SPQR Blues Chapters I-V

Lots of pencil talk ahead, plus some doodles.

Since I’ve been focussing mainly on ink work, I’ve been neglecting pencil drawing as an end unto itself, so now I’m making a conscious effort to play around with dark, soft leads. (“Ha ha!” I say to myself. “You can’t ink over this!”)

When I talked about the Tombow and Hi-Uni pencils before, the doodles I posted along with it were done on rough paper. I should post some done on smoother paper, too, which is winning me over for pencil work. With these beautifully buttery pencils, the trade off is that a 4H is on the dark side. The Tombow “Mono J” 4H is even darker still than the other Mono (scientific test: drew Felix with stubble).

I’ve been enjoying the art in the b&w version of a French graphic novel called Messire Guillaume: L’Esprit Perdu (eventually to be published in English probably under the title William and the Lost Spirit; click on the icons under “EXTRAITS” to see interior art), and I’d love to draw a comic in similar style. I’ve just always been hugely skittish about smears and eraser messes.

Last week I went to meet a friend in the stationery department of the Kinokuniya Bookstore. Surround me with presumably good quality pens and pencils, and you have a situation, especially now that I am binge-eating pencils. If it costs around a dollar, it is probably coming home with me. Even though it’s evidently meant for writing, not drawing, I figured I’d try the Uni-Ball Penmanship pencils. They’re triangular, not the typical hexagonal shape, so I wanted to see if that would make a difference in terms of grip and long drawing sessions. I’ll let you know.

The Japanese text on the back of the package explains that these pencils have a dark, consistent line; they are good for both fine lines and thick; they beat up other pencils at the gym; and they can sing, much like Prince Valiant’s Singing Sword.

A pencil-fanatic blog (I forget which one now) recommended the Prismacolor Turquoise. This one gets a thumbs down. I have to say, the 4B just feels like an ordinary pencil, nothing special, not impressively precise. Also, it literally hurts my hand to work with it for too long (sharper edges, perhaps). The lead even feels loose in the wood casing in the one I bought, and I noticed that, when looking at a handful at the store, the leads aren’t consistently centered in the pencil. I’ve read that there’s a difference in quality depending on whether the pencil lot was manufactured in Mexico or the US, but I’m not otherwise interested enough in this one to bother trying to find a “made in the USA” batch. They are not so bad that they would traumatise schoolchildren, so I’ll be adding these to a box of contributions to a grade school somewhere.