Hardness v Shade

My quest for specimens from various pencil manufacturers has landed me a large number of artist sets. I use my pencils about 50% for writing and another 50% for drawing, but never particularly used a wide variety of hardnesses. I like to draw with the same kinds of pencils I like to write with: not too hard, making a strong black line while still giving me some amount of feedback from the paper texture. Softer than a 4B typically means not enough feedback, and harder than HB usually means not dark enough. I generally pay attention to these both when I draw and when I write.

Lately I have occasionally been using harder pencils for creating 2-shade monochrome drawings, and it made me realize I couldn’t see a difference between the shades of the soft grades. I decided to try to find a way to more objectively measure this, and so made some charts with the full range from each set.

The result showed that, at least for me, most sets have 1 or two distinct shades regardless of the number of grades. I assume this means that more seasoned artists use the softer grades do it for properties other than shade of the graphite. Personally I don’t like the slippery feel of softer leads on the page, so I’m unlikely to join them, but it’s interesting to at least have some details on these.

Of course, there are no standards to this grading system, and as I saw with the Nobels, sometimes even within the brand there isn’t much quality control. I’ll keep this post updated periodically as I obtain more sets just to have a record of their shade tests.

Updates 5 January 2021: