Viking

Viking stuff is devilishly hard to find in North America. CW Pencils occasionally carries an item or two, but nothing close to their wider product line. Specifically, their artist pencil line, Rollo, is the only one produced in multiple hardness grades.

Viking pencils aren’t particularly special in terms of quality. They use good cores and California cedar slats. But their real selling quality is their design. The packaging is gorgeous, with small windows in the dozen boxes and no plastic. I also adore their artwork, and picked up one of their colouring books and a cute pack of colour pencils just for the awesome cordwork drawings like those that cover their packaging.

I would love to see them print some slim notebooks with this artwork (alas all of their notebooks and sketchbooks are landscape and perfect bound). The pencils themselves are varnished nicely, with glossy Skjoldungen and Skolablyanten lines and the matte-black Element. The Rollo has a smooth natural finish (likely with just a thin lacquer). The stamping and logo on the stick is clear and clean. I know that Scandinavian design is almost a cliché today, but Viking definitely makes beautiful stuff.

The Element, Skolablyanten and Skjoldungen all indicate HB hardness, and all leave a nice mark, but the Element has a particularly dark and strong core, and is by far my favourite. I ordered dozen packs of the Rollo in HB, 2B and 4B, as well as an artist set of 12 (2 of each 2H, HB, 2B, 4B, 6B and 8B).

In addition to all of this I grabbed one of their beautiful Essentials kits, which includes the dual-core Verso, another set of Rollos, and some ArtGraf products from Viarco, as well as sketchpads, ruler, blender and sharpener, all packed in a nice carrying sack and box.

To order mine I had to navigate their Danish-only website using my intermediate-at-best Swedish (as opposed to Danish) and some strategic translator help. The real trouble was with their fulfillment. I placed the order, then waited a couple days for an invoice to pay, as foreign orders require custom shipping price calculation. I then paid, and waited about three weeks. After not receiving them yet, I sent an email enquiry, at which point I was told there was a system error and I would be getting a shipping confirmation in a couple days. That never came, but I was patient and waited another three weeks. Then another email and was told I would (again) receive shipping confirmation from the courier. Whilst this confirmation never came, the package finally arrived a few days later, after more than seven weeks. I’ll definitely order more from them because I’m so fond of their stuff, but that was a difficult wait.