Xena has such wonderful jet black hair and in order to go pure black with graphite I needed to really work my arm hard.
In fact, I almost put a whole in the page I was pushing so hard with the pencil.
It also helps that I have these Mars Lumograph Black pencils from Staedtler. These pencils get much darker than normal graphite and really help in getting that pure black. I think they have some sort of additive in them as they are a bit waxy.
The only draw back to them is that I have to be careful how I mix them with graphite as they look very different on the paper in person. You can’t really tell by the photograph. Most of the time I would pick either regular graphite pencils or these for a drawing and never mix them.
Other Xena Posts
- Drawing With Motive
- Back on Track
- Short Day
- Group Poses and Another Xena
- Xena: See Structure
- Xena Overworked
- Reverse Gestures and Xena
- The Problem With Drawing Methods
- A Traditional Approach to Drawing
- Bad Drawing
- Trying to See
- Gestures From Memory
- Xena: Authentic Vision
- Drawing Materials Video and More Xena
- Almost Done
- Gestures and Modeled Drawings
- Routine
- Gestures and Modeled Drawings
- Gestures and Organization
Memory Gesture Drawings
Wow I was really bad at these today. My guess is that I didn’t get enough sleep last night and it was hard for me to really focus on the three 30 second poses before drawing for a minute.
Granted this is a hard exercise and I haven’t been doing it for a long time. But I know I’ve done better before.
The last one is a warmup exercise that I try to do most days.
New Art Tips Page!
Checkout my new art tips page! I’ve been working hard on some improvements with my website in plans for adding tons of content to help artists be more productive.
I did the fist tip yesterday which is inspired by a speech from Teddy Roosevelt. While creating this page I also noticed that a few of my posts were tagged with “tips” so I moved them to this new section of my site. I hope they are helpful to someone 🙂