 10B (hand-sharpened)

Though it took me half a day to get over the sheer beauty of that box of pristine, unsharpened pencils, I did get over it – after all, pencils are made to be used. I took out my knife; certainly, the larger-core pencils deserve a hand-sharpened chisel cut to ensure the widest range of marks. Compared to some other pencils I’ve knife-sharpened, the wood of the Hi-Unis cut easily and evenly without splintering. For the smaller cores, I used my KUM two-hole, long-point sharpener and amused myself with the delightful curls of shavings that emerged.

Knife-sharpened

KUM long-point sharpened

All of that joy came even before using the pencils. And now that I’m using them, they are as smooth and perfect as they appear.

No one – maybe least of all me (I tend to favor softer cores and will probably rarely use the harder ones) – needs 22 grades of graphite drawing pencils. Still, it’s rare to experience complete pleasure from such a simple product made well and presented with pride.

1/13/17 Hi-Uni 7B

11/23/16 Hi-Uni 10B

Brush Pencil: WTF?

11/23/16 graphite

If you’ve kept up with my blog for a while, you know that I have a mild obsession with all things fude (perhaps it was even here that you learned that fude is the Japanese word for brush). From my favorite fountain pen nib of all time to its various knock-offs and wannabes to all the many, many brush pens I have used, writing instruments of the fude kind interest me for one primary reason: They are designed to mimic the tapered and variable lines that can be made with an actual bristle calligraphy brush – and I simply can’t resist the beauty of those lines.

Given this obsession, I occasionally visit JetPens.com (the largest American source of Japanese brush pens) and put “brush” in the search line just to see what new products come up. After scrolling past all the pens I was already familiar with, imagine my surprise one day when I came upon the Uni Mitsubishi brush pencil.

Say again? How can a dry instrument like a pencil mimic the fluid line of paint or ink? And almost as curious, why in the world does one pencil cost $7.50? My curiosity got the better of my pocketbook; I clicked “add to cart.”

(Incidentally, I wondered if the name “brush pencil” was nothing more than JetPens’ marketing description. When I received the pencil, I used my kindergarten-level Japanese reading skills to decipher the characters stamped on the pencil, and I found that it says, fude enpitsu, which means, literally, “brush pencil.”)

Straight out of the package with its pre-sharpened point, the graphite brush pencil has an extremely soft and dark 10B core. Admittedly, I’m not much of a graphite user, but I had never seen a pencil graded 10B (the highest grade I’ve seen in other brands is 8B). What really caught my attention, though, was how thick that core is – much thicker than average writing pencils and even most colored pencils.

The marketing copy says, “Adjusting your writing pressure allows for exquisite variation in darkness and line width, mimicking the elegant sweeps and tapers of a traditional Japanese calligraphy brush.” I wasn’t quite getting those elegant sweeps and tapers yet, but I could see that with some practice, one could get a lot of line variation. My interest was piqued!

I sharpened first with a sharpener to take the wood down, then
cut the chisel tip with a knife.

Over coffee one day, I showed the pencil to a friend, and she mentioned that she had once seen a YouTube video in which an artist had sharpened the point of a pencil into a chisel shape. Light bulb moment! I didn’t even bother to search for the video – I just got out my knife and cut that extra-wide core’s point flat!

With that cut, I can use the corners to make fine lines and the flat, broad end to make wide, dark strokes – and moving it around gives me everything in between. What’s more, the core is so soft that a line can be smudged easily with a fingertip for shading. You may recall that I hate using charcoal (I won’t touch it without gloves), so smudging with a finger is not my favorite sketching technique. But I have to admit that I love the look that results.

Side view

Although the brush pencil smudges as any soft graphite core will, thankfully, very unlike charcoal, it doesn’t transfer too much to the opposite sketchbook page (at least in the signatures of paper I carry, which don’t allow the pages to rub together much). (Edited 12/12/16: Never mind. . . it transfers quite a bit. I've begun skipping pages in my sketchbook to avoid the mess.)

10/23/16 graphite, colored pencil

Of course, because the core is so soft, it wears down pretty quickly. After making several sketches with it at Zoka Coffee (the man working on his laptop is one), the sharp corners and edge were well rounded by the time I left. Stopping on the way home to sketch the street scene (top of page), I realized I didn’t have a knife to recut the chisel shape, so I used my usual pencil sharpener instead. The sharpening exposed a big wedge of graphite on the side, which I then used to make heavy shadows very quickly. So either cut with a knife or sharpened traditionally, the thickness of the core can take as much credit as its softness for producing fude results.

Like I said, I haven’t been much of a graphite user, but with this “brush pencil,” I may be!

Now – about that $7.50 price? I cruised through all of Uni Mitsubishi’s pencils on JetPens, and I spotted one in its Hi-Uni line that also has a 10B core. (According to JetPens, “Hi-Uni is Uni Mitsubishi's best-selling highest-level wooden pencil line with an incredible selection of 22 hardness grades.”) While not inexpensive, this pencil is $2.50. Hmmm. It’s not a “brush pencil,” but its core is the same grade and made by the same manufacturer. The next time I placed an order, I put one of those Hi-Uni 10Bs in my shopping cart.

Spoiler alert: As far as I can tell, the two pencil cores are exactly the same. The gold-body brush pencil is prettier, and the beautiful finish feels like lacquer, but I’m good with a regular Hi-Uni for $2.50 instead.

Top: Mitsubishi "brush pencil"; bottom: Mitsubishi Hi-Uni pencil

While I was searching for that Hi-Uni 10B, I spotted a Staedtler Mars Lumograph with an 8B core, and from the photo, its core looked plenty thick, so I put one of those ($1.80) in my shopping cart, too. I just gave it a chisel cut. I haven’t sketched with it yet, but its initial scribble test is just as dark and feels slightly waxier than the Uni-Mitsubishis. I’ll probably report back on that someday, too.

The Staedtler Mars Lumograph 8B with a chisel cut.