Our Blackwing Vol. 7 pencil is a tribute to animation and how it revolutionized the way we tell and view stories.

From the earliest recorded cave paintings in France dating back over 30,000 years to becoming a sacred Saturday morning ritual across TV screens, drawing has been a key way for us to communicate with one another and with the world around us. Animation has been used for education and entertainment in many forms from the Magic Lantern used in the 16th century to mastering computer-generated imagery in the 21st.

Animation itself operates as an optical illusion that uses a series of images shown in quick succession that tricks our brains into seeing a continuous motion picture. The human eye can only process up to 12 individual frames per second. The earliest analog animation devices explored different ways to create this illusion.

The Blackwing Vol. 7 is inspired by this analog evolution in storytelling and utilizes an animation trick called Picket-Fence or Barrier-Grid popularized in the 19th and 20th century. This animation-type is created by taking illustrated frames and turning them into an interlaced pattern that looks like a series of lines when seen with the naked eye, but turns into an animated design when viewed with a striped overlay.

Each set of Blackwing Vol. 7 pencils comes with six unique designs. When side by side and matched with the corresponding colored dots, they form a 7-frame animation that can be seen using the included Picket-Fence viewfinder.

1. Gather the six different Blackwing 7 pencils, all with a different dot pattern printed on the pencil.
2. Place the Vol. 7 pencil with the single ORANGE dot with the Blackwing 7 imprint facing up.
3. Match the pencil with the ORANGE and RED dot with the ORANGE dot of the pencil above it.
4. Match the RED dot with the pencil that has the RED and BLUE dot on it.
5. Match the BLUE dot with the pencil that has the BLUE and PURPLE dot printed on it.
6. Match the PURPLE dot with the pencil with the PURPLE and BROWN dot on it.
7. Finally, match the BROWN dot with pencil with the single BROWN dot to complete the sequence.
8. Now, take the Picket-Fence Viewfinder and place it on top of the six pencils.
9. Lastly, slowly slide the viewer from left to right to view the animation

You should now be able to see a 7-frame running animation of Chuck Jones’ iconic Wile E. Coyote like the one pictured below.