There are a lot of challenges on the internet- use this material, use that material, use only so many pens, etc… None of them really interested me. I dislike rules that aren’t my own… The first challenge that I’ve see that I really feel like I can do it the “6 Pencils for a Month” challenge that I first saw on the Erasable Facebook group.
Last month I struggled with which pencils to chose? I already had a pencil case full of 9 pencils. I chose not to take part in the challenge.
This month I decided to go with the following, with a few caveats, which I’ll detail later
- Musgrave TS 100– a solid pencil for note taking and sketching.
- Mitsubishi 4563 2B– Soft dark, but yet doesn’t wear down like crazy. Awesome for notes and sketching.
- Tombow 8900 B– A great pencil for notes and sketching. Dark but with decent point retention.
- Staedtler Tradition B– I’m less familiar with this one, it’s dark and soft, we’ll see how it contends with the rest for notes.
- Palomino Blue HB end dipped– One of my last pencils of this fine iteration of the Palomino HB. I was sad to learn that these are no longer produced.
- Caran d’Ache SwissWood Dark HB– the only true HB of the lot, but a very nice HB. Smooth. It smells like a campfire. I wish this pencil came in a 2B. I say 2B and not B because I find Cd’A’s graphite to run substantially harder than more other brands. I am doing this for Toffer. He can consider my using a hard pencil like this his wedding gift.
My caveats, because I cannot follow someone else’s rules without also imposing my own to flaunt them, are as follow:
- If I use a pencil down to a nubbin, I can replace it with one just like it.
- Or not if I don’t like it very much, or it proves to be a pain in my ass.
- I can also chose to replace it with something else from the pencil cup.
- I’m free to use whatever I’ve put into my bullet pencil.
- Art pencils and pencils used for art don’t count.
- Pencils may not be replaced until worn down to a nub.
Another issue that I will be running into is that all summer I’ve knife sharpened all of my pencils into delicate hummingbird points. I’ve found that I can write for 4 or more pages with a pencil sharpened as such, and have grown quite fond of these points. The issue that I’m going to run into is that if I don’t point up my pencils before heading into school, I’m kinda screwed. I feel like I have to decide to either remember to sharpen the pencils the night before or sharpen them with the “long” point sharpener. *grumble* Knife sharpening in a outside of the art rooms is not looked upon kindly.
So that is my personal challenge, with caveats.