I have a beautiful, wooden pencil box. It has 4 divider compartments, so I have all the B's in one; all the H's in one, erasers and small pencil sharpener in one, and graphite sticks in one.

The trouble is, the wood of most of the pencils is painted the same, as they are the same brand. At the end is the number (HB, 4B, etc etc) I have to poke through my pencils to find the one I need each time I change pencils.

The best I've done so far is line them up in order on my drawing table. This is real makeshift. Does anyone have a better system?

I guess I've eliminated the problem by reducing the number of pencils that I use.

For 99% of my drawings I use 3 or 4 pencils at most. F or H, HB, 2B and 6B for darks. I also use mechanical pencils with varying width leads and softnesses. The only wood cased pencils I use are 6B.

If you want the full range of pencils available to you, I'd suggest that you simply take out the ones that you will use for your drawing and either keep them in your hand or put them in a holder in front of you. That way you don't have to sift through all your pencils to find what you need.

I also use wooden pencils that are painted the same color, so I know what you mean when you say they are hard to find. The trick I did was to cut thin strips of blank white mailing labels into 1/4" wide by 1" long. I then used a dark black marker to write the pencil type on each one..HB, 2H, etc.. I wrapped the sticker around the top of each pencil and got an old jar. I filled the bottom of the jar with a crumpled up paper towel and placed all of the pencils tip side down into the jar. I use the towel at the bottom so I won't break the tips of the pencils.
My pencil set came with a little chart that shows the tones of each type of pencil when applied to paper. I taped that on the front of the jar for reference. Hope this helps![attachmentid=9165]

Since you've already got them divided by B's, H's etc in the box.. I would assign a different color to each number - say red for the 2's, green for the 4's, and so on. Then paint a stripe around the bottom of each pencil. That way, when you see the green-bottomed pencil in the "B" compartment, you know it is your 4B pencil

I have been using a color code, so that's not a bad suggestion. As a few of you know, I am a science geek in RL. I have been doing a lot of my artwork with mechanical pencils lately: I have 2B, HB, and 2H ones. I deliberately bought a blue one (short or "hard" wavelength) for 2H, a white one ("neutral") for HB and a red one (long or "soft" wavelength) for 2B. This makes perfect sense to me and didn't require learning a color code.