Oh, there are just too many jokes about pencils and leads.....This is a little on the edge of our discussions here, but I thought this would be of interest to some. I have chosen to stick to the traditional craft of fashioning my images from sticks that mark, and paper. For anyone else who has chosen that route, you know that the supplies to do this with are harder and harder to find. YES, there are decent on-line suppliers, but the Mom and Pop art stores we knew as kids, all but vanished. There is ONE place left that I manage to get to on occasion, and I often feel like an Alaskan hunter in town to get supplies for the winter.

My favorite marking sticks are these old drafting pencils, that take a long, heavy lead, that can actually be sharpened to a very fine point. I've been drawing with these since the mid-80's, when my father gave me a bunch he no longer had use for at work, where he was designing on CADs. I'm doing a lot of pencil work now, and the work I'm doing just burns through these leads. They aren't the kind of thing that is seeing much production these days.

So I'm in this old art store, digging through drawers that no one else in the store ever frequents, and I find this box— at first I thought it was a retro design. In great shape, cool typography, metallic ink, cardboard box, it couldn't really be THAT OLD, could it? The tray that holds the leads is made of WOOD. I ask the guy who runs the store, who admits with a sigh of depression that yes, they probably ARE that old—how old?— the © on the box reads 1935, which means they've been around for over 70 years. Now I can't bring myself to use them, I had to buy a newer box just to use...