The worst pencils can tear holes in your paper, while the best feel silky smooth as you hatch along in drawing nirvana. How do you reach drawing nirvana? After a few decades of drawing, I have some pencil enlightenment to share.
Comparison Table | Pencil Tech | Grade Chart | FAQ
My choice of best drawing pencil is the Swiss made Caran d’Arche Grafwood. Each grade is impeccably pure, meaning there isn’t a lot of tonal variance, so drawing with them can be disconcerting at first. Finally, a company has taken drawing seriously enough to create a new kind of graphite art pencil. At nearly three dollars a pencil, ouch, but they’re my preferred pencil now.
My mid-price range choice is the Derwent Graphic. This is a good quality pencil that comes in a full range of grades. You can sketch with Derwents while in your favorite chair, feet up, and watching tv, or you can create a graphite masterpiece with them, with or without the feet up and tv on.
My low-end pencil pick is the Prismacolor Turquoise. They come in a wide range of grades, and you can create any hatched graphite effect with them. You may occasionally hit a piece of grit in the hardest grades. If so, sharpen past it, and you’ll be good to go.
The table below is a comparison of some of the most common drawing pencil brands available in the US. I’ve judged them by the quality of the filler used, by how each grade looks on paper, and by price.
| Brand | Grade Range | Quality | Price | Sketch – Art |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Caran D’Ache Grafwood Pencils |
9B-4H | Superb | High | — – |
| Derwent Graphic Pencils |
9B-9H | Excellent | Average | – |
| Prismacolor Turquoise Pencils |
6B-6H | Average | Low | – |
Cretacolor Fine Art Pencils |
9B-2H | Excellent | Average | – |
| Cretacolor Monolith Woodless Pencils |
9B-HB | Excellent | High | – — |
| Staedtler Lumograph Drawing Pencils |
12B-8H | Excellent | High | – |
| Prismacolor Turquoise Lead For Lead Holders |
6B-6H | Average | Average | — – |
| Staedtler 2mm Leads for lead holders. | 4B-4H | Excellent | High | — – |
Table Ratings Key
High – $1.26 to $3.00 each
Average – $0.86 to $1.25
Low – $0.55 to $0.85 each
Superb – Pencils clearly marked, wide tonal range available, sharpens well, each grade clearly defined with no darker notes in it.
Excellent – Clearly defined consistent grades, wide tonal range available, pencils clearly marked, filler is mixed well, sharpen well.
Avg. – May be some inconsistency between grades of pencils, but filler is usually mixed well, usually sharpen well, good tonal range available.
Poor – Grades are not consistent, sharp bits in filler can tear paper, leads break often while sharpening.
Pencil Tech
The leads of drawing pencils are made with ground graphite and a filler, and the ratio of one to the other determines what grade of hardness a pencil is. The type of filler used depends on the brand.
The “harder” grades (F – 9H) contain more filler, and the “softer” grades (HB – 9B) contain less. While the correct ratio of filler to graphite for each hardness grade must be well known, I’ve never found two brands of drawing pencils that use the same formula, and one brand’s 2H pencil can be the same as another brand’s 4H.
The worst brands of pencils sometimes leave tiny chunks of filler unmixed in the lead. The problem is that the filler is harder than the lead and has sharp edges. If you’re hatching with some pressure when one of these chunks of filler surfaces, it can literally tear a hole in the surface of your paper. If this does happen to you, sharpen the lead past that spot and keep your fingers crossed that the rest of the lead is filler-chunk free.
Drawing Pencil Grade Chart
Drawing Pencil FAQ
Do I need a pencil in each hardness?
Not at first. A good range for a beginner is 4B, 2B, B, 2H, 4H. If you’re more experienced and moving into fine art drawing, you’ll need a full range of leads to create different effects.
What do you think about the ultra small (.5 mm) leads for mechanical pencils?
I don’t use them. They don’t come in the full range of hardness. More importantly, I use very sharp leads to create many of the textures in my drawings, and these small leads are too blunt for that. And they’re too fragile to sharpen.
The leads keep breaking when I try to sharpen my pencils. Are the leads already broken in the pencils? Did I get pencils that were dropped or something?
Chances are, the problem is your pencil sharpener and not your pencils. If you’re using the kind of sharpener that has a single blade in it. That blade gets dull very quickly, and that snags the wood and breaks the lead, or it may start chipping the graphite instead of shaving it.
I use the Kum Long Point Pencil Sharpener. It has two holes. One hole sharpens the wood, and the other sharpens the lead. It comes with extra blades. The body is plastic, so you have to be extra careful when you screw in the new blades or the holes will strip.
Graphite is shiny. Is there any way to avoid that?
No, but there are a couple of things you can do to make it less of a problem. First, don’t squash the paper grain by hatching too hard. Instead, apply the graphite in layers. Use a sharp soft lead first, but don’t try to cover all the paper in one pass. Then lightly go over that hatch with a sharply pointed harder lead. This will help you cover the paper evenly, which gives you a dark value without ruining the grain, and the grain will “interrupt” the shininess of the slick graphite, making it less noticeable.
Finally, after a drawing is finished, spray it with a matte fixative. That cuts down on the shininess and keeps the work from being inadvertently smeared. Any shininess left after fixing is usually only visible at certain angles, so if the drawing is hung on a wall, shininess is usually not visible at all. For the best possible presentation, fix your drawing, have it matted, and hang it out of direct sunlight.