The Magic of a Yellow No. 2 Pencil |

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posted by Dave Bossert

The Magic of a Yellow No. 2 Pencil

The Dixon Ticonderoga Yellow No. 2 pencils is my pencil of choice and I’ve been using it since at least kindergarten.

There are not many things that any of us can say we have used for most of our lives outside of the necessities. Okay, sure you can say that you have worn blue-jeans since you were a tike, or you have had numerous pairs of suede desert boots. I have. But I am talking about a simple pencil that I started using in kindergarten, maybe even before that, and have used consistently throughout my formative grade school years, Jr. high school, and Sr. high school where I took the SATs, then into college and throughout my animation career at Walt Disney Feature Animation.

For more than a half century, I have had a Yellow No.2 pencil within arm’s reach, most of the time. Whether at home or at work, I always had a stack of these bright yellow hexagonal pencils adorned with the metal ferrule holding a latex-free pink eraser. It has been my pencil of choice throughout my entire four-decade animation career. I rarely strayed from it and the hardness of that graphite core.

Yes, that is me at my Weber animation desk using a Yellow No.2 pencil on some animation drawings, circa 2003 or so, for a special project at Walt Disney Animation Studios.

Many animation professionals today use a stylus with a tablet and specialty animation software loaded on computer hardware. Some have only created animation on such a system, which is a shame. They have missed out on hand-drawn animation and the beauty that fluid lines bring to the medium. Traditional pencil animation is a technique unto itself just as any technique yields unique results.

The pencil can be traced back to the ancient Roman Empire writing implement called a stylus— not be confused with the modern digital stylus. No, the Roman stylus was a thin metal rod that left a light yet readable mark on papyrus, a form of paper. Some early styluses were made of lead, which is what many still refer to pencil cores as today even though they are made of non-toxic graphite.(1 )

Graphite came into widespread use after a large deposit was discovered in Borrowdale, England in 1564. There are several qualities in graphite that set it apart from lead. First, it is much darker when leaving a mark on paper and it is non-toxic when processed. Second, it is softer therefore it required some kind of holder. After trying to wrap graphite sticks in string, it was later inserted into hollowed-out wooden sticks giving way to the birth of the modern pencil.(2 )

But the pencil was not mass produced for nearly one-hundred years until 1662 in Nuremburg, Germany. Companies with familiar names like Faber-Castell, Steadtler and Lyra became the driving force as the pencil industry developed in conjunction with the 19th century industrial revolution.(3 ) By the 1890s many of the German companies established factories in the New York and New Jersey area including Faber-Castell, Eberhard Faber, Eagle Pencil Company (later Berol) and General Pencil Company.

Joseph Dixon, an entrepreneur and the son of ship captain, began experimenting with graphite he found on his father’s ship in 1812. Dixon mixed graphite power, clay and water then rolled it into strips that he baked in his mother’s oven. He took the baked mixer and pressed into “grooved cedar wood” producing his first pencil.(4 )

It wasn’t until the Civil War that the pencil gained traction as an everyday writing instrument. Soldiers wanted a more practical alternative to using a quill or dip pen for writing letters home. From that point on the pencil became widely adapted. To keep up with the demand, Dixon developed a machine that could produce more than 130 pencils a minute and with innovations in machinery the output climbed to 86,000 pencils a day by 1872.(5 )

The hexagonal shape of the pencil was designed that way to get an extra pencil out of the standard width wood slats used in pencil making. The wood slats are milled in two sections with long grooves for the graphite. Once the graphite is laid into the groove of the bottom slat, the top slat is glued on and then cut apart producing the individual pencils. The pencils are then painted, embossed with the brand information, and the ferrule and eraser are added.

Pencils were initially unpainted to show of the beauty of the wood, usually cedar....