Fact, Legend and Mythology for the Artist
Some of my earliest childhood memories involved a pencil ... I could be distracted for hours on end with sheet of paper and a pencil - something I'm sure my folks took advantage of to help maintain their sanity.
The pencil, as we know it today, has only been around for a couple of centuries but the stylus dates all the way back to the Roman Empire. The sylus is a sharp, metal rod that was used to scratch marks into wax coated tablets - it also doubled as a weapon if you needed a sharp instrument to silence a member of the senate ... wait - we will save that story for another time.
I'll end this chapter with an interesting fact: Graphite is a form of pure carbon and is one of the softest solids known ... change the atomic structure of that pure carbon and it can become a diamond - one of the hardest solids known.
Some of my earliest childhood memories involved a pencil ... I could be distracted for hours on end with sheet of paper and a pencil - something I'm sure my folks took advantage of to help maintain their sanity.
The pencil, as we know it today, has only been around for a couple of centuries but the stylus dates all the way back to the Roman Empire. The sylus is a sharp, metal rod that was used to scratch marks into wax coated tablets - it also doubled as a weapon if you needed a sharp instrument to silence a member of the senate ... wait - we will save that story for another time.
I'll end this chapter with an interesting fact: Graphite is a form of pure carbon and is one of the softest solids known ... change the atomic structure of that pure carbon and it can become a diamond - one of the hardest solids known.
