No. 2 Pencilion

         Another shortish post today, as my busy weekend is almost upon me!  To find out why I’m so busy, see the previous post.  As for today, I’ll just share my most recent piece, the No. 2 Pencilion.  This block actually began from a couple of the numerous October drawing prompts with which the Internet abounds.  For October 11, the Peachtober prompt was PENCIL, and the SCBWI Artober prompt was BEAST.  Putting the two together, I came up with this king of pencil beasts.  I transferred the sketch to rubber, but then waited to carve until Roslindale Open Studios on October 21-22.  After that I didn’t get around to finishing up and printing until after my next show at the beginning of November.  However, when I finally printed I decided to try two things.  First, I printed with plain black ink, but to make it a little more fun, I found some old (but acid-free) lined notebook filler paper left over from my kids.  After an edition of those, I carved out the erasers of the ears, and recarved the line the lion is drawing.  (I should have carved it that thin and careful in the first place!  Oh, well.)  And I printed a second edition in pencil yellow, and put in the details painted with eraser pink and drawn with pencil graphite.  I did try printing these on the lined paper, as well, but the yellow isn’t opaque enough to cover the lines and they proved too distracting.  So, plain paper for these.

        By the way, do you know why pencils are so commonly yellow?  Apparently Koh-I-Noor Hardtmuth pencil company was the first to paint their pencils yellow, and they did it to suggest Chinese royalty, since Chinese graphite was the highest quality graphite.  They won a Grand Prix for pencils in 1900 (having first introduced the yellow in 1889), after which everyone wanted to copy them.  As for the eraser on the end of the pencil, that was invented in 1858 by Hymen Lipman - but in 1875 the US Supreme Court ruled that it wasn’t an inventive enough invention to hold a patent, so all the manufacturers could do it, making those erasers ubiquitous, as well.  It was the Faber Company that first made the pink erasers with the metal ferrule so familiar today.

        Here’s some bonus belated Words of the Month action: 1. A pencil was originally a small, fine paintbrush, and comes from Latin for “little tail.”  2. The graphite in a pencil is called lead because when graphite was first discovered in England in the early sixteenth century it was sometimes called “black lead”.   So technically pencils have never had actual lead.  The word graphite wasn’t coined until 1789, from Greek graphein meaning “to write” — and yet we still call it lead more than 200 years later, so don’t expect us to stop talking about dialing phones any time soon.   3. The abbreviation for “number” is “No” because it comes from Latin “numero” instead of from English.

        As for the meaning of Number 2 in reference to pencil lead, there’s not actually a common standard, although the higher the number the harder the lead, and the harder the lead the lighter the color and sharper the point.  Many companies (and especially those outside the US) instead or in addition use the abbreviation HB for the grade of pencil right in the middle between hardness and blackness - although there’s some disagreement about the actual origins of the letters H and B.  An HB pencil should be equivalent to a No. 2.  For any child who grew up in the US in the past 50 years, number 2 pencils are famous primarily for being those required for filling in the answer dots on scantron tests.

        To be honest, these days I pretty much always use mechanical pencils because I love that there’s always a decent point.  Nevertheless, I continue to have a soft spot for the look of a traditional yellow wooden pencil.

[Pictures: No. 2 Pencilion and No. 2 Yellow Pencilion, rubber block prints with pencil details by AEGN, 2023.]