Faber-Castell Pitt Graphite 9B Pure Pencil

Product Information

They mention it's very soft and smooth as velvet on both smooth and medium grain paper, and it feels nice to hold. In many respects then the ‘best’ pencil for you will be very personal to the type of work you want to do. Lumograph pencils never scratch or feel gritty and as they rise up the scale the shades become darker in a most reliable and uniform manner. The only problem is that the attractive retro design of the casing is very restrained and grade of the pencil is only printed on them once and in tiny lettering.

However from 3B upwards the pencils drew so darkly that it was as if they came from a different range altogether. The Mars Lumograph brand was registered in 1900 and so they’ve had a long time to perfect it: the pencils always seem perfectly bonded and I haven’t known even the darkest leads to break when sharpening. I’m not necessarily saying that the 9000s are superior to the other pencils I’ve awarded top marks to, but for the type of drawing that I do (light, quite detailed portraits) they suit my style better than a darker, softer range.

Whilst factors like strength and reliability are very important when judging pencils, people’s preferences will also be subjective in many ways. If they aren’t, you’ll encounter that gritty, ‘scratchy’ feeling (and sometimes even a squeaky noise) when you hit a lump of clay and your pencil doesn’t make a good mark. The grade is printed on every facet which makes it easy to locate the shade that you want and the hexagonal casing has nicely softened edges making it very comfortable to hold. You will receive the credit within a certain amount of days, depending on your card issuer's policies. Derwent are an old British company (although now American owned) and are based in an area near the original Borrowdale mine in Cumbria where graphite was first discovered and was famously mistaken for lead.

It’s vital that both graphite and clay should be finely ground and well mixed to give a uniform and consistent stroke. It contains a versatile selection of pencils, ranging from a crisp, non-scratchy H to a soft, smudgy 9B - enough to handle all your everyday drawing. The texture is on the coarse side and yet there was a strangely ‘waxy’ feel to them, which again, I think some people might quite like but others won’t.

Japanese wood-casing pencils tend to run very dark and soft and the Monos are indeed extremely dark – they only go up to a 6B grade, but the Mono 6B is even blacker than a 9B from the Staedtler or Derwent ranges. I was surprised at how strong and durable the darker grades were considering their softness: they don’t crumble and they don’t smudge too easily. It shouldn’t shed a dust of tiny particles of graphite on your paper, an effect known as ‘ghosting’. The pencils are very dark: almost as dark as the Tombows and with an even more limited range of grades.