Pencil Problems

In Bare Necessities and My Favorite Art Supplies, I reference the Graphgear mechanical pencil and Pentel pencil lead as my favorite sketching pencil/lead. I’ve been using these 0.3, 0.5, 0.7 pencil lead primarily for a few years now, but before that, I used 2.0 mm mechanical pencils that uses lead the same size as standard #2 pencils. These lead pieces are way thicker than 0.5 or even 0.9 mechanical pencils. I stopped using them because I wanted the precision of the smaller sized lead.

Heavy-Handed

I am heavy-handed. It’s an issue I’ve had my entire artistic history and it frequently destroys my drawing supplies. I do try to practice better hand control and am better at drawing or sketching lighter, but it takes conscious effort that I don’t always have. When I started Acid Trip, I draw lightly enough to erase over and over without too much damage, but once I moved to the second half, I stopped being as careful (because it can be exhausting) and ended up unconsciously pressing so hard I couldn’t keep erasing. Paper was irrevocably damaged.

This is a common problem in my art practice…precision requires thought, ADHD sneakiily eats thought and then I’m running off automatic, thoughtless behaviors (my heavy-handedness). And it leads me to switch art supplies for ones that are more fool- (or child-) proof. This is why I prefer acrylic markers as my main color media, because they dry permanent, can’t be reactivated, and are opaque. I love watercolor and acrylic paints. I would love to try gauche or acryla-gauche one day…but they aren’t practical to my clumsy, ADHD attention-span (though I refuse to give up watercolor). So is this how I need to treat my pencils? Do I switch back and forth still?

Additional Thoughts After Experimenting

05-20-2026 at 9:37 am

Pentel doesn’t make 2mm lead so I used F lead from the Uni Mitsubishi brand. Uni’s 2mm F lead is way softer and darker than Pentel’s 0.5 F lead. I didn’t like this as much because the reason I don’t like softer grades is because I smudge too much. If I switch to 2mm, I’ll need an H or possibly even a 2H.

The 2mm F lead also doesn’t erase as well as others. I think it has to do with how much more graphite is being put down at a time. The 2mm 4H is the best eraser (because it’s the lightest) with the 0.5 F and 2mm 2H being close behind.

The darkness of the 2mm F lead is surprisingly lighter than the 0.5 F, even tho the 2mm lead puts down more graphite. I used to use STAEDTLER 4H 2mm pencil lead a lot to sketch. I think it could be useful to go back to that. Ideally, I’d have access to both 2H and 4H lead in two separate pencils.

There is another consideration, while technical pencils have the extra addition of needing some sort of sharpener (granted most technical pencils have a built in sharpener) which causes more of a mess, 2mm leads are easy to identify. Each 2mm lead I have has the brand and grade printed directly on it. This is a huge advantage as it’s so much easier to switch out leads without losing them. I’ve waited so much lead from the 0.# sizes because sometimes I don’t know what lead is in a pencil, so instead of guessing, I just remove it and put lead in that I know. It' would be very useful to know exactly what lead is in each pencil like with the 2mm ones.

The damaged paper is annoying, so I’m going to be focusing on the 2H 2mm lead for sketching and see how it goes.