Do you enjoy using pencils? I love the smell of pencils, and the different types of wood used to make them. I love the way a sharpened nib moves against a sheet of paper and that sometimes amazingly dark line of graphite…  

But I have a problem with pencils as well.

As soon as the point loses its sharpness, I get frustrated- especially while drawing because as the nib changes shape, so do the marks on the paper. I try to keep a sharpener at hand but I’d have to be sharpening all the time and I’ve used up pencils way to quickly that way for it to be useful. I also have tried mechanical pencils so the leads would maintain their size throughout their use but I always seem to have too much lead extended, or not enough- not to mention the fact that I’m always breaking the thin leads….

If you are a pencil person, how do you work through these issues? Am I missing something? Because I’ve got more than a few pencils in my arsenal and I’d sure love to be using them!