Review: Worther Shorty Mechanical Pencil

My friend Maybelline from OnFountainPens.com lent me this interesting pencil to review.

This is the Worther Shorty mechanical pencil or lead holder that's made in Germany.

As the name suggests, it's quite a short pencil at only 10.5cm in length.

The body is made of plastic except for the metal clamp that grips the lead. There are different colours available for the body which has a hexagonal barrel. The pencil may be short but it's not uncomfortable to hold.

The coloured leads come in little cardboard cartridges. There are 8 colours namely black, blue, pink, green, yellow, orange, red and white. Black is just the normal hard graphite.

The coloured leads are quite densely pigmented. Colours are strong. They are all quite hard with the exception of orange which is rather soft.

The colours came out strong and vivid. Most of the lead are hard as mentioned, like 2H 2B kind of hard. That affects the blending.

One thing to note is the leads are 3.15mm instead of the more common 2mm lead. So you can only buy the Worther leads to replace.

It sure is a cute mechanical pencil but in real life I find it not to be very practical.

Just for the sketch above of the hand holding the pencil, I had to swap out the leads multiple times, wasting quite a lot of time. And it's more inconvenient than using normal coloured pencils. It's best not to use it like a set of coloured pencils because it's going to be frustrating.

Another thing to note is it's said that the white lead is suitable for marking X-rays and the red lead can be used to write on glass.

I guess if you have more of these Shorty pencils, then it makes more sense to create a multi-coloured piece of artwork.

Video review

Covers the same points as mentioned above.

Availability

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Search Jackson's Art (UK) and Dick Blick Art Materials (US).