Interview with Illustrator, Letterer and Art Director Nick Sickelton

Last month, we launched our 20 Year Celebration commemorating the 20th anniversary of the founding of Pencils.com. To celebrate, we worked with former Pencil Artist of the Week Nick Sickelton to create a timeline chronicling the history of the Pencils.com domain. I sat down to chat with Nick about what it was like to work on that project, and what pencils mean to him as a creative professional:

Let’s start with the basics: Who are you? What do you do? What is your connection to pencils?

My name is Nick Sickelton and I’m an art director. With an ambiguous title like art director, I might as well call myself a designer and elaborate on that. I tend to do all things creative. I’m a letterer/typographer, a fashion/lifestyle photographer, and an art director at an agency as my full time gig. My connection to Pencils.com is ultimately that I use their product for every category of my work and creative projects. Everything starts with a pencil. An idea becomes real with a pencil.

What was it like working on the 20 year celebration project for Pencils.com?

Informative. There were things that I knew and many more things that I didn’t know Pencils.com was and has become. The most enjoyable part of working on the 20 year project was putting visual representation to benchmarks of Pencils’ history. Being the brain that get’s to represent each of the important historical moments was what made this project so enjoyable. 

What was your favorite portion of the 20 year timeline? 

My favorite timeline piece is the one that represents 9.1.2005. The “Pencil World Creativity Shop” was a collaboration with my wife who is a painter. She happened to be working on a personal project which I knew would fit perfectly into the map template I had put together to add some beautiful texture. It really finished the piece and made it my favorite.

Least favorite?

Not one. If I had a least favorite I probably would have redone it. ; )

Did you learn anything while working on the project?

I found out so much more about Pencils history and where they came from and thus giving me insight of who they aim to be in the future. It’s going to be really exciting to watch Pencils continue to grow.

What’s your favorite pencil? Why?

Man, I love the Blackwings. They cover all realms of weight and firmness. They feel, the replaceable erasers. They’re a fine balance of form and function.

Tell us a bit about your pencil shaving collection. What caused you to start collecting pencil shavings?

About 5 or 6 years ago I decided to to a long term project to save all of my pencil shavings. The idea behind it was a lot less profound than people may imagine. But, I just wanted to track my time spent using something that I use daily, pencils. It ended up being a slight obsession which led me to maintain my collection and see how far I could make this last. And so far, years later, I have around 2 liters worth of pencil shavings. All different colors, shapes, and sizes. It makes for a really pretty coffee table piece. 

You can check out the Pencils.com 20 Year Celebration timeline here. If you you’d like to see more from Nick, head over to his website and give him some love!