Art Materials: A Discovery

Greetings,

Ah those moments of discovery are priceless!

While reading  a post about pencil geekery in Enrico’s Blog (Founder of SketchCrawl), I became curious about the pencils he mentioned (both the Mitsubishi Hi-Uni and the Kuru Toga).

Initially I set to see if I could find the Kuro Toga (mechanical pencil) locally but no luck, not only that but it seemed the places I looked online were out of stock. Eventually I engaged a person living in Japan and inquired if it was possible to sell/ship me two mechanical pencils, and after a week of waiting I finally received them…

I wanted to share my discovery even before I received them but fearing that my wife may read this blog prior to me giving the pencil to her (the pink one is my gift to her) prevented me from posting 🙂

Up to this point the pencils I have been using for sketching have been those I purchased a while ago, a couple of sets and some single ones. In my room I keep three STAEDTLER (Germany) pencils (HB, 2B and 4B), while in my sketchbag I have two sets, the first is a 12 set of REEVES (England) sketching pencils (From 4H to 6B), and three FABER CASTELL (Germany) GRIP 2001. (HB, B and 2B). Of the pencils I carry in my bag the one I use the most is the FABER CASTELL GRIP 2001 (B).

Wow, if you are into pencils and mechanic pencils, that blog link (Dave’s Mechanical Pencils) Enrico posted is fascinating.. there is so much information, you can  spend some serious time reading the various posts.

This Kuro Toga is the first mechanic pencil I have purchased in a very long time, unfortunately I don’t know much about the various other choices out there, (plenty to read in Dave’s blog) but it seems to be an interesting concept. I will have to use it for a while to see how I like it.

While reading the “other” blog Enrico linked… equally interesting, I became curious not only about the Mitsubishi Hi-uni but also about the Tombow Mono 100, same story as the Kuru Toga, local stores do not carry either of them, so looks like it will be a while before both my wife and I (I am sharing some with her) get to try either of these.

DickBlicks does offer a similar pencil to the Tombow Mono 100, will have to check that out too (Tombow Mono Professional).

Below are a few links (DickBlicks) of some of the products mentioned above.

Staedtler Lumograph Drawing and Sketching Pencils

Tombow Mono Professional Drawing Pencils

Faber-Castell Grip Pencil

If you know of a place in the Bay Area that sells the Tombow Mono 100 pencils, please let me know.