Meet the Crew

Here they are folks; my pride and joy, my yin and yang, the reason the sun comes up in the morning, my pencils.

From top to bottom: rotary lead sharpener, graphite leads, kneaded eraser, cheap little junky sharpener, and two Koh-i-noor all metal clutch pencils. ( aka lead holders, aka drafting pencils)

Don’t get me wrong there really is no magic pencil.  It is easy to get caught up in the rush of obtaining art supplies but no matter what you choose to spend your money on it still comes down to your ability to use it. And the only way to get good at using it is to use it.

I personally prefer clutch pencils because they allow for a variety of strokes, they don’t get smaller as you sharpen them and you can sharpen them to a point that could be used to tattoo with. (Ouch) see! The nice thing about metal ones is they don’t snap in two if they are in your pocket when you sit down. This happens quite a bit to me, since I don’t like going anywhere with out one of these little guys. Koh-i-noor is the only brand I have found that makes metal ones so it might take a little hunting to track one down. On a side note, if you do decide that you want to try clutches then don’t get the stupid little sharpener. It will save you a couple bucks that’s true. However, no matter how little money you spend to buy one it’s wasted money. You need to just go a head and pay for the rotary sharpener.

So now that I have shown you mine you show me yours. Or tell me about yours anyway. What do you like to use to draw with?

Charcoal Drawing Supplies

Let me start out by saying THANK YOU to all of you who are following this blog. I appreciate it because it encourages me to continue posting.

Ok, let’s get in to it. I am going to shift gears a little and show you some of the stuff I personally use for charcoal drawing. Many pencil artist turn to experimenting with charcoal drawing at some point. Sometimes it sticks, sometimes it becomes frustrating and they choose not to go very far with it. Often the complaint is that it is too messy. Either way, I think that it is something every artist should try once. It doesn’t cost much to start out so I recommend it.

Paper simple enough, I choose to use news print because it is cheap and you can find it in very large pads. I would never do a finished drawing on newsprint because it doesn’t take long for the acids in the paper to react to the air causing it to yellow and degrade. However, newsprint has a few things going for it. One, charcoal is not  easy to work with on a small scale so in order to achieve detail a large format is needed. Also, charcoal needs something to hold on to, so paper used to draw on needs to have a bit of a tooth. If you have ever seen professional quality charcoal paper it has a lot of texture to it. To sum it up the paper you choose should be like an angry biker, big and rough.

Pencils are my favorite form of charcoal but they don’t cover large areas quickly, so I keep a small reserve of compressed charcoal sticks on hand. Vine charcoal is also nice to have around but it is hard to find at a good price. I can go through a whole package in just a couple drawings so I choose not to use it. You will notice that I do not include a pencil sharpener. I use a knife instead. Pencil sharpeners are a waste in general if you ask me but I’ll talk more about that at a later time perhaps.

I think that the rest of these supplies are self explanatory but, if you have any specific questions let me know.

The Collector Part 2

OK, so a little further along with my Halloween piece. I can see now that I probably should have used a Bristol plate paper rather than Bristol smooth. See the difference is the tooth of the paper. You have bristol vellum that is about a 3 or 4 on the scale of smoothness, then there is bristol smooth , extra smooth, and finally plate is the smoothest. Now bristol plate is very hard to work with and I do not recommend it for beginners.

So why do I say that I should have used plate? Well because I’m a gluten for punishment. No, just kidding. Using plate would have made it much easier to apply the amount of detail that this drawing calls for. The image is not small per say but I do find myself fighting with the tooth of the paper quite a bit. The other option would have been to work larger. However, I am limited by the scanner as to what sizes are available to me. When I get a better quality camera that won’t matter so much.

So any ideas yet as to why this drawing is titled The Collector?