David Thomas Rees

About
best-known work combines bland clip art with outrageous "trash talk" to incongruous effect. The comic strips have achieved wide popularity and some controversy.

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davidreespencil785 karma

Please up-point-vote this response, guys, as it will answer a lot of people's questions: In 2010 I was broke (I had quit cartooning) so I got a job working for the U.S. Census. On the first day of staff training, we were told to sharpen our #2 pencils using a government-issued single-blade pocket sharpener. While sharpening my pencil, I thought, "I wonder if I could get paid to sharpen pencils?" So I started ArtisanalPencilSharpening.com with the help of some friends (web designer, photographer, etc.) The whole thing was kind of a challenge to myself: Take something you enjoy doing and convince people they should pay you to do it. In order for this project to work, it had to take the form of an ACTUAL pencil sharpening business, not just a silly web site for a non-existent business.

davidreespencil716 karma

Burn your house to the ground, collect the insurance money, move to a new state, and fail to tell your mother.

davidreespencil429 karma

I don't fuck with those pencils. Throw them in a can, for they are garbage.

davidreespencil353 karma

Yes! In fact, the Pencil Museum in Cumberland (UK) has the oldest known pencil in its collection; you can see its similarity to a carpenter pencil: https://uwaterloo.ca/earth-sciences-museum/sites/ca.earth-sciences-museum/files/uploads/images/aelteste.jpg

davidreespencil353 karma

I'm not a fan of mechanical pencils.

davidreespencil346 karma

I like pens. I rarely use pencils, actually -- as a left-handed person, they smudge the side of my writing hand.

davidreespencil339 karma

Yes, I agree. I was trying to make a "LOL," as the obfuscatory properties of English sometimes result in unexpected delights.

davidreespencil333 karma

Listen to yourself. C'mon.

davidreespencil314 karma

One of the pleasures of a hand-sharpened pencil (that is to say, a knife-sharpened pencil) is that there's no mistaking it for an electrically sharpened pencil. HOWEVER I recently taught a pencil-sharpening workshop at MaxFunCon and one of my students produced a hand-sharpened point that was so fine, so flawless, that it could have passed for machine-sharpened in low light. I was flabbergasted. And enraged.

davidreespencil293 karma

Interestingly, the contemporary carpenter pencil is actually the closest thing we have to the original pencil -- that is to say, a flat (rather than hexagonal or cylindrical) mark-making tool. The earliest pencils were simply pieces of graphite sandwiched between two pieces of wood. (We're talking about the mid-16th century here, which is when the first deposit of graphite was discovered in England -- the birthplace of the modern pencil.)