Pencils for beginners

When I drew anything wa~y back in junior high or high school, I picked up a pencil and drew. One of those yellow #2 pencils. Ticonderoga comes to mind, but there were bunches of them, usually chewed on and left behind in desks at the end of the semester. Those. You picked up a pencil and started drawing. Period.

I had a friend in high school who did these incredible sketches in, well, just a pencil, probably a #2. So imagine my surprise when I learned there was more than one kind of pencil. In fact, there are LOTS of them, and they're used for different purposes.

You'll find this explained in so many other places, but simply:

Soft < - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - >Hard

8B 6B 4B 2B HB H 2H 4H 6H 8H

Soft goes on the paper a lot darker.

Hard goes on the paper a lot lighter.

There. That was simple.

But there's more (of course!). Artists use pencils in different grades to achieve different effects. The lighter leads will allow you to make very light lines, so for something like an outline of where a darker shadow will go, or points on the paper to help you keep your bearings can be easily erased later on.

Mid-range pencils can be used for shadowing lightly, and the darker Bs can be used to fill in areas in hair or dark shadows.

Pencil lead, or graphite, can be smudged on the paper, and this gives different effects as well. Because you can erase it, you can have fun drawing with erasers, which is called subtractive drawing. There are some fabulous examples on the web (google.com "drawing with an eraser").

In any case, graphite is easy to get hold of, and paper abounds.

Play, play, play!

#art #beginners #graphite #arttips