Foundation Tools - Graphite Pencils

Pencil is often the first medium people use when learning to draw. This is because it is one of the easiest to master, plus a set of pencils is relatively inexpensive and highly portable!

Grading of Pencils

Graphite pencils are not actually pure graphite: they are a mixture of clay and graphite which has been fired at a very high temperature. The more clay in the mixture, the harder the pencil. The letter ‘H’ on a pencil stands for ‘Hardness’ and the letter ‘B’ stands for ‘Blackness’. The perfect writing pencil is an HB; for technical drawing, which needs very fine, sharp lines, an ‘H’ pencil is required; artists creating sketches and realistic drawings tend to opt for the softer, blacker ‘B’ pencils. The higher the number, the harder or blacker the pencil; so an 8B pencil will be much softer and blacker than a B or a 2B pencil. Equally, a 7H pencil will be much harder and lighter than an H or 2H pencil.

Drawing Paper

Papers come in different surface textures which will affect how your graphite pencil drawing looks and ‘holds’. The roughness or smoothness of the paper is called its ‘tooth’. The rougher the paper, the more ‘tooth’ it has. The smoother the paper, the finer the detail that you can draw. If you want to create a heavily shaded drawing or you are using a particularly soft pencil, choose a paper that has more tooth; the bumpy grooves in the surface will hold onto the soft graphite fragments preventing smudging and allowing you to add more layers of pencil work into the paper.

Tip: Be aware that there is no common standard for the numbering of pencils, therefore a 2B pencil from one brand may be harder or softer than the 2B of another brand.

Shading

How successfully you shade your drawing will depend on two things; how you hold your pencil and how much pressure you use. Holding your pencil low down towards the point will allow you to create a firm, controlled line, however, holding it further up is better for drawing a rougher, lighter sketch. When shading larger areas, try and hold the pencil on its side so the side of the lead is marking the paper; this allows you to shade larger areas more quickly.

How much pressure you use, in combination with which pencil you choose, will hugely affect the success of your shading. Pressing hard with a B pencil will create a much lighter mark than pressing hard with a 6B. It is therefore good to use more than one type of pencil when creating a detailed drawing. For example, if you want to shade the whites of the eyes in a portrait (which of course, are not pure white), a harder pencil will be easier to control and will allow the pale area, even after shading, to remain quite light.

Myth Buster! There is no lead in lead pencils! They are all made of graphite which is a non-toxic form of carbon.

Graphite Sticks

Most drawing graphite is found in the form of a pencil (graphite covered in wood to protect your hands), but you can also purchase graphite sticks which are chunky sticks of graphite with no wood covering. These tend to be used by artists to create large sketches where quick, large, smooth strokes are required and very fine detail is not needed. In this way, they are similar to charcoal, but not as dark. Be aware that not all graphite sticks have the same density; just as with pencils, the graphite is mixed with various amounts of clay and fired at a very high temperature, and the more clay there is, the harder the stick and the lighter the marks.

Blending & Highlighting

Some artists prefer not to see the pencil lines and marks of their drawing; they blend the pencil marks in certain areas away to create a more realistic look. To do this, you will need either a tortillion or a blending stump; a tortillion is paper wound closely into a stick shape and a stump is made of paper pulp which is shaped into a stick. Both can be used to gently blend away the pencil strokes in an area of shading. If you lose your highlights as you shade or blend, a simple plastic rubber or better still, a putty eraser, will be able to lift highlights out of the shaded area.