Usually painted in a pleasing color and embossed with their name and grade, they cut a striking figure in one’s art box. Of course, you can’t judge a drawing pencil (solely) by its beauty ...

What makes a pencil a pencil is graphite, of course, ... Today, that scale includes 21 different grades, but No. 2 pencils are still the ultimate “tweener” pencil: ...

Pencils are labeled based on graphite hardness, which in turn affects the shade of the mark left behind. ... The numeric scale is used by pencil manufacturers in the United States, ...

The pencils are graded by their ratio of graphite to clay. Grades ranged from 9B to 2H, where H denotes the hardness caused by the pencil’s clay content, and B denotes the blackness due to the ...