Faber Castell 9000

The company

I discuss Faber over in the Perfect Pencil post - see there for some details.

The pencil itself

I was expecting fairly good things from this pencil. It is sold in nice racks in art shops and as a quality pencil here. The paint job is nice, and the gold embossing oozes a touch of quality.

How does it write

Coming to use the pencil after having recently used a number of Japanese pencils, for an HB, this is a very hard lead. Not too scratchy, but definitely significantly harder, and subsequently not as dark on the page, as the Japanese ones. I believe this is a known trend or theme though - that Japanese pencils tend to be softer and darker for their ratings than their Western counterparts. I guess maybe it is true.

Following on from that, point retention here is noticably much better. I found I sharpened the pencil much less through the week. I did find though that the pencil did not seem to lay down the same on different papers - it seemed quite sensitive to what I think was the surface texture of the paper in use.

I’d quite like to try a B grade to see if that hits my happy place for softer and darker pencils.

Sourcing

Here this is relatively easy to source, being available (if you can find one) in many art shops.