Time to play

The Covid restrictions that came into effect through August and September within our state of Victoria limiting our movements allowed me more time to play around with different media and papers, trialling combinations and styles. Some just didn't work out well but others did and this is a more in depth look at one of the successful trials.

With drawing being the main focus in my art, I love to try out different drawing media and combining one or two of them together, this being the reason I originally bought the carbon pencils so that I could enhance some of my graphite drawings with extra black areas. It was only on the odd occasion that I did this and then put the pencils away never to see the light of day for many many years.

My reluctance to use them has been that they are quite unforgiving with errors when applied too heavily so with a deep breath and plenty of planning and patience, I forged on to create a small drawing solely with the carbon pencils.

Work in progress, the initial shaping and structure of the head.

Having some pan pastel tools now available I decided to use the sponge applicator to lightly apply the pencil to large areas of the face and to smooth out the black stripes as I find the pencil is quite scratchy to use and leaves white dots of the paper showing through. This was a successful breakthrough that I needed to push the pencil around, I just had to be extra careful not to encroach on the white areas otherwise I was doomed!

Applying just a couple of layers of pencil I was able to achieve a lovely depth to the drawing and the further I went the more I learnt and progressed with fine tuning the values and application. The choice of paper being Arches aquarelle worked well to achieve the softness of fur. All in all I was very happy with the end result and will try another one soon.