 Hey there, it's Sandy and today I'm going to tell you why I have so many color pencil sharpeners and use them all the time For a long time. I used exclusively the bow stitch quiet sharp and I've talked about that here on the channel And here's the reason why This thing knows when to stop eating your pencil and that was important to me I went through a lot of sharpeners that just would keep eating the pencil and eating the pencil and eating the pencil And so this one I loved a lot of people said it's too big and too noisy, but there you go. It's just what it is However, there were some instances when that was not sharp enough. So I have a bunch of handhelds and This one is an old handheld. You could hear it hardly made any noise. Listen to this guy That is what a sharp blade sounds like So if yours is not making the same noise it used to and it's kind of crunching your pencils in weird ways That could be why so get yourself a new one. They're really cheap. Go ahead and get one and This is my afmat that I also introduced recently There are a number of different brands that have this kind of a pencil sharpener But it gives you a really long point and for some people they get really jealous of the long point They love it but look at how not sharp that long point is compared to the quiet sharp and Compared to what you can get when you use that and held Well, this point doesn't go very well into a handheld because it's not the same shape To sharpen that they give you a tiny rectangle of sandpaper and It's very tiny and it's a little awkward to be opening your pencil sharpener all the time In order to use that and I suddenly had the brilliant idea to use another tool that's been here in the studio forever and It is a stump sander And I call it a stump sander, but it's actually just a sandpaper block You could use a sheet of sandpaper make your own stump sander. I've made my own before and Use that for your pencils It's really an easy thing to do It's less work than getting out the inside of the pencil sharpener and you can sharpen just that tip It does make a little awkward look for it. It doesn't Sharpen the entire long pencil. It just sharpens the very tip, but that's really all you need You don't need the entire thing to be in that that needle shape You just need the tip to be really sharp now also I don't sharpen it that sharp for absolutely everything on this rabbit drawing. I did not have it that sharp for the whole thing I just sharpened it for these fine details in the white fur where I'm adding Two grays and a black in order to create that texture So use it exclusively for Those kind of details don't put yourself through getting that kind of a needle sharp pencil point Because you don't really need that the rest of the blending here was done with blending stumps and a brush and all kinds of things and Gamsol That didn't require the fine detail of a very very sharp pencil So that's my tip for you for today, it's not like super rocket science, but I thought since it's something that I Realized all of a sudden in the last couple months Maybe I should share that and maybe that would help somebody else to get a really sharp pencil This has been rabbit week of course here on YouTube It's been rabbit week all over social and on my blog today I've compiled everything there so you can go get links to anything that you might have missed because I post in crazy places So you want to go see that there's also a brand new rabbit on the art dash classes calm home page And you can go play with that one and see all the new content that I've put on the front page Because I finally got around to redesigning it. Also, there is a new color pencil drawing class and this one is a rabbit Yeah, you knew it was coming a rabbit It's a level five class. So it's an advanced class and Not only do you learn how to do the textures of the rabbit you'll learn how to add leaves to a picture and How to add grasses to the front how to make the rocks look like they're going back into the distance and in shadows And it's taught in polychromos with one Prismacolor pencil So you'll learn about why that is because the different pencils have different properties that work in different ways Lots to learn there. I hope you have an excellent weekend ahead. I'll be back with a new theme for next week I think you're gonna really like that one and I'll see you then take care. Bye guys