National Stationery Week, Day 1

National Stationery Week is upon us once again.

I say 'once again', but in reality I managed to forget all about it last year.  So this year I've flung myself into it wholeheartedly.  Somewhat overzealously, in fact... the full extent of which will be revealed tomorrow, and when I say 'full extent' I do mean it.

Today is 'Pencil Day'.  I used to have a decent collection of watercolour pencils (as shown to the left) and regular colouring pencils, along with drawing and metallic ones--I still do, in fact, somewhere--but as I don't draw much any more a lot have fallen by the wayside.  These days, my trusty assistant for everything from sketching to puzzles in the newspaper is an ancient and slightly disgusting mechanical pencil that I 'liberated' from a former workplace many years ago.  I should probably replace it, but it's served me well.  I'd feel bereft without it.

Most people swear by various pencil grades (I have a set of those somewhere too), but not only am I a heathen who uses a mechanical pencil, but I'm doubly damned by using generic HB leads too!  At least it's not so bad these days, as all I do is ink over the pencil lines and then erase them--but it's arguable that I'd be better using a softer 2B lead...  But as the side of my hand is grey and disgusting by the time I'm finished normally, anything softer and more easily smudgable would be disastrous!

In preparation for my big project, I've been working on two illustrations.  I forgot to take a picture of the first one before I started to ink and colour it, but I did remember the second.  So, in honour of Pencil Day, this is the pencil sketch of the second illustration (the one that shows just how out of practice I am!).

Fancy handwriting will be the death of me.

You can see my trusty pencil, along with the putty eraser that might look disgustingly disreputable, but is actually supposed to be that colour.

Hopefully, tomorrow, the whole finished picture will be ready for you to see!

Tomorrow: Pen & Ink Day, the day I may have gotten a little carried away with... Notepad Day, my favourite photographic subject!