There's something enthralling about the humble pencil.
The wood settles into the permanent concavity on the side of my middle finger as I poise the point above paper. The graphite encased in the wood varies in hardness and darkness, from the very faint 7H to the ultra-dark 9B. Or maybe I've got a carbon pencil in hand; it produces lines only slightly different from charcoal. Or on black paper, the white charcoal and the soapstone pencils are just plain fun.
Some stroke the paper with a gritty, scritchy sound and feel, but my favorites glide smoothly, effortlessly, as I write or draw. And if I want to change a spelling, a line, a shadow, the pencil strokes are not so permanent that an application of eraser can't lighten or remove what I've done.
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| Jasper |
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| Echo |
Yes, the shades of light and dark come across well. I took a drawing class once, my first semester of community college. I can't claim to have learned it very well, but pencil and charcoal were the most fun mediums for me.
ReplyDeleteI like those drawings, especially the effect of drawing white tone on black paper.
Thanks, Bainespal!
ReplyDeleteI've got the full color version of the cat on FB, but I really enjoyed doing the white on black version of the portrait.
I do most other portraits (some also on FB) with pencil, carbon, and charcoal. I've done more watercolor painting, acrylic painting, and photo covers for Cross & Cosmos, but the one for Issue 2 that accompanied "Ley of the Minstrel" was pencil only, then shifted into a sepia tone by computer (didn't have a sepia pencil at the time). :)