Krita Pencil Leads

PENCILS have a somewhat peculiar behavior. The hardness of the pencil limits how dark the stroke can get; if you draw successive strokes with a HB pencil, it will never get totally dark, due to the pencils hardness. To make the area darker, you will have to pick up one with a softer lead, such as a 2B pencil. This natural limitation enables you to create very controlled tones.

One of the virtues of the pencil medium is how the different leads brings you greater sensitivity, so that you can, for instance, make a suble gradients between a medium-light tone and a tone slightly darker. Alas, this aspect of pencil drawing is mostly ignored in digital art; when drawing digitally, we usually don't experience the same control over the shades as we do with real-life pencils. This is why, by introducing different leads to these pencils, I hope to highten the sensitivity to the various tones.

I have recreated the behavior of real-life pencils by simply setting my pencil presets to the Darken blending mode, so it never goes darker than the current painting color. This, combined with a palette with all the pencil leads from 9H to 9B, gives a better mastery of the tones.

The included palette has a range of 19 shades of grey:

9H  8H  7H  6H  5H  4H  3H  2H  H  HB  B  2B  3B  4B  5B  6B  7B  8B  9B

Of course, this is overkill. Nobody needs 19 different pencil leads. But having a large range should enable you to experience and discover your own favorites.

Included with the bundle is a whole lot of brush nips. This is all in the public domain, so feel free to use it in your own brush creations!