Because drawing with a pencil is a basic but often ignored or underestimated rendering skill, we offered a didactic aid--the teaching artist's monochrome picture book--to elementary school third graders for their visual art classes (N = 25, between 8 and 9 years of age). On the basis of the created works of visual art and the transcribed interviews with them, we checked the participating students' responses to the monochromatic graphite technique. This research shows that the graphite technique attracts the students and upgrades their knowledge of visual art concepts.