This article by Ray Spitzenberger first appeared in IMAGES for East Bernard Express, East Bernard , Texas Dec. 30, 2021.
During my childhood, the days right after Christmas in countdown to New Year’s Eve were devoted to playing with the toys I received for Christmas. Those toys always included the Quality Art Set from Sears and Roebuck, my most longed for and cherished gift. Every year, the Sears Christmas catalogue offered three art sets for kids, — the Basic Art Set, the Quality Art Set, and the Deluxe Art Set. Knowing we could not afford the Deluxe Set, I would lobby for the Quality, also knowing the Basic wouldn’t last very long. Always included in the Quality Set, which my mother would reluctantly get me, was an assortment of colored pencils. Colored pencils, or map colors, essentially the same thing (wood casings filled with wax or oil-based stuff with pigment), were the least fun with which to create art. I would create with them later in the year after I had exhausted the supply of tempera and watercolors which helped me create much more exciting art.
Christmas 2021, some 80 years later, was almost deja vu for me! My family showered me with new art supplies, which included sketch pads, Japanese ink brushes, Micron drawing pens, a set of #2 Cedar Pointe pencils, and one prismacolor pencil. During these days before the New Year, I am playing with my “toys.”
Never having taken art classes, I prefer the old-fashioned Cedar Pointe #2 graphite pencils over the more “professional” art pencils favored by the professionals. I use them both for pencil sketches and as under drawings for my watercolor paintings and ink sketches. My wife threw in one prismacolor drawing pencil, an implement I have never used before, and I have been enthralled with it!
The prismacolor pencils differ from the Cedar Pointe graphite pencils I normally use in that their innards are made of clay and graphite, with of course pigments and binders. The clay makes all the difference, taking me beyond what I can do with the graphite. One of my art books suggests using the prismacolor pencils to enhance the graphite.
In looking at the history of pencils and pens, you see that using these implements for writing and drawing evolved together. Egyptian hieroglyphics, the second oldest writing system in the world, used drawings as writings, while Sumerian cuneiform, the oldest writing system, used wedge-shaped characters. Hieroglyphics were drawn/written with a brush on papyrus or wood, and with a hammer and chisel into stone. Cuneiform characters were written (etched) into wet clay tablets with a stylus (made of a bamboo reed). So, I suppose you could say that the first pencils were a brush, a chisel, and a stylus!
The first pencil, as we know it (with graphite), was first “invented” in 1565 by Conrad Gessner in Switzerland; however, it was never really used by anyone. It wasn’t until 1795 that a Frenchman, Nicholas Jacques Conte, re-discovered the pure carbon called “graphite” (which we erroneously call “lead”), and pencils became a commonly used commodity.
No doubt that was more history than you wanted to read at a time when the old year comes to an end, and we celebrate the new; but I share it because it uncovers a surprise for me. I had always thought that pencil sketches and drawings were done long before the 16th Century, and before pen and ink sketches were popular. There are erasers for drawing with pencils, whereas pen and ink is so final, the only eraser being to tear up the page. Pen and ink are as final as chiseling hieroglyphics into stone! As a kid, I don’t remember colored pencils being very erasable, — perhaps that’s the reason I was never too excited about using colored pencils! I’m looking forward to lots of sketching in the New Year!
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Ray Spitzenberger is a retired WCJC teacher, a retired LCMS pastor, and the author of three books, It Must Be the Noodles, Open Prairies, and Tanka Schoen.