Well, I never felt more like singin’ the blues…

A couple years ago I wrote about the stash of non-photo blue pencils I have all over my house and why I use them:

Non-Photo Blue pencils are a particular shade of blue that could not be detected by a  graphic arts camera like a photostat camera. I ran stat cameras in the era when graphic design was an analog pursuit involving rubber cement, illustration board, razor blades, rubylith, waxers, zip-a-tone and a lot of manual labor. It also involved Non-Photo Blue Pencils which I have a bunch all about my house. I do a lot of my initial sketches with these pencils and work over top of them with graphite pencils or ink.

I was afraid that these pencils were going to disappear. A few years ago I asked a clerk in an art supply store for non-repro blue 2mm leads for a clutch pencil. Her response was, “What do you mean by non-repro blue?” I thought my days of enjoying these pencils were numbered. Fortunately, that’s not the case. They are not necessarily easy to find, but non-repro pencils and leads are still available. The Caran D’Ache at the bottom of the photo is a recent acquisition and the Swiss make a very nice pencil!

I continued to use them vaguely roughing out drawings with them before finalizing the sketch in graphite pencils and ink and I sharpened them down to useless stubs.

I was doing that until today.

I just got these Pilot leads for a 0.7mm mechanical pencil in my mailbox. I’ve been looking for non-photo or non-repro leads and coming up dry. Once plentiful 2mm non-repro leads for a clutch pencil are hard to find. I thought that they may have succumbed to obsolescence like a lot of art supplies I sorely miss, but I was happily mistaken. My guess is that in order to avoid confusion, Pilot calls the color of the leads Soft Blue rather than maintaining some arcane technical name that modern artists don’t care about. They are the same color as my old non-photo blue pencils, but they have a couple of advantages over my old wood clinched pencils — they erase a lot easier than the waxy lead of the old pencils and the thin leads never have to be sharpened.

I’ll give these leads a spin and report back on what I find. If they work out well, I think I will immediately order more. There are ten leads in the box, and if things go well, they won’t last long!