Tombow Mono Graph Mechanical Pencil - Lavender

I love Tombow, so it's no surprise to discover my pastel lavender mechanical pencil is as gorgeous as it looks. In fact, I've been sketching with it all afternoon, and am thinking I should get other colors too. Tombow products are addictive, but a very happy addiction!

I've had this pencil for a few weeks now, and wanted to make a review once I had some time to put it through my usual workflow. As a mechanical pencil for writing, it performs just fine - if you've used a mechanical pencil before - you'll know exactly how this works. But to get into the details of why I'm giving this the title of favorite drawing pencil, let me explain my perspective. As a beginner artist, I've focused all my time with traditional materials to learn - why spend a lot of money when I'm still learning the basics right? Well I've gone through lots of standard wooden pencils, BIC mechanical pencils and even a few solid metal pencils. All of them are great and do different things very well, but I chose the Tombow Monograph for a different reason. I chose it partly because of the great color choices, partly because their erasers are by far the best I've used (and trust me, as a beginner artist you use a LOT of erasers) and also because the unique mechanism sounded interesting to try out. You see throughout my time with all these other brands, Uni, Zebra, BIC and rOtring, they all had roughly the same weight, and very similar (but not all) sizes. What set this pencil apart is it had a wider circumference which fit's my larger hands much more comfortably, but it also had extra weight due to the mechanism inside for shaking the lead out. For my preference, this actually improved the quality of my art because I tend to be a bit heavy handed - and the extra size and weight (though not by a lot mind you, this is not a 'heavy' pencil) seemed to be just enough to help guide my hand much more easily than the others did. This made for a very comfortable and enjoyable experience that I honestly have not yet found anywhere else, for me - this is now my default sketching pencil! It's also excellent at producing very soft / transparent lines when I need it for a base sketch, and going thicker when I need to put down some lines. It's shake mechanism is interesting, but I don't find myself using it much - I'm sure if I was writing more than drawing I would actually use it more often. Overall, for what I'm looking for and my preferences, this is a fantastic pencil that should hopefully find it's way into your selection soon! It's very affordable so it isn't difficult to add one to your list, there's a few very nice colors that pop and after weeks of daily drawing I can say that the quality of the lead and plastics feel and look great.