Mark Making Part 11: Col-Erase and Other Pencils

Yay, more gesture drawings! Col-erase and gesture drawings go so well together. The lead is just soft enough to flow easily on the page without too much smudging.

Once again, I used Line of Action, Quick Poses, and Pexels for reference photos. I’m feeling more comfortable with the overall figure, compared to face drawings. I’ve been defaulting to cartoon-ish or stylized manga looking faces, rather than looking at sweeping lines or form. Which was okay for this, as the purpose was to use each pencil for any kind of mark. Yet, I feel drawn to practicing realism and grounding my art more in fundamentals.

Learning the “right” fundamentals is an ongoing wish of mine. Sometimes I wonder if I’m using it to block myself: telling myself I have to learn “x” before I can draw “y”, then not making time to draw either. Note to self: as long as it’s drawing, it’s moving along the path – I can let go of the perfect course of study!

Besides the standard array of Col-erase pencils, I also used some various brands of non-photo blue pencils that I’ve picked up over the years. They are my favorite random art supply store splurge, as they always seem useful and they’re usually fairly cheap. I also have a bunch of Prismacolor Verithin red/blue double ended pencils, which are handy to use when I don’t want to carry a lot of supplies out on sketching trips.

I drew all of these, except the black card stock, in my cheap sketchbook dubbed “No. 3 Sketchbook”. I am soooo ready to be done with this thing: It’s pages are very thin and it’s just full of stops and starts of basic doodles. I only have like 10 more pages to go – I’ve been doing leaves and other nature drawings, but I’m also tempted to fill the rest of it with more gesture sketches just to get it over with. We shall see.

‘Til next time! 🙂