The main media that I work with is pencil on paper. Comparing it with painting or color pencils, the graphite is limited in colours. In fact you have only one colour: black (or more exactly a grey gamma). Beside this limitation, graphite is still fascinating. Why? Because of its simplicity, power in details… Let’s see from different points of view what the power of grey is.

First of all, according to the color theory, grey (British) or gray (American) describes the tints and shades ranging from black to white. Black and white are the result of the color mixture. There are two types of mixtures: the additive mixture (or light mixture) and the subtractive mixture (or pigment mixture) depending by the medium (light or pigment). The result of the additive mixture of the primary colors, red, green and blue is white, and the result of the mixture of cyan, magenta and yellow is black. (see the images below) www.wikipedia.org

Getting grey…

So, by mixing black with white we obtain grey. But also we can obtain grey by mixing two complementary colors: red with green, yellow with violet or blue with orange. What’s the difference between these two kinds of combinations? In the first case we obtain a neutral grey, and in the second case we obtain a colored grey. Theoretically these two types of grey are the same.

On a screen you’ll see no difference. But making a pigment mixture and with a source of light, you’ll see the differences (considering that the mixture would be a perfect one, which is hard to obtain in practice). Grey is its own complement. Consequently, grey remains grey when its color spectrum is inverted, and so has no opposite, or alternately is its own opposite.

At least since the time of the Neo-Impressionists there has been a controversy among painters about making greys. Thinking greys made from black are lifeless, some painters never allow black on their palettes. They only make greys from complements.

Certainly overusing black in a painting will make it look dirty. But neutral greys made from black and white are the same as neutral greys made from exact complements. Greys made from complements are more lively because they are incomplete mixtures. The grey is created in the eye from an incomplete mixture of one color next to another. www.multimediaarts.com

So, what do we do when we draw?
We add grey values on a white or sometimes colored paper. While in painting we can lighten the subject by adding white, in drawing* we will not do that but we’ll apply a H pencil range. These are harder and with a lower grey value. We can use the rubber to eliminate graphite and lighten things (so rubber is also a drawing instrument, not only a delete tool)
(*mention: using a mix medium (graphite with charcoal or colored pencils) we can add white color to lighten subjects, but I want to talk about the simple graphite drawing)

As you can understand now, the grey is somewhere in the middle of the color spectrum, is the result of the combination of all the primary colors, and a combination of black and white. Is everything or nothing. Is the simplification of the color spectrum. Because of this simplicity, a color spot from a grey composition will always capture the whole attention. This effect is usually present in the web design, where the screen can render higher the grey spectrum.

How do we make the grey tones with pencils?

There are 18 values named from 9H to 9B, from the lighter value which is also harder as a density (9H) to the darker value which is the softer (9B – some brands use the range till the 8B). I would also like to mention the 9B is not as dark as you would expect it to be, and this is because of the graphite texture which gives a shiny effect on the paper and reflects the light.

Don’t push the tip of the pencil on the paper to obtain a dark shade. There are some methods to make a track as dark as possible, which I’ll talk about in another tutorial.
The key is to use the right pencil range with the right drawing method to be able to obtain the desired result.

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Let’s be a little poetic and think about the colors of the sky during a whole day and night. In the morning we see warm colors (red, orange, yellow). Till the middays the colors become colder. We see a clear blue sky. Towards the evening the colors begin to be warmer again… think about the sunset. But what happens with the colors during the night? They are still there, but mixed intro black and white. It’s a huge contrast that brings up the stars. Isn’t that great? Now we can see what we couldn’t during the day.. So, black and white simplify everything and allow us to see deeper. (:
Now grab your pencils and simplify things and bring up their meaning
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See also:

The year is about 1961: A small girl is sitting too close to the black-and-white TV, watching Captain Kangaroo. Her mother is in the kitchen. Captain Kangaroo comes on and introduces something called “Benham’s Disk,” a disk, half black and half white, with black markings on the white half. He says when you spin it, you see colour, but he warns his viewers that they can only see it if they are watching colour TV… read more

Nanotechnology
*Grey goo is to a hypothetical end-of-the-world scenario involving molecular nanotechnology in which out-of-control self-replicating robots consume all living matter on Earth while building more of themselves (a scenario known as ecophagy).[4]
Neurology
* The substance that composes the brain is referred to as “grey matter”, and so the color is associated with things intellectual.
* Grey is associated with former British Prime Minister John Major. His puppet on Spitting Image was entirely grey implying that he was incredibly dull… read more