Our Comrade Bemsha in Japan has some great photos of his pencils, among which ranks the GRIP 2001 HB:
“After trying out fountain, ballpoint, and rollerball pens with Moleskine notebooks, my current and favourite choice is the Grip 2001 pencil from Faber-Castell.
My gratitude goes out to the Pencil Revolution website, which helped me rediscover the pencil in general as being the most reliable writing instrument – the ink in pens may run out or get clogged or leak, but with a pencil you’re sure the first letter you write will come out clear.
Among the five degrees of lead hardness in the Grip 2001 collection, my favorite is HB. I’ve used both B and H Grip 2001 pencils as well – B produces a dark firm line but in my case they tend to smear and create grey mists in my Moleskine after awhile when two pages written in pencil are stuck together (perhaps this won’t be much of a problem when you’re drawing a picture in the Moleskine sketch book); with H the pages remain clean but the letters look thin and faint, thus making it slightly hard to read the written words.
The Grip 2001 pencil is light in weight compared to most other pencils, and its triangular shape makes it comfortable to hold.
And it’s pleasant to the eye as well – just like the Moleskine.”
Check out more of his photos on Flickr, and his site here.
[Images, text, Songlines. Used with very kind permission.]
I prefer darker, softer leads (around a 2B for writing, softer still for drawing), and draw a lot in Moleskine sketchbooks. I highly recommend
“Workable Fixative” spray — easily found at an art supply store. It’s stinky (and will do terrible things to any water-soluable media on facing pages unless you’re clever enough to use a piece of scrap paper to mask off what you don’t want sprayed), but it does its job, fixing pencil marks to paper, very well.
Besides masking blank pages (to avoid texture and stubborn spots for future drawings) and pages with watersoluable media, I would also highly recommend doing your fixative spraying outside or in a well-ventilated room. I go a step further and keep my sketchbook somewhere well-ventilated overnight after it’s been sprayed. The stink is gone by morning and the sketches are preserved with no more worries of rubbing off on neighboring pages or smearing on my hand as I write.
I have been wanting to try some fixative, but I was put-off by the smell sticking around. If it’s gone overnight, I just might have to try some. My sense of smell is too strong (people joke that it’s the size of my nose), and I think I’d get sick if the book still smelled, even a little.
This stuff is supposed to be a bit easier on the nose: BLAIR VERY LOW ODOR WORKABLE MATTE FIXATIVE (found at http://www.jerrysartarama.com)
Thanks, Bill!
Hello, I have some pencil-photos, but I don’t know how to send it to you. Could you tell me your e-mail adress, please?
Great photos. Thanks. What intrigues me is the photo of the pencils with (I’m guessing) kanji and a small logo. Are they hand decorated? If so, its great. If not, and they are commercial products, I’d love to find out how to get some. Even the pencils without decoration look nice. Again, thanks for an excellent entry.
Alia and Bill – thanks for the information on fixatives…
steve l: Thanks very much for your kind comment on the photos.
The pencils you mentioned are from a small shop in central Tokyo called Gojuon that specializes in pencils and ballpoint pens and accessories related to these two types of writing instruments.
The pencils in the above photo are the shop’s originals that are hand painted – like you guessed, they each have kanji lettering of the shop’s name and a small picture of a pencil. (Photos of the shop’s exterior can be found in the link at Flickr.)
Again, thanks to you all!
Great choice! I bought 4 of the Grip 2001 pencils after reading about them here a month or two ago love them, highly recommended.
Chris
http://amateureconblog.blogspot.com/