Are you a big notebook doodler? Here’s a new note-taking trend that may help you put that creative spirit to a productive use. Visual note taking is a new method of taking notes that encourages the writer to stray away from traditional text-heavy form. With visual note taking, the note-taker uses sections, structures, images and […]
Hunan province’s local chemical plant wants the world to think that something is in our children’s pencils. Over 300 children in the Chinese province have tested positive for high levels of lead in their bloodstreams, Salon reported last week. Reason points towards the chemical plant’s runoff. The plant denies responsibility, suggesting students’ habitual pencil chewing as […]
An artist’s materials are essential to their craft. For those that work with drawing mediums – pencil, charcoal, watercolor, ink, pastel – paper is vital to creating of lasting work. Having trouble finding the right paper for sketch work, tracing, or the final piece of your portfolio? This post will detail the different properties and […]
The Stanford Synchrotron Radiation Lightsource (SSRL) Office of Science User Facility kind of made diamonds out of graphite this past February. In a study entitled “Interlayer Carbon Bond Formation Induced by Hydrogen Adsorption in Few-Layer Supported Graphene,” Stanford researchers found that exposing graphene to hydrogen produces diamond-like carbon. According to Wikipedia, “Graphene is pure carbon in […]
There’s a Subreddit for just about everything these days. Unsurprisingly, then, /r/pencils is the Subreddit for all the Internet’s fervent pencil hobbyists. With daily posts and over 500 subscribers, /r/pencils is a lively community. Its users go in-depth over everything pencil: there are discussions about utility, construction, rare makes, even sharpening – and if you […]
Pencils and print ads go together like peanut butter and jam. Usually, however, the print is not about the pencils that likely birthed the ads. Here are our all-time favorite pencil print ad campaigns. Some of them advertise pencils and all of them feature a pencil as its focus. 1. Eberhard Faber, Mongol 1957 Print Ad […]
What makes an individual’s handwriting stand the test of time? Certainly the document it forms plays a role, but the truly iconic examples have something more to them. Here’s a look at some of our favorite iconic handwriting samples and the people, stories and ideas behind them. Jacob Shallus: The Constitution The United States Constitution’s iconic […]
The United States has a rich literary tradition. A big part of that tradition has to do with writers who explored the virtues of the ecosystem and humankind’s relationship to the land. Here are three environmental writers whose works have influenced the nation’s attitude towards nature well beyond their deaths. Henry David Thoreau (1817 – […]
