Chris LaPorte- 2010 ArtPrize Winner!

Yesterday in Grand Rapids, Michigan, Chris LaPorte became a rich man. Chris was the winner of the 2010 ArtPrize contest. Chris' 28-foot wide drawing of a group of 1921 American officers helped him bring in a $250,000 prize. Over 450,000 people voted over the past couple of weeks to determine the winner. Chris must have an unbelievable amount of passion to draw with the amount of detail that he did. This drawing took him around 800 hours to complete! Imagine sitting down for over a month straight with a few graphite pencils and creating this amazing and historic artwork. It is breathtaking.

"Drawing is always cool--no matter what your age or background," stated Chris (www.artprize.org, 2010). That is the complete truth. Although not everyone has the talent that Chris has, it can still be extremely enjoyable to sit down and turn a plain piece of paper into a masterpiece. The time and effort that was put into this artwork is truly amazing. Our congratulations goes out to Chris for his special feat.

Pencils.com 'Featured Artist' Brian Duey also competed in ArtPrize 2010. His drawing of a broken Jack Daniels bottle looks like it could be a photo. Brian has the talent and know-how to masterfully create an object as simple as a bottle and make people turn their heads. We look forward to many more interesting drawings from Brian in the future.

I am convinced that Armin Mersmann's drawing is nothing more than a photograph of a tree. The amount of tiny branches that he drew is just crazy! He made every last portion of this drawing look as if I can actually touch the tree. Very realistic!

Here at pencils.com we would like to commend everyone that entered ArtPrize 2010. Pencil art continues to maintain its popularity even as we move into a more and more technologically driven era. Graphite pencil realism especially is acquiring more followers as time passes. We thank everyone for participating and we hope that we can continue to view these amazing pieces of art in the future.

Breast Cancer Awareness Month

October is Breast Cancer Awareness Month. About 1 in 8 women in the United States (between 12% and 13%) will develop invasive breast cancer over the course of her lifetime. In 2010, an estimated 207,090 new cases of invasive breast cancer are expected to be diagnosed in women in the U.S., along with 54,010 new cases of non-invasive breast cancer. Breast cancer also occurs in men (at a much lower rate). Less than 1% of new breast cancer cases are diagnosed in men (Statistics retrieved from www.breastcancer.org, 2010).

Obviously, breast cancer is a problem that plagues people all over the world. The death rate has decreased every year since 1991. We have been making strides for nearly 2 decades and hopefully, with enough hard work and determination, we can completely cure breast cancer.

Here at pencils.com, we are dedicated to helping breast cancer research. We now have two models of breast cancer pencils available. "Fight Like a Girl, Knock out Breast Cancer" and "Erase Breast Cancer" are the two slogans on our pencils. A percentage of the proceeds made from the sales of these pencils will go towards Breast Cancer Research. These pencils are being offered in 12-packs or in bulk (144 pencils).

Please do your part and help the cause, purchase your breast cancer pencils today.

Blackwing Project: Take 1

Here at Pencils.com we are pleased to introduce Take 1 of our newly established Blackwing Project. The Blackwing Project is a new collaboration with artists, writers, musicians and fans of the Blackwing pencil to share creative inspiration enabled by or associated with our new Palomino Blackwing pencil. The goal is to produce a series of fun visuals and videos demonstrating art, music, photography, video content, prose and/or poetry associated with the Blackwing pencil.

Take 1 is more properly titled "The Blackwing is Back" and is just an initial effort I put together with my own limited skills in PowerPoint and Movie Maker with some of artistic contributions we have available today from several of our devoted fans (see credits & links below). I hope you enjoy this first effort which is more of a Palomino Blackwing advertisement focused on promoting the fact that we've now launched sales, some of the most popular uses of the pencils, a few of the famous Blackwing users throughout time and that the product is available for purchase at the Pencils.com store. Future editions will be much more completely devoted to artistic creativity of our Palomino Blackwing fans. Special thanks to the following artistic and photographic contributors:

Diane Wright, Pencils.com Featured Artist

Lisa Laughy, Ninth Wave Designs

John Celestri, Grace Animation Studios

Sean Malone, The Blackwing Pages

Joey Gilbreath, art student

And particularly to my friend and talented musician Christian Tamburr and the CT Trio for sharing his original composition "Blues for Chu" and his great talent on the vibes. I'm just sorry we didn't have enough content to support playing the whole number in this video.

The Blackwing Project videos will be broadcast through our new Pencilscom YouTube Channel as well as our Pencils.com 'What's New' blog, The Pencil Page on Facebook, our Twitter feed, etc. Full creative credit for contributions of each individual will be acknowledged with appropriate links to artist websites where appropriate. If you are interested in participating in the Blackwing Project and gaining a broader audience for your work please contact us by e-mail at blackwingproject@pencils.com to share your interest, ideas and creative contributions.

Reviving the Blackwing: First Day Sales Update

First of all I want to express my personal appreciation to all of you who have shown interest in the new Palomino Blackwing thus far and are now supporting us with your orders on our first day of this new product sales on Pencils.com. We also received a nice bit of publicity today from the Boston Globe, in the multiple forms of an article as well as a video post from Globe Columnist Alex Beam.

The sweet music to our ears is that we are well ahead of the inital projections I had made for the opening 24-48 hours. At this point we essentially met my initial forecast for that period within the first 12 hours of sales. Our small Pencils.com team in our home office is busy focusing on completing and shipping as many of these orders as we can accomplish today since we want to do our best to maintain our normally high standard of prompt shipments. I appreciate the patience of some of you who will have to wait until Monday or Tuesday for our shipments to go out as we just won't be able to get all the orders out today.

I need to especially thank our core Pencils.com team Paula, Dave, Joey and Philip for all thier hard work in preparing for the Palomino Blackwing launch. As well as Vincent for his assistance on the supply side with both our Japanese producer and our sales agent team in Tokyo. Without this groups dedicated and collective commitment we would never have been able to experience such a strong initial launch today.

I fully expect the initial rush of orders to taper off after a day or so. However, it's clear we'll be needing to make an additional expedited airshipment from the balance of our intial production run presently being completed in Japan. Otherwise we will not make it through the approximate 45-60 days from now we'll have to wait for the main portion of the shipment to come over the water as we're probably 2-3 weeks away from a ship date from Japan on the balance of the production. Should we end up short of product for a few days to a week we will be notifying any of those with backorders of a projected ship date. Note that we have limited order sizes through the initial lauch period to try to spread around what we have to as many new customers as possible.

Thanks again for everyone's support. I very much hope you enjoy your new Palomino Blackwings and this day will become a bellwether of good things to come for the future of the the Blackwing.

9/30- 'Just Because' SALE!

50% off all Spangle 24-packs today only on pencils.com! Choose from a wide range of pencils and get them for half price! Be sure to check in on Thursdays for our 'Just Because' sales because we will have great savings on school and art supplies...Enter Promotional Code: SPANGLE50 at checkout to receive your discount.

German Pencil Wars

There is an interesting story today in the Wall Street Journal about the "pencil wars" between two historic German companys in our industry. Who's the oldest? Who's the best? Who's the most innovative? Interviews of Count Anton (Toni) Faber-Castel and Axel Marx current MD from Staedtler. I wrote a related post a few years ago about all the pencil company's vying for the title of having produced the biggest pencil in the world. All in good fun.

It's nice to see some mainstream press coverage on the pencil business. Coincidentally, I was just interviewed yesterday by a writer from the Boston Globe who is working on a story about our relaunch of the Blackwing pencil.

New Product Update

We are pleased to inform you that the new Palomino Blackwing will officially be available for purchase exclusively at Pencils.com on Friday, October 1st. If you are a registered user/customer at Pencils.com you will be receiving the first of our new Monthly Newsletters early that morning with a direct link to the Palomino Blackwing store items on our site. (note: If you have previously opted out of our e-mail notifications from this list then you will not receive the e-mail Newsletter. Effective Friday, the Palomino Blackwing pencils will also be easily found under both Palomino and Blackwing brand names within the Store Shop by Brand option. We thank you for your patience as we’ve worked to accelerate availability of this product over the past few weeks versus our original plans. For more information about the development of this product and reviews from other blogs visit our Blackwing Coming Soon page for relevant links.

We also have several additional pencils and related drawing supplies scheduled for launch on Pencils.com in the coming month or two. So here’s a brief update on what else is coming your way.

First up, as October is National Breast Cancer Awareness Month we are introducing two new motivational pencils with the slogans “Knock out Breast Cancer” and “Erase Breast Cancer”. These will be available in a 12 count pack (6 each slogan) or in Bulk quantities (144 pencils per slogan) and are ideal for any needs you may have in your own local community Breast Cancer awareness projects this year. Pencils.com will be donating a portion of the proceeds from these pencils to Breast Cancer research as well as participating in a local Breast Cancer awareness event donating significant quantities of pencils to Thunder Goes Pink V in our home community of Stockton, CA. We are proud to help the cause and maybe, one pencil at a time, we can help find a cure for Breast Cancer. These will be available for purchase beginning Monday October 4th.

We are also adding a new specialty carpenter pencil sharpener selection courtesy of General’s. This unique sharpener provides a quick and easy means of producing a uniform flat and square point similar to sharpening with a knife along each of the pencil’s four edges.

By mid-October we will be adding several new ‘Green’ products. Green Apple is an Earth friendly brand that offers quality natural finish cedar pencils made from all natural and/or recycled and reclaimed materials. We will initially be adding a 10-count ergonomic triangular #2 pencils made from finger-jointed reclaimed wood as well as their 4-count Jumbo Highlighter dry text pencils. Our first text liner pencil we’ll offer on the site. At the same time we’ll be adding a range of Banana Paper notebooks and sketchbooks, which are environmentally friendly tree-free, acid-free, natural paper and paper products. The paper used in these products is made from 80% post-consumer waste fiber and 20% banana leaf fibers.

Finally, coming toward the end of November we will be expanding further our Palomino orange graphite pencil selection with addition of 4B and 6B grades. These offer a super smooth and extra rich and dark texture to extend from our current 2B limit in Palomino as well as the new Palomino Blackwing pencil.

This is just the beginning of a growing mix of pencils and brands we’ll be offering on Pencils.com as we progress towards the holiday season and on into the New Year. Stay tuned for more details on each product as they are made available in the coming months.