The one that’s hard to read is the oldest.
Let me tell you about my favorite mechanical pencil. It’s the Pentel P207. It’s usually blue and the size of the lead is .7mm. I can’t tell you exactly when I first used one of these pencils but I think it was them1980s. I also like to use it with a softer graphite then is stock. It comes with HB graphite (the equivalent of a #2 pencil) but I prefer to put the softer 2B graphite in it. I also have some with B graphite in it but I can barely tell the difference between the B and 2B.
The .5mm version is the more popular size and I think I tried and used that one first. It was way back in high school in the early 1980s that my mother brought me home a .5 Pentel pencil from a garage sale. It had the standard HB (or maybe even the slightly harder 2H graphite) and I liked it but I didn’t use it all the time.
It was probably in college in the mid to late 1980s that I discovered the .7mm Pentel 207 and maybe the softer graphite. I definitely discovered the pencil then but I suspect that I may not have had found the 2B graphite yet. The softer graphite for that pencil wasn’t, and still isn’t, as widely available as the harder HB stuff. I might not have found it until the early 1990s when I started going to Pearl Paint in NYC.
I used a lot of different pencils in the first half of the 1990s. I used a lot of regular wood drawing pencils of all sorts of brands and hardnesses. I even used lead holders and a lead pointer for a year or two. Those are a specific type of pencil that there is no wood around but instead the graphite is by itself and you insert it into a holder the size of a pencil. You sharpen it by spinning it around a lead pointer which is a circular piece of sand paper. Some people use those all the time.
I slowly found out that I much preferred the softer and darker graphite. A lot of cartoonists and comic book artists use a harder pencil that leaves a lighter line so there is less erasing and it keeps the page neater. I always seemed to gouge the paper with the hard pencils and I would leave ruts in it. I was too heavy handed trying to get the line to be darker. I am better off using the softer graphite so that I can use a light hand and still get a dark line. I’m okay with the mess the dark graphite can make.
In the 1990s when I was using all those different pencils I didn’t use my Pentel 207 as much as I use it today. I kind of got board with it. That pencil can really only make one line (a thin .7mm one) and I wanted to use my pencil in a variety of ways. I ended up using wooden pencils of the soft 4B and 6 B variety. I don’t have a preference in brand and still use those ones today if I use a wooden pencil.
It was probably around 2010 when I started using the Pentel P207 more. I think it was around then that the size of my pencil drawings got smaller. I ink almost everything on 11×17 inch paper and I used to draw everything at that size too. That’s when I would use the wooden pencils.
I would do preliminary drawings on 6×9 inch paper and then blow those drawings up to 11×17 inches and do a finished drawing that size. Then I would transfer that drawing to another 11×17 inch piece of paper and ink it. After a while of working like that I started to find making the second drawing to be redundant. I could get all I needed to get at the 6×9 inch size if I drew with the .7mm mechanical pencil and skipped the second larger drawing.
It was also around this time that I discovered there is also a larger .9mm mechanical pencil that Pentel makes. I got a couple of those and use them on occasion. I still use the .5mm when I need to draw finer detail and I also discovered that Pentel makes a .3mm pencil but I haven’t found any use for that one.
I’ve used other brands of mechanical pencils but I find these Pentels to be the best. I like the way they feel in my hand and they last forever. I still use the original one that I got in the 1980s but I have some others too.
I’m writing about my favorite mechanical pencil because I just bought a bunch of new ones. I saw that Pentel has been putting out these pencils in new colors. They are only about $4 to $5 a piece so they’re not expensive. I bought a set of three shiny metallic ones plus a set of Kimono colored ones. They’re fun.
This past weekend I was looking at art supplies online and saw that there was a set of ten color .7mm leads. I’m not a big color pencil guy but this intrigued me. The were only $12 for the set but that would also mean that I’d have to get ten new Pentel P207s. I wouldn’t want to be switching out ten different colors in one pencil. That would make me never use them.
I found I could get a dozen of the mechanical pencils for about $40 but that seemed like too much money to me. I went over to eBay to see what I could find there. Oddly there were a lot of people selling these pencils as “Vintage” and charging more for them. I saw a big pile of about fifteen of them for around $50. I kept looking.
The pencils come new in two packs for around $10. I found a person selling four new two packs for about $20. I made him an offer of $15 and he countered with $16. I accepted it and with tax and shipping paid about $20. I thought that was a good price.
The pencils were all the blue color .7mm and when I get them and the color graphite I’m going to have to color code the pencils. Maybe I’ll put a dot of color on the end of them the has the metal eraser color. I’ll figure that all out later. Now I’ll draw.