If you find that your sharpenings are breaking off into small, jagged shards then your blade will probably need replacing. It’s easier to sharpen a high volume of pencils with a crank sharpener, however there is still some manual work involved to turn the crank. This sharpening technique is particularly popular for sharpening soft leads like pastel and charcoal pencils. You can also mount most of our models onto a desk, giving them a bit more stability during sharpening. Essentially you’ll need to brace the pencil in your non-dominant hand and gently run the sharp edge of the blade away from you down the lead of the pencil.

Manual crank sharpeners, also sometimes referred to as helical sharpeners, have a completely different sharpening mechanism to pencil sharpeners with a single blade. Clutch Pencils work similarly to a mechanical pencil, but have a thick lead more like that of a standard pencil.

For canister sharpeners the only other maintainance will be making sure that you empty the removable bin regularly. This barrel moves around your pencil when you turn the crank, griding against pencil to remove the wood casing and sharpen the tip to a fine point.

However, there are single hole sharpeners that have a larger hole suitable for jumbo pencils (like the M+R Giant Pencil Sharpener) or for uniquely shaped pencils (like the Lyra Groove Sharpeners). However, they are still more bulky than a standard sharpener and aren’t exactly what most artists would consider to be ‘portable’. They’re popular with artists taking classes or drawing on the go as the reservoir means you don’t need to carry an extra container to hold your waste.

These sharpeners require very little in the way of manual work – all you need to do is insert your pencil and let the machine do the rest. The world’s largest coloring pencil is located in the UK at the Derwent Pencil Museum which opened in 1981. If you work with these materials you’ll probably find that most standard sharpeners are too harsh and will break their soft lead.

Coloured pencils contain waxes and oils that will gunk up blades much quicker than graphite, pastel and charcoal. Read below to see a comparison of all our sharpeners and it should help you find the perfect sharpener for you. After all, pencils can be expensive and you don’t want a poor sharpener to chew up the wood and damage the leads. It may not be a world record holder but the folks at Casey Illinois are certainly proud of their giant size pencil.

If you’re using larger or smaller than standard pencils you might need to get a sharpener with a different size hole. Our range of sharpeners can be split broadly into four categories: simple manual sharpeners, reservoir sharpeners, crank sharpeners, electric sharpeners and other sharpening accessories.