Artisanal Pencil Sharpening

[rug]

DAVID REES USED TO BE A POLITICAL CARTOONIST. His work appeared in Rolling Stone, GQ, The Nation, Harper's, and many other publications. He gave that career up to pursue his dreams.

David loves #2 pencils and pencil sharpeners, and considers it a privilege to sharpen pencils for friends and strangers.

http://www.artisanalpencilsharpening.com/bio.html

[talkingmime]

1. The best pencils I've ever found are Mirado Black Warriors - US Made!

They're a PaperMate product, #2, made from solid cedar, not chip. The Dollar Tree had 12 packs for, yes, a dollar. I bought about 20 packs. Most pencils are crap these days so it was nice to find some really good ones for that price. Even a shitty little plastic pencil/crayon sharpener puts a knife-tip on these pencils.

[rug]

2. Those are good, great price.

I'm partial to Ticonderoga.



Bonus trivia. Thoreau's family owned a pencil factory which allowed him to muse on Walden Pond.

[talkingmime]

3. I got some of those at an art supply store some years back.

The Mirado are round, not hex or square. Maybe it's a throwback to primary pencils in grade school but I just prefer round pencils. My youngest (about to graduate HS) has a thing for #7 mechanical pencils. She doesn't like having to sharpen them, and mechanical pencils really don't turn out so great when you run them through a sharpener.

[union_maid]

4. Not as far-fetched as it should be

I recall about a hundred years ago, I was in art school in a life drawing class. The instructor insisted that we sharpen all our sketching pencils with a razor blade and not use a pencil sharpener. I accepted this without question at the time and probably haven't thought about it in 50 years. I don't think there was a single good reason for it, in the case of pencils that would fit in a sharpener. I guess we were just being artisanal.