Tuesday, March 27, 2007

Wild about Graphite

Every now and then I get cravings, in my case not for food, but for the humble pencil.
I can just sit down with my pencil and start to create.
I mainly use a 2mm clutch pencil made by Staedtler, just occasionally changing to a 0.5mm lead for very fine detail. I mostly use a HB lead, but do add darks with a 2B, even sometimes going as far as 6B in the eye. If I use a 6B I always then go over it with a harder lead to dull the shine.

I decided I wanted to do another wild animal piece so had a look through my photographs.
This Meerkat is from one of my own images, I take many Meerkat photographs as I love their funny little faces.
We had a trip to the Zoo at weekend and the Meerkats posed for me.


My drawing is about 12 x 8 inches, on Arches Hot Press Watercolour paper. I really like Arches paper as it is smooth but can take plenty of graphite. The only slight disadvantage is that it is a touch cream coloured, which makes reproduction a little more difficult than if it was a bright white.



There is more at the bottom of the picture but it doesn't fit on my scanner.




4 comments:

vivien said...

it's great :)


have you thought of approaching the zoon to see if they would sell prints? I'm sure they'd go well.

Gayle Mason said...

Thanks Vivien, most Zoo's seem to have a resident artist, but there's no harm in trying.

Making A Mark said...

I agree with Vivien - I don't think any resident artist is going to get the 'Gayle' look easily!

Gayle Mason said...

Thanks Katherine, I'm in the process of doing some research.