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Archive for category: Pencil News

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Pencil news, product updates and important stories from the world of pencils.

Understanding Paper Weights

Once upon a time, a tenth-grade English teacher sought to impress upon her students the importance of following MLA guidelines to the letter. One such guideline was that essays must be printed on paper of a particular weight. That night, twenty-some…
Visual Note Taking

A Guide to Visual Note Taking

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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…
How Pencil Sharpeners Work

10 Little-Known Pencil Facts

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I write a piece of trivia on my whiteboard at work every morning. It started as a way to lure visitors to my remote cubicle without bankrupting me the way a candy bowl would. Then I moved closer to the rest of my department, and everyone looks…
China Lead Poisoning

Pencils Slandered in Lead Poisoning Case

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…

Matt Diffee’s World Cup Doodle Nails it

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At this year’s SXSW, I had the pleasure of meeting Matt Diffee, a cartoonist who is perhaps best known for creating the hilarious doodles found in each issue of the New Yorker. Matt was participating in a discussion titled “Turning a Blank…
How to Choose Your Drawing Paper

How to Choose Your Drawing Paper

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…

Scientists Create Diamonds Out of Graphite. Sort of.

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…

Boing Boing’s Mechanical Pencil Torture Test

Our selection of mechanical pencils has grown in recent years (And may be getting some new additions soon. Stay tuned for more on that later.), and we can appreciate the subtleties of the woodcased pencil’s mechanical brethren.  So, when…
/r/pencils

/r/pencils: The Front Page of the (Pencil) Internet

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. …

The Best Pencil Print Ad Campaigns

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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…