Pencil Sharpening Issues Draw Sharp Contrasts

As any schoolboy knows, power sharpeners are all very well and good for the pencil laity, but the professional pencil technician will generally stand by the precision and superiority of a high quality hand-cranked sharpener model, which like shoes, are generally better the older they are; however, there is a very notable exception to the reliance on your good old 1947 Boston.

I will of course have to examine Dr. X's contention regarding the Ipoint Titanium, but I am skeptical. The difficulty lies in the inherent contradiction- power sharpeners are all too consistent, and frequently have an over-steep angle with too short a distance between the pencil body and the pencil tip. Unless extremely heavy or bolted to something, the tend to fall off the desk (a general degradation and lightness in pencil sharpeners lead to the deterioration of wood pencil use, and necessitated the rise of the disposable mechanical pencil, I believe). Also, at the very tip, there is a strong tendency for power sharpeners to round off the very tip, which contramands the very purpose for which one is generally trying to sharpen the pencil.

But if you wish to be truly manful regarding pencils, you sharpen your pencils with a KNIFE. A knife of a high quality, somewhat thin blade, and kept in a state of maintained sharpness. The penknife, so named because it was designed to shape quill pens, is perfectly suited for this.

This must be done with some sensitivity to the wood and the feel of the lead- you must become sensitive enough to stop cutting as your knife touches the lead. Always, of course, cut away from you, use light, light pressure, and try not to stab yourself in the thigh. A pencil of base nature and spiteful quality will quickly show its cheapness under such treatment, breaking, splitting, splintering, and forcing too much pressure on the knife. A cheap pencil is not only a danger to Art, but to your leg! Cutting a Staedler or a Tombow is a safe and satisfying experience.

You also do this so that you allow a lead projecting shape, which exposes not only the tip, but greatly increases the availablity of the lead to create a much larger variety of marks than would otherwise be possible; drawings involving different shades or a variation of marks all but require a knife-sharpened lead.

Better still, the lead tip can be kept sharp by the act of drawing on the edge of the lead rather than the tip, and rotating as your draw, greatly reducing the need to resharpen. This is an important element of pencil mastery: adjusting the shape of the lead, and thereby the mark used, by controlling the wear pattern made by the very act of mark-making.

This also requires relearning to hold a pencil. Most people do not really know how to hold a pencil for drawing and sketching or for anything really except accidently sticking it in their eye- generally, it should be held lightly length-wise across all tips of the fingers, index finger dangling over the pencil tip ready to steady it or vary pressure. Done properly, the variety of marks to make with a pencil held this becomes very large, and the range of available darkness or lightness under such fine control nearly makes a common #2B perfect for most purposes.

The needle shape shown above is not ideal for art purposes although excellent for traditional drafting; I leave about a quarter inch or less of lead exposed, fully-rounded, with the sharpening only to a point towards the tip. A 3H sharpened this way will stay sharp for a ridiculously long stretch of time.

If memory serves, there are specialized drafting sharpeners that expose the lead in just this way-it's a two step process, one machine to expose the lead, and a tipper to create a perfect cone tip. They are not common.

Done properly, re-sharpening with a knife is the fastest and most specifically shaped of all, but for initial sharpening, the easiest is to begin with a hand-crank and finish with the knife.