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Found this amusing story via boingboing.net.

The Blackwing was a pencil that went out of production in the end of the nineties; I'd discovered them only a little earlier and was sad to see them go. This, however, is about people who have virtually turned it into a fetish object.

I'm not entirely guiltless; I still have one unsharpened Blackwing in my box of assorted fresh pencils. At Spümcø, Jim Smith stuck the stub of his last one (or one of his last ones) up on a bulletin board with a note reading 'The Blackwing is Extinct!'.

Things like this are why one friend of mine set out to learn to use the dirt cheap pencils you can buy ten for a dollar at the drugstore. And why I do so much of my color work digitally. What artist in the furry community, with the cultural love affair with art markers, doesn't have a horror story of their favorite markers vanishing?

Oh, my current favorite drawing tool is the Dixon Ticonderoga, in 2.5B ("medium") and 1B ("soft"). Maybe I should stock up in case of corporate nonsense.

Date: 2002-12-17 04:25 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] mandrill.livejournal.com
There's all sorts of art supplies that have gone extinct. All kinds of lovely ink pens and nibs. Certain paint colors you can't buy any longer because the minerals used to make particular colors are too toxic. People will buy even dried up tubes of certain oil paint colors (the paints can be reground and oil added to make them usable again).

Prismacolor changed the formula for their colored pencils after the company was purchased by Sanford a few years ago. I recall that some people were rushing out to buy the stocks of older Prismacolor pencils which were slightly softer and easier to blend.

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Margaret Trauth

October 2020

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