The Myth And Reality Of The Palomino Blackwing 602

As a guy that loves to draw, one of the benefits is that people give me a variety of artistic gifts for Christmas and birthdays. One of these is examples is a lot of different drawing pencil sets, which I have begun using at home, if only at first to get rid of them. However, there are some great pencils out there that are exceptional to sketch with, my two particular favorites being Staedtler and Tombow.

However, lurking in the corners of the internet, I continued to hear one word repeated over and over again. Similar in myth and legend to the sword Excalibur, the word I continued to hear was Blackwing. As in the discontinued Eberhard Faber Blackwing pencil. It’s renowned for being able to produce a dark line with very little effort, thanks to the addition of wax to the pencil. Granted, this isn't a unique approach among pencils. I believe the Sanford Turquoise pencil works along the same principle, and it’s a piece of shit. But this pencil was used by all sorts of people, notably artists, writers, and newspaper reporters. Two of the bigger known names associated with the Blackwing were Chuck Jones and John Steinbeck. It’s regarded to be the best pencil ever made.

So when Eberhard Faber decided to cease production of the pencil in 1998, there was a push by Blackwing devotees to get the company to reconsider. Eberhard Faber declined, and the Blackwing went extinct. People immediately went out and bought all the Blackwings that they could find, and boxes of the original Blackwings on eBay are known to go for premium prices. However, the California Cedar Corporation recognized a need, and decided to create a similar pencil to the Blackwing. More or less replicating the original design, CCC released their new Blackwing under their Palomino brand, to great fanfare. Despite those who immediately took to the new design, others said that it was still too soft and dark to truly be similar to the original Blackwing. So, CCC released another variant, the Blackwing 602. This is regarded to be close enough to the original that many of those that had great affection for the original finally accepted it, although there do remain a hardcore zealot camp of the pencil aficionado group that still regard it as shit. Picky fucking bastards.

I normally wouldn't have spent money on this type of product, because the mark up for nostalgia is about twenty bucks per box. However, I did have an Amazon.com gift card that was burning a hole in my pocket, and didn't have anything else I was going to purchase outside of a book. On an idle hunch, I looked up the Blackwing on Amazon, and sure enough, there was an after Christmas sale, plus free shipping, that dropped the price dramatically. With that in mind, I went ahead and pulled the trigger.

The Blackwing 602 is a very aesthetically striking pencil. It’s gunmetal grey, with gold leaf on the shaft of the pencil, naming the pencil on one side, and proudly proclaiming that its “HALF THE PRESSURE, TWICE THE SPEED” on the other side. It also has the signature wide pencil eraser at the end, which allows for one to be able to replace the eraser when it becomes dull. It’s this replaceable eraser design, and specifically it’s clips that hold the eraser to the eraser harness, that doomed the original Blackwing, since the machine that stamped out the harnesses broke, and the pencil wasn't commercially lucrative enough to repair. The pencil eraser actually works pretty well, and you can buy replacement erasers in black, pink, orange, and blue. However, the huge downside to this eraser design is that it means that it is incompatible with a pencil extender, which many artists use because, well lets face it, pencils are a bit expensive at a dollar to dollar fifty a pop. This makes the Blackwing, at a certain point, useless, or just uncomfortable to use.

However, I'm dancing around the main issue at hand, the one that is most important among all of this pencil worship: how does it write? Well, very well, thank you. It's a very smooth pencil, one that barely offers you any resistance or friction, similar to what you get in the softest of leads. With minimal pressure, you get a nice, darkish line, similar to a HB or B lead, and with more pressure, you can get some really nice, smooth dark lines probably in the 3 or 4B range. It really is a fine writing instrument, and for this reason, I can see why so many artists and writers loved it. Plus, the lead is pretty firm, and doesn't dull very easily, a complaint I've heard about the standard Blackwing. I like this, actually.  I like it a lot.

Do I like it enough to pay the full price for it?

No.

Let's backtrack a bit.  It's a very expensive pencil.  I calculated the average cost of the pencil, with the full price of each box, plus shipping.  You're going to roughly pay about $2 per Blackwing if you are going to be a regular user.  That's a pretty steep price for what is a good, but not transcendent sketching experience.  Plus, this is still a pretty niche pencil, which means you are more than likely not going to find it in your local art supply store.  You're going to have to get it from a third party seller like Amazon or JetPens.  For about .50 cents less, and a lot more convenience, you'd get somewhat similar results from a Staedtler F Lead Pencil, or a Pentel Ebony.  The experience isn't worth the extra coin and work.

More importantly, there's this.  Tools can only go so far.  Granted, there is a difference between spending a good deal of cash on something cheap and actually getting a quality product at a good price.  But what makes the tool most effective is the person using it, not the tool.  You can't teach skill.  Using a Blackwing won't make you into Steinbeck or Chuck Jones.  I've seen people do absolutely beautiful artwork with nothing more than a Number Two pencil.  The Blackwing does add a bit of ease and smoothness into your drawing experience, but it doesn't replace the actual skill of the person wielding it.  I'll probably use up this box of Blackwings over the year, and will do so with great pleasure.  I think even the stub of the pencil that I can't use, plus the unique eraser (it'll be intact, as I rarely use the erasers on pencils) will look pretty sweet in a fedora.  But I'll probably never buy a box again, unless circumstances like what happened occur once again.

But I I have one final thought to those that might decry this Blackwing as still inferior to the original.  Just use this new one.  Regardless of whether or not it is a true successor to the original, outside of a garage or estate sale (and I look, trust me) or a eBay auction, the original has gone the way of Tasmanian Tiger.  You more than likely won't ever find the original ever again, barring Eberhard Faber suddenly deciding to reverse course and market this as a limited edition premium pencil, which will likely be more expensive.  Plus, I'm willing to gamble that much of the opinion about the original Blackwing is merely perception, as if a way of maintaining the cult status of what was a beloved, but unappreciated pencil, whose disappearance and mythology has only increased as our memories fade and the feel of the original disappears from our hands.  If you must have a Blackwing in your paws while you create, than at least give what is out there a chance.

Sources

• Fortune Magazine's Blackwing Article
• The Blackwing Pages
• Pencilpedia's Blackwing Article