Half the pressure, twice the speed.  Surely a better tag line was never written.  Doesn’t that make you want to write with a pencil?  With anything.  Who wouldn’t want to use (or experience) half the pressure.  And twice the speed.  Anyone who knows me will tell you  I’m all about speed:  I drive fast, walk fast, talk fast and of course, want to scribble as fast as I can.  I’ve always been like that.  I think I was born knowing how to write and once I got the hang of it, and was allowed to use something better than a big unsharpened crayon, I wanted to write as fast as I could, as much as I could.  I’ve never gotten over that pleasure, and I’m told that my writing isn’t much more legible than it was back then either.

I spend a lot of time writing (longhand, actual paper and pen) and I care a lot about the implements. I wish I didn’t, but I do, and I have requirements:  the experience of a particular pen must be aesthetic, it must be smooth, have a fine consistent line, and the pen must be light enough that I forget I’m holding it.  Thumb tendonitis.  If my hand aches I can’t write, so it has to be effortless.

And I love pencils.  Who doesn’t.  The smell of the wood after it’s sharpened; the way they look in a bunch; the thrill of graphite.  🙂  But the thing about writing with a pencil is, to get a fine line, that is consistent, I have to press down hard, and keep checking, and then keep sharpening.  So I use pencil for drawing, or designing something, but not for writing in my journal or taking notes during a meeting, when I can’t be distracted by my writing implements.

I have read about the legendary Palamino Blackwing pencil on blogs for years, and as they are expensive, I never thought I deserved them, or some such excuse.  $20 for 12 pencils.  One day I was feeling extravagant and ordered a box.  When they arrived I was already regretting getting sucked in one more time by the promise of a pencil I would fall in love with, and after a couple of sentences it would turn out to be just like all the others.  But, I sharpened up a couple of Blackwings, pulled out my trust Baron Fig journal, and the next thing I knew, my hand was flying across the page, effortlessly.  The words were flowing!  I stared in rapturous admiration.  It was true!  I didn’t have to bear down, and could write just as well as I could with a pen!  Of course all that goodness has a downside: it does need to be sharpened.  We could have a whole blog post about sharpening, but there are many bloggers that do that already and in considerably more detail than I’m willing to.  Suffice it to say, I sharpen (ok, I use a Kum Longpoint).

When I’m going to be writing for a while, say 10 minutes or longer, I will go to the Pentel Finito, the combination of weightlessness, fine point, and ink quality.  But for designing, when I need to scribble, erase, extend (mindmaps are an example), I’ll reach for the Blackwing.  The right tool for the job.