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Starter Pencil Setups, a #PencilWeek guest post

/ Andy Welfle / Leave a comment

Yesterday, I wrote a guest post for the Pen, Paper, Ink, Letter (PPIL) blog. Heath, the editor, is a tireless blogger and content creator about all things scribomechanica, and decided he wanted to do a whole week on just pencils!

I can definitely get on board with that. He asked me to contribute, and naturally I jumped at the chance.

This post is about getting started with wooden pencils, for those who may not know much about them:

[U]nlike, say, a coffee starter kit, a pencil primer shouldn’t be based on accessibility but rather, price, assortment and application. A writer who wants to invest a lot of money up front in pencils has totally different needs than, for example, a sketch artist on a budget. If you fit into one of these use cases, or somewhere in between, hopefully you can get some use out of this post.

Here are some tips for those looking to get more serious about pencils (to be more specific: wooden pencils) without investing a lot of time and energy up front.

Hit the link in the headline to read more, or click here:

Starter Pencil Setups #PencilWeek #Erasable | Pen ★ Paper ★ Ink ★ Letter

Erasable Episode 6: The Brotherhood of the Traveling Sharpener

/ Andy Welfle / Leave a comment
Reviewing materials for a podcast about pencils has never been so yellow!

Reviewing materials for a podcast about pencils has never been so yellow!

Tim, Johnny and I have been having a blast with the Erasable podcast so far. An absolute blast. Perhaps my favorite episode so far is the one that just came out today, Episode 6: The Brotherhood of the Traveling Sharpener.

Whenever we’ve asked Twitter for ideas on what our followers would like us to talk about, almost everyone wants to know about sharpeners. Trouble is, we’re just an hour(-ish) long podcast, and there are so many sharpeners out there!

We decided to just go through some questions people have asked, and then list our favorites and explain them, like the Classroom Friendly Sharpener and the much-debated KUM Long Point Sharpener. Invariably, the conversation came around to David Rees and his artisanal pencil sharpening, and, of course, his book.

Rees talks a lot about one of my sharpener obsessions; the El Casco, which I’ve blogged about before. It’s quite expensive, and Johnny proposed we all three pitch in to buy one and then share custody (like the pants from the movie The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants. Hence the episode title).

Go take a listen — if you have any interest in pencils sharpeners at all (and why would you be here if you didn’t?), you’ll love it.

Link: Don’t Be Afraid of a Pencil.

/ Andy Welfle / 1 Comment

I’m a huge fan of Medium — Evan Williams’ new publishing platform. I’ve had the opportunity to write a few things there, and though I haven’t written anything pencil related for it yet, Caryn Vainio has:

Don’t Be Afraid of a Pencil. »

The golden nugget from her post:

[S]ketching is one of the most critical skills I think you could learn if you work in any environment that requires you to build something, whether that’s a physical product or a piece of software. And you should learn to stop being afraid of a pencil and a piece of blank paper, because sketching is fast, visible, collaborative communication, and it doesn’t matter how well you can draw.

She’s absolutely right. I work at a web development shop, and although I have absolutely no artistic background, I will often grab one of my ever-present pencils and sketch out a very rough layout of how I think content should be structured on a site we’re building.

Because as Vainio points out, we’re not drawing something — it doesn’t have to look polished. We’re just getting a visual idea down and on paper.

It’s worth a read! And hey, if you want my thoughts on Medium, check out this post on my personal blog.

 

My guest post on The Pen Company’s blog

/ Andy Welfle / Leave a comment

I was honored to write about pencils for The Pen Company’s company blog. They’re a burgeoning pen shop in Hertfordshire, England, and asked me to write about why their audience, generally fountain pen users, might be interested in a pencil:

[C]hances are, you use a fountain pen as a tribute to days and technologies gone by. Like those who drive with a manual transmission or shave with a straight razor, fountain pens are a simpler, purer, more beautiful way to accomplish your task. There are no springs or roller balls. You just use a reserve of ink, an irrigation duct, and gravity to get ink to paper. Pencils are participating in that grand tradition, and in fact, is an even simpler, purer way to accomplish that goal. While the craft of pencil production has been honed over the decades, it’s fundamentally the same concept of writing as ancient cave drawings by human ancestors — you pick up a piece of carbon, rub it on a surface in a certain pattern, and flecks of that carbon stick to the surface in that pattern. [Link]