The cedar is Californian, the graphite Japanese. A Blackwing crosses the Pacific as lumber, picks up its core and lacquer outside Tokyo, and comes home to Stockton to be tipped — about 5,000 miles each way, for a pencil.

Blackwing’s first in-depth process film, out in July 2026, runs 8:46 across three factories. It opens in Kofu: powdered graphite and clay mixed, rolled, mixed again with water into a paste, then extruded twice: into fat logs, then into strands thin enough to spool.

The grade is decided right there, in the ratio. Softer pencils get more graphite, firmer ones more clay. That is why a softer pencil is also a darker one, and it is the difference between the firm 602, the balanced Pearl, the soft Matte and the extra-firm Natural.

Then it turns into ceramics. The cores dry in slowly rotating canisters so they don’t fuse together, then bake in carbon-lined boxes at 1,000°C. Out of the oven comes the step that matters: a hot wax soak. A Blackwing core is graphite, clay and wax, and the wax goes in last — that, not the graphite, is the smoothness.

The wood half is quieter. Slats of incense cedar — grown in California and Oregon, chosen for a straight grain that sharpens evenly — run through a grooving machine, take a thin layer of glue and the graphite, then a second slat on top. The clamped “sandwiches” dry, get shaped one side at a time into hexagons, then checked so every core sits centred. Each yields eight pencils. Then paint: a coat, a slow lap around a drying carousel, another coat — ten or more times for some designs — and a gold imprint set with heat and pressure alone.

Only the ending happens in America. In Stockton the pencils are hand-loaded into what Blackwing calls its one-of-a-kind machine, which joins each to its signature flat rectangular ferrule. That ferrule is a holder, not a crimp: the eraser rides in a clip you pull from its nest to push it up as it wears, or swap it. Then hand inspection, twelve to a box.

One thing the film leaves out. This is Blackwing’s own marketing, and it never says the brand is a revival. Eberhard Faber introduced the 602 in the 1930s and discontinued it in 1998, after which single pencils fetched $40 on eBay. California Cedar Products — a Stockton lumber company, the world’s leading supplier of pencil slats — bought the name in 2008 and relaunched it in 2010. The ferrule and the slogan are inherited; the company is not. Which answers the geography: the cedar is Californian because the owner mills it.