Choosing a Pencil for Beginning Drawing

Video Transcript

Hi! My name is Peggy Robertson and on behalf of Expert Village.com, in this clip I am going to talk to you about the importance of using a proper pencil as a drawing tool. Now we are all familiar with our standard #2 pencil that we have used in school for writing. It has a sharp tip that usually stays enough for us to finish what we are writing. This is a writing tool that is not used for drawing very often. There is also other kind because everybody knows the colored pencils, which you mess around with and there is also what is called a charcoal pencil which has a solid wider lead in center, actually it is charcoal, it is not lead or graphite at all. What I want to talk about today is the graphite pencil and they are graded on the edge of each pencil. This is a 2B that means it is a medium soft lead or graphite since they do not have lead anymore and this gives you a softer, smoother line. An H pencil with the H on it will give you a hard straight line like you were drawing or writing, but once again it is softer than the 2B pencil because it does not make a mark on the paper unless you press it really, really hard. You can go up to 6B or an 8B which is a very, very soft, soft lead and it gives you a very dark mark without any pressure at all which is good because you do not really want to make indentations in your drawing paper as your drawing. This pencil is very good for shading. It smears very easily and blends to give you softer lines. Whereas if you take the H pencil and draw it in a line back and forth and you take your finger and you try and smear that, it won’t smear. Now you will notice that these pencils also do not have erasers on the back. That is because the eraser on the #2 pencil is a very hard abrasive one. Now if I draw a line with a #2 pencil and go to erase it, I get little pieces of the eraser all over the place and then you have to smear with your hand to get it off or blow it off or you can put moisture on your paper. What property it uses is called a kneaded eraser. It is a soft eraser, it is all stretchy and what this does when you work it up, you can take it and just rub it across the paper and it absorbs or actually removes the graphite from the paper leaving you with a clean piece of paper. There are no abrasive marks from where you have rubbed really hard with the other eraser.

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