When Palomino relaunched the infamous Blacking 602 Pencil, we decided to celebrate with a year long celebration of the pencil called the Blacking Experience.
The campaign started with banner ads and an exclusive social media campaign fueled by Klout, It then ended with a week long exhibit and party celebrating the history of the pencil at The Art Directors Club in NYC.
The event traveled to Los Angeles where it was showcased at the Chuck Jones Experience Center, San Francisco and was even included as part of the Chuck Jones exhibit at the Circus Circus Hotel in Las Vegas.
Originally made by Eberhard Faber, production of Blackwing 602 pencils ceased in 1998, and writers, animators, and Blackwing fans everywhere had to scramble to get them. after buying up all of the unused stock, fans began paying upwards of $40 for a single Blackwing pencil on sites like ebay. The pencil’s scarcity and the stories of its soft, smooth graphite caused its legend to grow, and people began searching for a worthy successor.
The 60 foot timeline of The History of The Pencil was a true labour of love, utilizing a custom font and hand-drawn headlines by my partner Lesli Scott and written and arranged entirely by me. For those curious about the process...A timeline, 6' x 60', using a custom font and hand sketched letters drawn with the Blackwing pencil of course.
From the Brochure
"IN AN AGE FILLED WITH TOUCH SCREEN, TABLETS, SMARTPHONES AND COMPUTERS, WRITING, DRAWING AND CREATING WITH A PENCIL IS A DELIBERATE CHOICE."
From the Brochure
"Blackwing pencils are considered by many to be among the very best in the world. If this strikes you as an overstatement, consider this: from Stephen Sondheim to Chuck Jones, some of the greatest creative thinkers of our time have chosen these pencils above all others. John Steinbeck went through 60 of them in a day."
This visual history of the famous Blackwing pencil is the first of its kind using only a pencil. It played on loop in the events Pencil Sharpening Lounge.
From the Brochure
"BLACKwING PENCILS ARE TRULY SPECIAL PENCILS AND, AS A SIXTH GENERATION PENCIL COMPANY, PALOMINO COUD NOT WAIT TO CREATE A NEW GENERATION OF BLACKWING ARTISTS, WRITERS, MUSICIANS, AND CREATIVES. THAT IS WHY WE DECIDED TO HOST THE BLACKWING EXPERIENCE, WHERE ANYONE CAN BECOME AN ARTIST AND CELEBRATE THE HISTORY OF PENCILS AND THE PEOPLE WHO USE THEM. "
A party celebrating the pencil sounds kind of absurd. So to announce it we teamed up with comedian David Reese of Artisanal Pencil Sharpening fame to create a viral video that begged the question..."Is this for real?" It was a top 5 reddit post for 3 weeks straight and still solicits comments 3 years later.