Friday, April 8, 2011

Pencil drawings

I've posted many examples of various ink drawings and one of the keys of success is to do preliminary as well as tight pencil sketches, especially if you are new to the medium.

FriBLOG1
I often do several very rough pencil sketches to establish the composition.

FriBLOG2
When first starting to do ink drawings it's wise to also do a tight pencil drawing like the one above, to establish tonal values.

FriBLOG3
LISA
It's also a good idea to do a lot of pencil drawings from photographs before doing sketches outdoors or from live models. All this will help when attempting ink line art.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Hi Harry,

Did you use an ordinary graphite ('lead') pencil for these drawings?

Why do the blacks in your drawings look very black? I've never been able to achieve that level of blackness with lead pencils (for example B,2B,3B,etc Faber-Castell 9000 or equivalent Staedtler. All I get is glossy dark gray.

Is that an effect of the reproduction? Or did you use a special pencil?

Vince

Harry Borgman said...

Hi Vince,
Te drawing of the girl was done with a Stabilo All pencil which has a waxy lead much like a china marking pencil. This pencil creates very black lines. The other drawing was done with a regular 2B drawing pencil and was scanned from my book ART & ILLUSTRATION TECHNIQUES where the reproduction was rather dark.
Harry