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While at the Patchings Art Festival in June 2014, I had the great pleasure of meeting with Leah Lister, Marketing Manager of The Cumberland Pencil Co Ltd, who manufacture Derwent Artists Pencils. I grabbed the opportunity to interview her and Leah shared some interesting insights and background to Derwent, and the huge range of products that they make.

Derwent Pencils background

The first recorded factory manufacturing pencils was back in 1832 in Keswick, and in 2008 the Derwent Pencil factory moved to it to new state-of-the-art facilities in LillyHall in Cumbria.

Derwent now provide over 1000 different colour/product combinations from their LillyHall factory, and it’s now the UK’s only pencil maker.

Derwent Pencils combines traditional pencil making skills, perfected by generations of local craftsmen, with state of the art manufacturing techniques. They pioneered many of the processes now in common use and their reputation for quality and consistency is unsurpassed in the art materials world.

Connect with Derwent Pencils

How Derwent Pencils are made

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