An artist doesn’t need to spend an hour researching or romanticizing tools because he or she already has boxes and drawers of random bits of pencils, lead holders, graphite, charcoal, pastels, inks, nibs, crayons, acrylics, oils, etc. Just grab whatever; “a yellow one” makes sense though I am sure they could tell if it was 4B versus 4H.
Just looking at the Blackwing site, you can clearly see what/where the artisanal sharpening folks are poking fun.
I mean, any pencil company whose marketing slogan is " We want to help people slow down and find some balance in their fast-paced digital lives." is selling something other than pencils. That’s a lifestyle statement more than a statement of artistic/writing performance, which is what I’d expect if these were aimed at real artists and writers.
I guess what I’m getting at is that the artisanal sharpening guys aren’t making fun of the folks who buy pencils made from special graphite and clay that makes the pencil more consistently black, or from wood that supports the lead effectively, and so forth. Those are performance statements. They’re making fun of the people selling pencils to people as a way to ‘slow down’ and implying they need this special frou-frou pencil to do so, and that a Dixon Ticonderoga or Golden Bear #2 somehow won’t do the trick.
When I was an engineering student in the 80s I used a mechanical pencil for everyday work. H and HB leads were the standard and I had to have HB. It made a big difference.
As a guy who’s a member of the Blackwing quarterly subscription program, I feel attacked. ATTACKED!
Nah, not really. I can do without the lifestyle suggestions. I just like the periodic arrival of a cool new design and the associated box of trinkets that make for fun desk toys.
Also, as much as I enjoy those Blackwings and the assortment of five different lead types I have, I don’t thing they’re quite as good as the Eberhard Faber Blackwing 602s that were discontinued a decade or two ago. This new company just picked up the name to make a broadly similar pencil. It’s the originals that go for totally mental prices on eBay.