If you are new to drawing, you may be looking at art supplies and notice that drawing pencils often come in sets that include a range of leads. Usually, these are labeled with H and B along with various numbers. Some brands have other letters, just to make things confusing - for whatever reason, Staedtler uses E. Most lines, however, use the grades you see in the sample chart, above, which can also include F. Don't worry, I will explain what the different grades mean – even the rare ones.
Basic Info about Drawing Pencil Grades
First things first: a pencil "lead" is a stick of compressed graphite powder, so no worries about being in contact with actual lead. As you draw, you leave a trail of that graphite powder on the surface of the paper. The various pencil grades indicate exactly how much of the powder you will leave, which determines the quality of the mark you make.
Let's start with the letters: H stands for hard and B stands for soft (yeah, I know – maybe it would help to think of the softness of a baby or a bunny). HB is in the middle, and then you go up the numbers to the hardest and softest leads. The hard leads make a lighter mark that is more precise (because less graphite is being deposited) and the softer leads leave a darker, less-defined line, because more of the soft graphite particles are being shed onto the paper surface. The higher the number, the more of this characteristic there is: an 8B is loads darker and smeary that a 2B, and as expected, an 8H is harder and more precise than a 2H (you may notice that there's no 1H or 1B – those are just H and B).
As for the one-offs, F stands for either Firm or Fine (as we've learned, a firm lead makes a fine line, so they are essentially interchangeable). As you can see from the above chart, F is in the middle with HB, but is put on the H side. E, in the Staedtler lines, stands for Extra Black (they will sometimes use EE or EB, as well), so it would occupy the spaces after the highest B numbers.
Fun fact: the "number 2" pencils commonly used in schools are a 2B lead. The reason they are so common is that they are required for the standardized tests we took as kids where you have to darken in an oval for the correct answer. The 2B lead is dark enough to be easily read by the optical scanner that grades the tests, but firm enough so that it doesn't smear into other circles.
Tips about Using Different Drawing Pencil Grades
Be aware that the harder the lead, the more it tends to press into the paper. If you are trying to make a fine art drawing, you will be sad, because these teeny little furrows will mess up your flow. If you are making a technical drawing, however, you will be fine, because you will probably be using a hard surface - perhaps vellum - on which to draw, and you will be ruling precise lines that probably won't need to be shaded over or erased.
Soft leads have their own challenges. The softer the lead, the more it tends to smear – great for blending and building up dark tones; bad for maintaining the cleanliness of you, your clothing, the work surface, etc. Be warned.
A word of warning about these pencil sets: You might be tempted to mix the different leads in the same drawing, since you have a bunch. Yeah, don't do that. The hard leads have a noticeably "silver" cast, down to a much darker, charcoal-like black for the softest leads. They DON'T look good together. Don't go more than two grades away (say 4/5/6B, for example) if you want your tone to be consistent. Anyway, your really don't need all these different grades, in my opinion: If you want a lighter line, don't press down as much. For a darker line, press harder, thus depositing more graphite. That's how I get the full tonal range with just one grade of pencil. I personally use a regular old #2 mechanical pencil (Papermate Sharpwriter, if you're curious), and I can get a decent tonal range out of it (see my drawing of Tom Cruise below).
Enjoy your journey into the wonderful world of drawing! Drawing is a wonderful baseline skill to develop that will in turn improve your skills as a painter, a printmaker, and a designer or illustrator. I hope my tutorial helped.
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Other articles about drawing you might like:
https://allsortsartbyali.blogspot.com/2016/02/learning-to-draw-first-step-have-right.html
http://allsortsartbyali.blogspot.com/2015/03/i-have-been-professional-portrait.html
http://allsortsartbyali.blogspot.com/2015/03/figure-drawing-101-wacky-secrets-of.html
http://allsortsartbyali.blogspot.com/2015/05/figure-drawing-101-so-you-wanna-be.html
Image credits: pencil grading chart - https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/fa/PencilGradingChart.png
portrait of Tom Cruise – my original art, see copyright notice
