Today I'm going to demonstrate two things. One is the way that I prefer to hold a pencil when I'm drawing. And two is how to sharpen your pencil in this fashion where you've exposed a firm one of the wood and made a nice, low sloping angle towards the tip. And exposing a little bit more of the lid than is typical with a store bought or regular pencil sharpener like that. Sharpeners tend to make a point that looks like this. It's not as flexible as this one here. And why am I saying that? Well, with this pencil here with the extra exposed lid, if I'm and I'm holding it like this for a reason, I can make marks by just moving my hand, pushing it around in different directions like so, make a nice line with that. But if I want to get in there and do some really quick shading, maybe I need to react to something expressively or I'm working from life and I want to rough something in very, very quickly. I can just tilt the pencil on its side and cover a fair monetary at once. It also allows me to, I feel like I'm almost carving into the paper with this. Whereas this pencil here that just has the regular small point, I can do a little bit of shading on the side, I can't, you know, it doesn't work quite the same way. And the reason that I like to hold the pencil in my hand this way is you probably noticed how easy it is for me to angle the pencil down all the way to the paper to get those wide strokes. Whereas if I was holding, either one of these pencils, but if I was holding it like this, like I would when I'm typically, when I'm writing, I can do some mark making, in fact, you know, I could do some quite nice shading, but if I by hatching, but if I wanted to get in there and do a lot of wide shading, you can see it's, I can't really do it as well. So now I'm going to show you the method of sharpening that pencil to get that preferred long piece of lead and the nice tapered pencil end. So I'm going to pick up a recently bought pencil. It has a point that looks like it was sharpened in a regular old pencil sharpener. And I'm going to use a wide blade knife, utility knife for pencil sharpening for whatever reason. This is one of my favorite tools to use. You could also use an Ulfenei for sometimes they come in yellow where you extend the blade out. And as you use it up, you can snap the blades off. These are really helpful. I prefer them when they actually have a locking mechanism. This one doesn't really lock as you use it, but it still, it's got a nice weight to it. And you feel like you have a lot of control when you're holding a wide knife. Using an exacto blade, that could work as well, but they're so narrow that in my case, usually the handle is about the same diameter as a pencil. In my case, I just feel like I don't have as much control trying to shave off the wood without damaging the lead or having it slip and cut my finger. So I do tend to prefer the wide ones. Another tool that's going to come in handy at the end is this little pad of fine sandpaper. You don't have to buy one of these from an art supplies store. You can buy just regular sheet of fine sand paper from ArtWirster if you prefer. So how do I trim off the wood? Alright. So first of all, I hold the pencil that needs to be sharpened in my other hand. My right hand, my dominant hand, my left is not. So I'm going to stabilize the pencil with my left hand control blade with my right. And you'll notice that I have my forefinger toward the end of the pencil, but it doesn't go all the way to the end. I don't want to be endangered of cutting myself. And I tend to cut with the knife on a very low angle. So it just barely cuts off any material in one go. I just keep turning the pencil around and shave off little bits. And you'll notice from from the video that you'll probably see that I'm actually more pushing the knife with my left thumb and guiding it with my hand. I'm not so much moving the blade as moving the pencil. It's a little bit of both. And it sounds like I'm peeling carrots. It always reminds me of that. Well, this particular pencil has a very, very brittle wood. So the first few times you do this, you might snap the lead a couple of times. So just take your time. Try to keep the angle low. So you can see the angle that I'm working out of the camera will focus. There you go. So I'm just shaving off little bits of a time. I don't want to go too quickly. The other two reasons. One, you don't want to cut yourself too. You don't want to drop the pencil or break the lead. Working the pencil by the way is a really bad idea, especially onto a hard surface, like the floor, because the lead inside the pencil will break. And then when you go to sharpen it, like I'm doing, the lead will just fall out at the end. It's very frustrating. So I'm getting there. This woods fighting me a little bit. So I have a little bit to a little bit uneven here and there, but that's okay. I'll just fix it up a little bit. I want it to have a fairly smooth paper in here. So that's not too bad. I'll hold this up and you can see the results. So it could use a little bit of smoothing out though, and that's what the sandpaper is for. It's mostly for the lead itself, or it's actually graphite not lead. We call the pencils used to be made with lead, but it's been a long time since they have been. But the term has just lingered on forever. So there's my freshly sharpened pencil. Let's see how it works. Now this one, I didn't even check what it is. It feels like an age pencil. It is. It's a five age. It's quite a hard pencil. So if you want to make it a dark tone, you have to push pretty hard. It's amazing. I'm not snapping that little lead when I'm pushing so hard, but you'll figure it out as you do it. So two lessons you learn today. One is the benefit of holding the pencil on the inside of your hand and how flexible and great with shading that can be. And the other is how to sharpen your pencil to take advantage of a longer length of lead being exposed to get those large areas of shading very quickly.