Pencil Sketch Drawing Quotes

Said Hamlet to Ophelia, I'll draw a sketch of thee. What kind of pencil shall I use? 2B or not 2B?

What are you working on?" I ask. "The last page." He gestures towards the table, where a pencilled sketch is being turned into inked brushstrokes. It's a drawing of us, in this café, in this moment. I smile up at him "It's beautiful. But what comes next?" "The best part." And he pulls me back into his arms. "The happily ever after.

The kitchen was bright, cheerful yellow, the walls decorated with framed chalk and pencil sketches Simon and Rebecca had done in grade school. Rebecca had some drawing talent, you could tell, but Simon's sketches of people all looked like parking meters with tufts of hair.

She told me to draw the curtains shut, so I grabbed my pencil and began to sketch.

Provided with a case of pencils, and some sheets of paper, I used to take a seat apart from them, near the window, and busy myself in sketching fancy vignettes representing any scene that happened momentarily to shape itself in the ever-shifting kaleidoscope of imagination: a glimpse of sea between two rock; the rising moon, and a ship crossing its disc; a group of reeds and water-flags, and a naiad's head, crowned with lotus-flowers, rising out of them; an elf sitting in a hedge-sparrow's nest, under a wreath of hawthorn bloom.

One morning I fell to sketching a face: what sort of a face it was to be, I did not care or know. I took a soft black pencil, gave it a broad point, and worked away. Soon I had traced on the paper a broad and prominent forehead and a square lower outline of visage: that contour gave me pleasure; my fingers proceeded actively to fill it with features. Strongly-marked horizontal eyebrows must be traced under that brow; then followed, naturally, a well-defined nose, with a straight ridge and full nostrils; then a flexible-looking mouth, by no means narrow; then a firm chin, with a decided cleft down the middle of it: of course, some black whiskers were wanted, and some jetty hair, tufted on the temples, and waved above the forehead. Now for the eyes: I had left them to the last, because they required the most careful working. I drew them large; I shaped them well: the eyelashes I traced long and sombre; the irids lustrous and large. "Good! but not quite the thing," I thought, as I surveyed the effect: "they want more force and spirit;" and I wrought the shades blacker, that the lights might flash more brilliantly--a happy touch or two secured success. There, I had a friend's face under my gaze; and what did it signify that those young ladies turned their backs on me? I looked at it; I smiled at the speaking likeness: I was absorbed and content. Is that a portrait of some one you know?" asked Eliza, who had approached me unnoticed. I responded that it was merely a fancy head, and hurried it beneath the other sheets. Of course, I lied: it was, in fact, a very faithful representation of Mr. Rochester. But what was that to her, or to any one but myself? Georgiana also advanced to look. The other drawings pleased her much, but she called that 'an ugly man.

But you can draw people’s faces, can’t you? I’m sure lots of women here in Etten would like to have their portraits painted. There’s a living in that.” “Yes, I suppose so. But I’ll have to wait until my drawing is right.” His mother was breaking eggs into a pan of sour cheese she had strained the day before. She paused with half the shell of an egg in each hand and turned from the stove. “You mean you have to make your drawing right so the portraits will be good enough to sell?” “No,” replied Vincent, sketching rapidly with his pencil, “I have to make my drawing right so that my drawing will be right.” Anna Cornelia stirred the yolks into the white cheese thoughtfully and then said, “I’m afraid I don’t understand that, son.” “Neither do I,” said Vincent, “but anyway it’s so.

He was asked to draw a rabbit that wouldn’t keep still as he drew it—as soon as it had paws it scratched itself luxuriously and then went hopping off around the page, nibbling at the other questions, so that he had to chase it with the pencil to finish filling in the fur. He wound up pacifying it with some hastily sketched radishes and then drawing a fence around it to keep it in line.

The desk in front of Frasier was littered with sketchbooks and colored pencils. Drawing was a medium he'd taken up later in life and all he drew was birds, over and over, usually in the heat of the day when it was too hot to be in the garden. The wall in front of him was covered in sketches of the dellawisps, so many of them the papers overlapped, forming a decoupage of turquoise birds.

He was the most astonishing contradiction of components I’d ever encountered. Shy yet fiercely communicative when putting an idea into your head. Vocally astringent regarding his own abilities but not to the point that he couldn’t produce—he was as prolific an artist (yes, an artist, and I never use the term, especially regarding people I like) I’ve ever seen. But I could feel it. Everything he sketched, penciled, inked, made—was a payment, one he could scarcely afford; as if it physically hurt him to put pencil to paper. Yet that only seemed to spur him on, to live far beyond his means. He was unable not to. For Sketch, to draw was to breath, and so the air became lead—silvery in the right light, dark soot in the wrong; heavy, slick and malleable—into shapes he brought together in glorious orchestration, with a child’s eye and a rocket scientist’s precision, all fortified by a furious melancholy, a quiet engine of sourceless shame and humility. When it came to another’s work, he longed to praise it but then couldn’t resist critiquing it all within an inch of its life, analyzing deficiencies with uncontrollable abandon and laser accuracy. He was sharp as his Radio 914 pen nibs, and as pointed. And then he’d apologize. Oh, he would apologize: Oh my GOD, forgive me, please don’t hate me, I’m SORRY, don’t listen to me, why am I saying things, what do I know, I don’t know anything, why do you listen to me you should just tell me to shut UP, I’m awful, forgive me, you hate me, don’t you? Tell the truth. Please don’t hate me. Please don’t. Please.

Douglas’s work. And the first time Mrs. Caperdeen showed us a slide from his series Aspects of Negro Life, I knew the kind of art I wanted to start making. And so I did. The only difference was that I framed mine in a circle, like The Family Circus. And that’s why I needed Ma to make sure she brought me my sketch pad and pencils. I woke up early, and before doing anything else, before getting up and having a morning pee, or brushing my teeth, or spirometering, I turned the TV on, muted it, then grabbed my stuff and starting sketching on a fresh page. I wasn’t sure what I was drawing. That’s not true. I knew exactly what I was drawing. The only thing I could. I was

A leaf, large and rough, a thorny stalk, blue flower. I borage bring courage. Than a saw-toothed leaf. Lemon balm. Soothe all troublesome care. Marigold---cureth the trembling of harte. Perhaps their medicine will cross through the cell walls of my drawing hand. The plants grow into a schematic, a garden, geometrically arranged. I consult the crackly herbals by my bed. Chamomile, catmint, sorrel. In Latin: Matricaria chamomilla, Nepeta X faassenii, Rumex acetosa. I get out of bed, retrieve my colored pencils, come back. The smell of earth fills the room. Root and flower and loam. Decay and regeneration. Mullein and comfrey, costmary, feverfew, betony. I sink into the earth, below verbena and lavender, descending as I draw.

Haiku are meant to evoke an emotional response from the reader ... to light the spark that triggers creative rumination ... They act as literary manifestations ... visions of nature’s seasonal modulations ... They're emotionally tinged words, barely perceptible sensory flickers ... literary etchings of lucid visions transposed into the minds of its readers ... They're meant to act as sensory catalysts ... like the passing of a penciled baton laid out upon a piece of paper that a reader might grasp for in their mind's eye ... all of which prompts the reader to continue exploring the sensory experience elicited from the writers pen ... This is how the literary sketching of poets are intended to function ... as creative muses with which readers can draw from and viscerally apply to their own artistic idioms ... from that lucid space within their heads ... where their minds eye can spark their own creative visions" Bukusai Ashagawa

Catherine broke off as she saw something among the drafts of structures and landscapes and the pages of notes. A pencil sketch of a woman … a naked woman reclining on her side, light hair flowing everywhere. One slender thigh rested coyly over the other, partially concealing the delicate shadow of a feminine triangle. And there was an all-too-familiar pair of spectacles balanced on her nose. Catherine picked up the sketch with a trembling hand, while her heart lurched in hard strikes against her ribs. It took several attempts before she could speak, her voice high and airless. “That’s me.” Leo had lowered to the carpeted floor beside her. He nodded, looking rueful. His own color heightened until his eyes were startlingly blue in contrast. “Why?” she whispered. “It wasn’t meant to be demeaning,” he said. “It was for my own eyes, no one else’s.” She forced herself to look at the sketch again, feeling horribly exposed. In fact, she couldn’t have been more embarrassed had he actually been viewing her naked. And yet the rendering was far from crude or debasing. The woman had been drawn with long, graceful lines, the pose artistic. Sensuous. “You … you’ve never seen me like this,” she managed to say, before adding weakly, “Have you?” A self-deprecating smile touched his lips. “No, I haven’t yet descended to voyeurism.” He paused. “Did I get it right? It’s not easy, guessing what you look like beneath all those layers.” A nervous giggle struggled through her mortification. “If you did, I certainly wouldn’t admit it.” She put the sketch onto the pile, facedown. Her hand was shaking. “Do you draw other women this way?” she asked timidly. Leo shook his head. “I started with you, and so far I haven’t moved on.” Her flush deepened. “You’ve done other sketches like this? Of me unclothed?” “One or two.” He tried to look repentant. “Oh, please, please destroy them.” “Certainly. But honesty compels me to tell you that I’ll probably only do more. It’s my favorite hobby, drawing you naked.” Catherine moaned and buried her face in her hands. Her voice slipped out between the tense filter of her fingers. “I wish you would take up collecting something instead.

Yes,” I tell him, too afraid to be annoyed. “But the light was on. It turned on, by itself, just as I was about to open the door. I heard . . .” I trail off, not sure if I should say anything else. Perry is watching me closely. “Heard what?” I swallow hard and give her a pleading look. “I heard mom,” I whisper. “You know that’s not her,” she says to me but I can’t quite agree. Dex frowns at us, then looks around him. He quickly moves to the desk and grabs the pencil I was using to sketch and holds it like a knife. “What the hell are you going to do with that?” Perry hisses. “Draw the ghosts?

Even at her sickest, she tried to create at least one drawing every single day. Sometimes she drew stuff out of her head. Other times, she sketched nurses and orderlies and other patients. Once, she was so tired that she could barely sit up, but she struggled through a detailed drawing of her own scrawny fingers holding a pencil.

Tolkien worked like a painter who first pencils in a rough sketch, erases, then draws again, then fills in a more detailed drawing, then adds layers of color, working from background to foreground to final details.

If a pencil has an “H” on it, that letter indicates that it is a hard pencil. H pencils make light, sketchy lines, which are useful for drawing and sketching. The number in front of the H, ranging between 2 and 9, indicates how

It will produce branches and bear fruit and become a splendid cedar….” —Ezekiel 17:23 (NIV) I e-mailed my siblings: “Prayers appreciated for a talk I’m giving on Thursday afternoon.” Several responded, relaying the sentiment “God is with you, and so are we.” At the appointed hour, I encouraged participants to compare their prayers to trees. I displayed photographs and artists’ renderings of gnarly olive trees, weeping willows, deserted palms, orange-laden orchards…. I handed out colored pencils and suggested they draw a tree that represented their recent prayers. “Imagine Jesus as the trunk—the core ‘vine’—and your prayers as the branches. Then consider the big picture: Whom is your prayer tree shading or protecting? Where is it in the seasonal cycles—producing hopeful spring blossoms or mature fruit? Do your prayer-branches reach for the sky in praise or bend close to the ground with requests? Is your tree in a solitary setting, or do you prefer praying when you’re surrounded by peers, as in a grove?” Eventually I asked them to explain their pictures. A husband had sketched two leafy trees side by side, representing his prayers with his wife. A mother had envisioned a passel of umbrella-shaped twigs, symbolizing parental prayers of protection. When I was packing up, a woman who’d held back earlier showed me a nearly hidden detail of her flourishing tree. At the base of the trunk, underneath grassy cover, she’d outlined deep roots. “They represent the grounding of my family, my upbringing.” “Oh my!” I smiled. “You introduced a whole new dimension.” I drove home with a revitalized prayer—like limbs stretching upward with thanksgiving—for my natal family and many others who have enriched my relationship with God. Lord, thank You for the grounding of my faith through my family and the family of God. —Evelyn Bence Digging Deeper: Ps 103:17–18; Prv 22:6

I tried to sketch but couldn’t. When I started to draw, the pencil moved by itself, propelled by something hideous that lived inside of me.

Despite an icy northeast wind huffing across the bay I sneak out after dark, after my mother falls asleep clutching her leather Bible, and I hike up the rutted road to the frosted meadow to stand in mist, my shoes in muck, and toss my echo against the moss-covered fieldstone corners of the burned-out church where Sunday nights in summer for years Father Thomas, that mad handsome priest, would gather us girls in the basement to dye the rose cotton linen cut-outs that the deacon’s daughter, a thin beauty with short white hair and long trim nails, would stitch by hand each folded edge then steam-iron flat so full of starch, stiffening fabric petals, which we silly Sunday school girls curled with quick sharp pulls of a scissor blade, forming clusters of curved petals the younger children assembled with Krazy glue and fuzzy green wire, sometimes adding tissue paper leaves, all of us gladly laboring like factory workers rather than have to color with crayon stubs the robe of Christ again, Christ with his empty hands inviting us to dine, Christ with a shepherd's staff signaling to another flock of puffy lambs, or naked Christ with a drooping head crowned with blackened thorns, and Lord how we laughed later when we went door to door in groups, visiting the old parishioners, the sick and bittersweet, all the near dead, and we dropped our bikes on the perfect lawns of dull neighbors, agnostics we suspected, hawking our handmade linen roses for a donation, bragging how each petal was hand-cut from a pattern drawn by Father Thomas himself, that mad handsome priest, who personally told the Monsignor to go fornicate himself, saying he was a disgruntled altar boy calling home from a phone booth outside a pub in North Dublin, while I sat half-dressed, sniffing incense, giddy and drunk with sacrament wine stains on my panties, whispering my oath of unholy love while wiggling uncomfortably on the mad priest's lap, but God he was beautiful with a fine chiseled chin and perfect teeth and a smile that would melt the Madonna, and God he was kind with a slow gentle touch, never harsh or too quick, and Christ how that crafty devil could draw, imitate a rose petal in perfect outline, his sharp pencil slanted just so, the tip barely touching so that he could sketch and drink, and cough without jerking, without ruining the work, or tearing the tissue paper, thin as a membrane, which like a clean skin arrived fresh each Saturday delivered by the dry cleaners, tucked into the crisp black vestment, wrapped around shirt cardboard, pinned to protect the high collar.

The little boy was found by his mother with pencil and paper, making a sketch. When asked what he was doing, he answered promptly, and with considerable pride: "I'm drawing a picture of God." "But," gasped the shocked mother, "you cannot do that. No one has seen God. No one knows how God looks." "Well," the little boy replied, complacently, "when I get through they will.

At school, Pablo found it hard to concentrate. Rather than completing classwork, he filled the margins of his notebook with pencil sketches of animals, birds, and people. His teacher grew exasperated with his lack of attention. She wrote a note to his mother saying: “Pablo should stop drawing in class and pay attention to his lessons.” It was clear that Pablo hated rules, and he took every opportunity to disobey them. When adults told him what to do, he did the opposite. He once got in trouble for coloring the sky a bright red instead of the “normal” blue. Pablo was often banished to the “calaboose,” a bare cell with white walls and a bench, which served as a holding pen for unruly students. “I liked it there, because I took along a sketch pad and drew incessantly,” Pablo later said. “I could have stayed there forever drawing without stopping.” He even began misbehaving on purpose so that he would be sentenced to detention and sent to the calaboose. The one person who understood that Pablo wasn’t acting out for no reason was his father. One day when Pablo’s mother caught him drawing on the wall with a nail, Don José took him to the beach to blow off steam. As Don José stretched out to take a nap, Pablo sat beside him and drew a dolphin in the wet sand. When Don José awoke, he was astonished by the beauty of his son’s drawing. “Could it be Pablo who drew this?” he wondered. That afternoon, Don José took a closer look at the image Pablo had drawn on their living room wall. What at first looked like random scratches soon took shape. Don José recognized a reindeer and a bison running away from a group of men on horseback who were armed with bows and arrows. At that moment, Don José knew what to do to get Pablo to stop misbehaving. He decided to take him into his studio and teach his son how to paint. From that day onward, Pablo and his father were inseparable art partners. In search of new subjects to portray, they began going to the bullfights. Pablo was mesmerized by the sight of the brave picadors as they charged ferocious bulls. He saw El Lagartijo—“The Lizard”—one of the most famous bullfighters in Spain, and he met Cara Ancha,

After Rufus's death, David's journals explode with color. Meticulously rendered sketches of wildflowers and ferns and ivies and brambles and any scraps of nature, it seemed, he could tear away from the world. The drawings are not artful; they are labored, covered in pencil smudges, ink stains, eraser marks, and little tears from overly vigorous coloring in. But in the crudeness you can see it-his obsession, his desperation, the near-muscular effort he was exerting to pin down the forms of the things unknown to him.

We cannot ever know the past for certain because it no longer exists. All we have is the information to be collected from the endless now, and our interpretation of that data. Then we begin to weave stories to link our interpretations into a coherent narrative rather like the sketching games in children’s play books where a pencil line is drawn from number to number to reveal an image. The poetic might like to draw an analogy of seeing pictures in clouds. Asking whether that narrative is ‘true’ in some absolute sense is pointless. Only priests and politicians claim to know truth. Humble academics know they are ‘interpolating’.

Here's today our topic is how to draw a sketch and which application is the best for this purpose? So let's start with one of the best applications."Pencil sketch" is the best application for this purpose. You can easily make pictures with the help of this application and this application makes your pictures as real. It’s not easy to make a drawing or real pencil sketch of your face with the help of hand but, Now use this application pencil sketch photo editor, photo sketch app & sparkle effect make outstanding simple or coloring photo sketch on one single click. Pencil sketch photo editor, photo to sketch & sparkle effect best tool to convert your Wonderful pictures into pencil sketch photo editor, photo to sketch, or colorful outline sketches.

Where the real trouble comes in is where to make a start and where to leave off. Everything depends upon a good beginning. When planning our general composition we must feel our way with long lines, seeing first only the big and fundamental things and arriving at the necessary detail last, never forgetting the darkest accents in the subject, which should be among the first objects to note. Our touch should be free and suggestive, and this can come only from knowledge and the correct pressure of the pencil, held as I have explained. Every subject is good if we render our impressions of it clearly and strongly. The slightest sketch can be strong if it suggests the artist’s emotions to others, and the strongest drawing weak if it leaves them cold.

Simplicity, balance, character, direction and relation of the limbs to each other, with their proportions and general symmetry of the whole, must be apprehended in a flash and put down in long lines, without lingering on less important details of form, for there is little time to hesitate in making a ten-minutes sketch. The quicker we draw, the better, so long as we can keep up the tension of our eyes, brain and hand all working together at the same time. The moment one of these three faculties gets out of gear or tired, the vitality of the drawing is lost. An intelligent model in a good pose inspires us enormously to produce an artistic and living drawing. A drawing done in a few minutes, in a red-hot fever of excitement and with concentrated observation, following the contour of the form from start to finish, is far more living than the often elaborated drawings of a cataleptic, relaxed figure, dumped upon the traditional throne, so often seen in art schools ; for the essence of life figure drawing lies in the outline. There is no short cut, no royal road to excellence : the only way is by persistent study and cultivation of visual memory.

Her greatest deficiency was in the pencil—she had no notion of drawing—not enough even to attempt a sketch of her lover’s profile, that she might be detected in the design.

A French woman, upon spotting Picasso in a café, approached the great master and insisted that he make a quick sketch of her. Graciously, Picasso obliged. After studying her for a moment, he used a single pencil stroke to create her portrait. He handed the woman his work of art and she gushed, ‘It’s perfect! You managed to capture my true essence with just one stroke. Now how much do I owe you?’ ” I cut in dramatically, “ ‘Five thousand dollars,’ said Picasso.” Carter frowned heavily. “Are you telling the story or am I?” “Go onnnn,” I said with exaggerated courtesy. “Picasso informed the woman that she owed him fifty thousand francs. And the woman was furious. She said to Picasso, ‘It only took you a second to draw it!’ To which Picasso responded, ‘Madame, it took me my entire life. It was my fifty years of serial preparation and fifty years of perfecting my unique talents and fifty years of honing my experience plus the five seconds that produced this sketch.’ ” “Nice story.” “You see,” Carter continued complacently, “it takes years and years of study and practice to build expertise in any profession. And with that knowledge comes the appearance of ease and the perception that what’s being asked is—oh, no big deal. But, it is a big deal.

She is about to close the book and return it to the desk when she catches sight of a face passing on the flickering pages. She leafs her way back until she finds it again- not an entire face, but a section; an eye, the sweep of a cheekbone, the curved line of a neck observed from side-on; all illustrated as if seen in the reflection of a small, oval mirror. A car-wing mirror. She peers at the page more closely, breath held in her chest as the moment returns to her: sitting in Charles's new car, Jack scrunched in the back and Lillian in the front, a peacock barring their path. It is exactly how he would have seen her reflected back at him in the wing-mirror. As with the other drawings, the accuracy is remarkable. She is amazed at his ability to recall the smallest details. There is the pearl stud at her earlobe and the almost indiscernible beauty spot above her lip. Yet the more closely she studies the sketch, the more she is discomforted. It isn't just the precision of the pencil lines conjuring her on the paper- butt more the expression he has captured- a certain wistfulness she hadn't known she wore so plainly. The portrait feels so intimate; almost as if he had laid her bare on the page. She continues to leaf through the sketches and finds a second portrait. This time she is seated in the drawing room, her face turned to the window, the skirt of her dress falling in a fan to to the floor. A third reveals her standing on the terrace, leaning against the balustrade, a long evening dress sweeping about her legs. The night of the party. The next page shows just her arm, identifiable by a favorite diamond bracelet dangling at the wrist. The last is of her head and shoulders, viewed from behind, the curves of her neck rising up to a twisted knot of hair. Looking at the images she isn't sure how she feels; flattered to be seen, to be deemed worthy of his time and attention, though at the same time a little uncomfortable at the intimacy of his gaze and at the thought of having been so scrutinized when she hadn't even known he was watching her.

Eventually, she held up the page, satisfied. It depicted Yalb and the porter in detail, with hints of the busy city behind. She’d gotten their eyes right. That was the most important. Each of the Ten Essences had an analogous part of the human body—blood for liquid, hair for wood, and so forth. The eyes were associated with crystal and glass. The windows into a person’s mind and spirit. She set the page aside. Some men collected trophies. Others collected weapons or shields. Many collected spheres. Shallan collected people. People, and interesting creatures. Perhaps it was because she’d spent so much of her youth in a virtual prison. She’d developed the habit of memorizing faces, then drawing them later, after her father had discovered her sketching the gardeners. His daughter? Drawing pictures of darkeyes? He’d been furious with her—one of the infrequent times he’d directed his infamous temper at his daughter. After that, she’d done drawings of people only when in private, instead using her open drawing times to sketch the insects, crustaceans, and plants of the manor gardens. Her father hadn’t minded this—zoology and botany were proper feminine pursuits—and had encouraged her to choose natural history as her Calling. She took out a third blank sheet. It seemed to beg her to fill it. A blank page was nothing but potential, pointless until it was used. Like a fully infused sphere cloistered inside a pouch, prevented from making its light useful. Fill me. The creationspren gathered around the page. They were still, as if curious, anticipatory. Shallan closed her eyes and imagined Jasnah Kholin, standing before the blocked door, the Soulcaster glowing on her hand. The hallway hushed, save for a child’s sniffles. Attendants holding their breath. An anxious king. A still reverence. Shallan opened her eyes and began to draw with vigor, intentionally losing herself. The less she was in the now and the more she was in the then, the better the sketch would be. The other two pictures had been warm-ups; this was the day’s masterpiece. With the paper bound onto the board—safehand holding that—her freehand flew across the page, occasionally switching to other pencils. Soft charcoal for deep, thick blackness, like Jasnah’s beautiful hair. Hard charcoal for light greys, like the powerful waves of light coming from the Soulcaster’s gems. For a few extended moments, Shallan was back in that hallway again, watching something that should not be: a heretic wielding one of the most sacred powers in all the world. The power of change itself, the power by which the Almighty had created Roshar. He had another name, allowed to pass only the lips of ardents. Elithanathile. He Who Transforms. Shallan could smell the musty hallway. She could hear the child whimpering. She could feel her own heart beating in anticipation. The boulder would soon change. Sucking away the Stormlight in Jasnah’s gemstone, it would give up its essence, becoming something new. Shallan’s breath caught in her throat. And then the memory faded, returning her to the quiet, dim alcove. The page now held a perfect rendition of the scene, worked in blacks and greys. The princess’s proud figure regarded the fallen stone, demanding that it give way before her will. It was her. Shallan knew, with the intuitive certainty of an artist, that this was one of the finest pieces she had ever done. In a very small way, she had captured Jasnah Kholin, something the devotaries had never managed. That gave her a euphoric thrill. Even if this woman rejected Shallan again, one fact would not change. Jasnah Kholin had joined Shallan’s collection.

it. This combination of letters and numbers indicates the grade of the pencil and the hardness or lightness of the mark it makes. This grading system indicates the hardness of the core graphite (H, B, etc.) and the degree of hardness (2, 3, 4, 5, etc.). If a pencil has an “H” on it, that letter indicates that it is a hard pencil. H pencils make light, sketchy lines, which are useful for drawing and sketching. The number in front of the H, ranging between 2 and 9, indicates how light the mark will be. The higher the number, the harder the writing core and the lighter the mark left on the paper. Therefore, a 9H pencil will leave a mark that is much lighter than a 2H. A 9H pencil will leave a hard, light line, great for mechanical drawings. Some scales will show an “F” grade between the “H” and the “HB.” “F” often indicates “fine,” “fine point,” or “firm.” If a pencil has a “B” on it, that letter indicates that it is a soft pencil. B pencils make dark and smudgy marks, which are excellent for shading with. The higher the number, the softer the writing core and the darker the mark on the paper. Therefore, a 9B leaves a very soft, very dark, very intense mark, one that is much more intense than a 2B. Note that softer pencils (B) will dull faster than harder pencils and usually require more frequent sharpening.

Drawing pictures was an idle way of finishing an unprofitable morning’s work. Yet it is in our idleness, in our dreams, that the submerged truth sometimes comes to the top. A very elementary exercise in psychology, not to be dignified by the name of psycho-analysis, showed me, on looking at my notebook, that the sketch of the angry professor had been made in anger. Anger had snatched my pencil while I dreamt. But what was anger doing there? Interest, confusion, amusement, boredom—all these emotions I could trace and name as they succeeded each other throughout the morning. Had anger, the black snake, been lurking among them? Yes, said the sketch, anger had. It referred me unmistakably to the one book, to the one phrase, which had roused the demon; it was the professor’s statement about the mental, moral and physical inferiority of women. My heart had leapt, My cheeks had burnt. I had flushed with anger.