Art & Story Blog

For those folks who would turn a nose up to drawing with a mechanical pencil, note that a lot of the doodles, and café and beach sketches that I’ve posted on here recently were drawn with one. You can still get a fair amount of expressiveness out of that 0.5mm lead. With a light touch, extend the lead out a little further and hold the pencil to the side, and you can get a bit of tone as well (see the shading in Dave’s suit jacket in my previous post for an example). For the broader strokes and shading, though, I pick up my 2mm mechanical drafting pencil with a 4B lead. Here’s a pic:

A nice thing about the drafting pencil as a sketch tool, is that it often doesn’t need to be sharpened. If drawing at an angle, the lead seems to keep itself sharp enough just rubbing against the paper. In fact, I’d say you get a more interesting point than one straight out of a sharpener, because it has a bit of bevel to it, so you can get a wider variation of lines. But when I do want that pristine point, as is pictured above, I use a lead pointer. Because you’re only sharpening the lead and not the wood, it’s much faster to sharpen one of these. You also don’t have to fuss with cheap sharpeners always breaking your lead because they can’t cut through the wood.

By the way, all of my recent life drawings posted here were drawn with this last pencil.