General Pencil Company Carbon Sketch Pencils & Sharpener

Great blacks and not so messy as expected. I use these with graphites as well as General's 557 charcoals. The sharpener that General's provides is better than most sharpeners...less breakage.

on General's Carbon Sketch 595 - these might very well be my favorites, and the darkest pencil in my arsenal.They go on nice and smooth, I use Bristol as the paper of choice.I sympathize with the folks who have a hard time sharpening them without breaking. I do not use a standardsharpener. I don't believe I could make that work. Instead as in the Pic, I use a Box cutter... and that very slowly holding my index finger under the Charcoal. That always seems to work with the notable exception of my soft Primo Pencils. Try as I might the softest one I find nearly impossible to sharpen.I like these pencils and I can recommend them.

I guess someone at the warehouse desperately needed a pencil sharpener. Because the product package was carefully opened at the top in order to remove the included pencil sharpener, not that I really needed it. But still I expect to receive my orders not being tampered with. The Generals carbon pencils themselves are great. 5 stars otherwise.

The best pencil to draw on top of a lots of pastel layers. Better than any other professional charcoal pencil.

When I received the package there was charcoal all over the inside the pencil was broken at the top. Not a huge deal but just know it’ll be a little messy when you open it

Blackest pencil for drawing, which I really needed to get shading accurate.

The pre-sharpened pencil right out of the package was the best carbon pencil I've ever tried. Not only the darkest, but by far the smoothest in it's application. Unfortunately, the first time I needed to sharpen this pencil, It became quite clear that this was an impossible feat. Any kind of pencil sharpener, including the one that came with it, is completely out of the question. This wasn't a concern because I sharpen almost all of my pencils with an x-acto bladed craft knife. Even this method, no matter how carefully and gracefully attempted, could remove the wood casing/glue to a usable level without the carbon lead breaking or crumbling into bits. I may have gotten a set of damaged pencils with the carbon already broken inside the casing, but all I could do was salvage all the little bits to use like an extra-mini charcoal stick or crush into a powder. Adding more binder/graphite would ruin the great quality so the only solution I can think of is to lessen the amount of glue/adhesive to the wood casing and make the package more secure.

Good pencils, use them for students who can’t press hard enough on paper