Lead Thickness

Like the pen tips, the pencil lead can also have a certain look on your drawing. Let's say you want to start off with a rough sketch and you don't want your lines to be too dark so you can erase easily. Your best choice for a mechanical pencil would be a 0.3 or a 0.5 pencil and lead. The lead is very thin and makes it much easier to create thin and light lines. On the other hand, the 0.9 and 0.7 lead can be much more thick and darker for your finished drawings. For people who use wooden pencils, the lightest you can go is a 10H, and the darkest you can go is a 10B. There is a large selection of pencils with lighter and darker lead, depending on the hardness of the pencil you like to draw in.

There is always the option to just press with more force or less force with the pencil that you have now, but you might not get the same outcome if you would have used the pencil meant for that kind of hardness. The pencils are honestly not that cheap. You can get a nice set of pencils 20-25 pencils and other art materials for about 20 dollars. That's a pretty good deal for all of those art pencils with some erasers and pens for 20 dollars. The set that I bought was probably 15 dollars for 5 pencils. That's all the basics of pencils and pencil lead.