Today's Daily Pencil

[FlyingClayDisk]

I never thought I’d be salivating over the thought of writing with a pencil, but here we are.

And so now you can see the attraction in what otherwise seems like a tragically boring subject.

It has a very nice industrial look to it. Sleek design and very utilitarian. If I was a draftsman or an artist I could see how choosing the right pen or pencil is critical. It is a tool which must feel right to the user. Like any tool you become comfortable and confident once you learn to use it correctly.

Exactly.  When I was working as a dedicated Technical Draftsman (I still do it today periodically, but it's a subset of other tasks now), I needed to be able to see precisely where my lead was (and wasn't) on a sheet.  When I say 'precisely', I mean at a level of accuracy that is difficult to many to understand.  However, when you consider that you might be working on a diagram showing racks of pipes where there might be 40-50 pipes in a single rack, each containing a different chemical (I did a lot of work in chemical plants and power plants), an incorrectly placed pencil lead would make a mark which required erasing and this could easily mar or partially erase other lines already drawn on the sheet.  Additionally, it was critically important to ensure that the line weight of a new line was the exact same weight as the line it connected to.

A graphical artist, on the other hand, is often more interested in things like shading large areas, so maybe not concerned with that same level of precision the majority of the time.  However, the graphical artist is going to be far more sensitive to things like tone and depth, more so than a Draftsperson would be.  (See?  I even covered my daily 'PC' requirement in there with Drafts"person"!)

On a couple of footnotes:  Ironically, as a Draftsman I seldom used mechanical pencils opting instead for wood pencils because I could get even more precision with those, even though pencils like the legendary Pentel P-200 series and the Pentel PG series pencils were around at the time.  The other thing is, most production level technical drawing these days is no longer performed by Draftsmen (and women).  It is generally all done in electronic CAD form, and even "CAD" is a dated and disappearing design form now.  Everything we do is in REVIT which is next generation three dimensional CAD (both by AutoDesk).