While the
Pentel Black Polymer 999 HB wooden pencil
did not wow me when I first got it, decided to give it another try in my
sketching kit. I read some blog comments in
Pencil Talk that this pencil line has recently been discontinued, and
Jet Pens has placed its remaining stock in their
clearance section.
Earlier I found an older
Naruto tankōbon improperly shelved in some random aisle at the library, so it inspired me to doodle a couple of the female ninjas depicted in it.
The
Black Polymer 999 HB pencil adequately retained its sharp point while completing this mermaid sketch without requiring additional sharpening. While not as smooth as the
Mitsubishi Hi-Uni pencil, it still makes for a pretty good
sketching pencil given its lead strength and the range of values it can achieve by itself.
While the Pentel Black Polymer 999 HB wooden pencil did not wow me when I first got it, decided to give it another try in my sketching kit. I read some blog comments in Pencil Talk that this pencil line has recently been discontinued, and Jet Pens has placed its remaining stock in their clearance section.
Earlier I found an older Naruto tankōbon improperly shelved in some random aisle at the library, so it inspired me to doodle a couple of the female ninjas depicted in it.
The Black Polymer 999 HB pencil adequately retained its sharp point while completing this mermaid sketch without requiring additional sharpening. While not as smooth as the Mitsubishi Hi-Uni pencil, it still makes for a pretty good sketching pencil given its lead strength and the range of values it can achieve by itself.
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2 comments:
I've gotta say I wasn't terribly thrilled with the finish and look of the Black Polymer 999, and I wasn't even particularly impressed by its writing feel, but I was definitely impressed by its breakage resistance in writing.
One of the main reasons I have not been using my Hi-Uni Bs for writing is that the finest points will snap off with relative ease. Even the Mono 100, which seems a bit more robust than the Hi-Uni, will snap off with moderate pressure. The BP999? I have a few in B grade and tried snapping the tip with firm diagonal writing-style pressure, and when it did finally break (after more pressure than it normally takes me to snap an HB Mono 100), it only snapped off a teeny tiny bit, and remained quite sharp. I repeated this a number of times, and each time, the BP999 breaks were far less serious than those of other premium pencils.
I am no artist, but as a writer, I've gotta admit I'm pretty impressed by the strength and darkness of that BP999 in B...and if I had more of them, I probably would have cycled them into my writing set.
(fwiw, the CDT Item 17, which also uses a polymer graphite lead, was pretty strong too, though I didn't get the same strength I got from the BP999s)
Thank you very much for sharing your insight on this pencil's performance.
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