To put a point on it

I love my various sets of pencils - watercolour, charcoal and the humble graphite! But one thing I discovered is that my pencils don't like sharpeners very much.

Not. At. All.

This has been the case, ever since owning my first pencils at primary school. My greatest irritation was having one side of the pencil perfectly sharpened, while another decided it would remain wood. It didn't matter how many times I put the pencil in the sharpener differently, that one irritating section of wood, wouldn't go down!

So I'd end up with a point I could use, but would inevitably snap within the pencil shaft, because the wood didn't support the lead, evenly, all the way around. The lead would pop out again - leaving me with no alternative but to battle with the sharpener once more. Sharpen. Snap. Sharpen. Repeat. Have you ever experienced this particular dilemma?

So someone (*cough* Derwent) invented something so simple, its much easier for me to get the best point on my pencils, time after time. It's called the Derwent sharpening stand. You can buy it separately, but it's most often sold with a craft knife.

I have yet to find another like it on the market, and I've been looking! If it appears I'm only plugging "Derwent", its because its the only one I've seen available commercially. And because of the Australia Day, public holiday recently, I had to wait four extra days for my stand to arrive in the post.

If you're interested, here's are a few places I've seen it being sold online in Australia:

Larry Post- stand and knife set
Art Online - stand and knife set
Artistic Den - stand only but free postage no matter how many items are purchased

I've bought items from all the places above, and found them to arrive in good condition, without any need to contact them back with complaints. I'm not paid to put up the links above, I just spent a lot of time looking for places I could buy art supplies from online and these ones I've had good experiences with,


So does the sharpening stand work or not? I'll let you be the judge with one of my Mont Marte charcoal pencils, not to be confused with my Derwent ones.

As a comparison, look at what my pencil sharpener did. You can see its cracked the lead inside the pencil, and when the wood resisted the sharpener, it also broke a large chunk of wood off and split it down the length of the pencil. I won't sharpen this one for this tutorial (its too damaged) but I'll use the white one in the upper image instead.

This is what it looked like after using the razor and sharpening stand. You need to be patient sharpening your pencils, its not achieved in twenty-seconds like you may be lucky doing with a sharpener. Because it gives more control, it only making the cuts which are necessary and is much kinder on the wood and lead. I used this rather roughly afterwards, with no snapping lead as I had experienced previously.


I tried sharpening my Mont Marte pencils with just a razor, but without the stand keeping the pencil at the perfect angle, allowing me to be gentler with my cuts - and the buffer to press the lead up against, I found the pressure placed on the lead just made it crack also. So the longevity of my pencils, even the cheapies, are much more inclined to go the distance with this new sharpening stand.

Here is a quick video tutorial if you wanted to see one in action too...

I hope this helps others with their sharpening dilemmas. I'm very happy to have far better control over the sharpening process, and thus being kinder on my pencils.