Faber-Castell Pitt Graphite 9B Pure Pencil

Product Information

Based in Vienna, Cretacolor produces high quality and innovative pencils which have won several awards. Caran d'ache Grafwood Graphite Pencils are professional artist pencils They are available in 15 different graduations from 9B to 4H. Apart from this omission, I’ve included the professional ranges from all of the top pencil makers including Faber-Castell, Staedtler, Derwent, Koh-i-Noor, Tombow, Caran D’Ache, and Conté à Paris.

The Grafwoods aren’t the most elegant pencils individually, but the ability to identify the grade I wanted so quickly was a revelation and I wish all ranges could have some kind of colour coding. Graphite pencils are mixed with a binder of clay, and different grades of softness and darkness are created by the varying the graphite and clay ratio. They are light to hold and have their grade printed clearly on every other facet so that they are easy to identify. The pencils are very popular in the UK where many people rate them for their blending ability, but I personally feel that they don’t match the standard of some of their rivals despite the fact that they often cost more.Perhaps you have received a pack of Notebooks, opened them up and they just aren't what you expected or were hoping for. If they aren’t, you’ll encounter that gritty, ‘scratchy’ feeling (and sometimes even a squeaky noise) when you hit a lump of clay and your pencil doesn’t make a good mark. The lighter grades are delightfully smooth too and if you wanted to draw more lightly with them you could use a selection of the H grades – I found that a 3H was tonally equivalent to about an HB from Staedtler’s Mars Lumograph range. The 16 different grades of hardness range from a delicate grey hue to a deep graphite black, and offer artists a wide range of possibilities. The biggest frustration is that the grading seems inconsistent, with the 5B in my set drawing unmistakably darker in tone than the 6B!

You can create everything from broad strokes to tiny details using the same pencil, and it's easily sharpened, just like a conventional pencil. The texture is on the coarse side and yet there was a strangely ‘waxy’ feel to them, which again, I think some people might quite like but others won’t. Lumograph pencils never scratch or feel gritty and as they rise up the scale the shades become darker in a most reliable and uniform manner.The pencils can be used to create tonal graduations, the B range is the softest, creating the darker tones, complemented by the H which allows light tones, placed together to create contrasting tones. At first I thought this was quite mad – the point of regular hexagonal casing is after all to stop the pencils sliding around on your desk – but then I picked one up and it felt so lovely, slim and smooth to hold that I was quite won over!

It turns out I couldn’t have been more wrong: the Koh-i-Noor Hardtmuth company was founded back in 1790 and its Austrian founder Joseph Hardtmuth played an important role in the development of the modern pencil made from graphite and clay. If you wanted to draw more lightly with them you’d need to use the H grades, but because these stop at only 3H there would be a limit to how light you could go. Good-quality pencils are an essential tool whether you are a professional artist or just starting out, so it's easy to see why Derwent Soft Graphic Sketching Pencils are so popular. They come unsharpened and it’s a bit of a killer on the wrist to sharpen a whole tin’s worth, unless you have an electric sharpener.They have a pleasing black casing that is slightly thicker than some of the other brands, and nice retro lettering.