Okay, sketches from now on have accurate dates. Before I only used the month or the date I edited them. Still, I’ve changed the post date so that they don’t sink below the sketchdump.

Anyways, as you can see I’ve made more notes. I’m trying to keep all my sketches clean and presentable like I talked about in my resolutions post.

Now I struggled a bit with the dark shading in the tree sketch and I want to mention this because it just so happened I had started to read a Course in Pencil Sketching by Ernest Watson, and it mentioned something interesting that I’d never considered and that is the surface on which you’re drawing and whether it’s hard/soft. I would usually draw on a hard surface because you can get more precise lines, but as the book explains this is a horrible surface for shading.

So those blocks of shading at the bottom are me experimenting with different surfaces and pencil combinations. My favorite where the last two. I used a 4B (Lyra) pencil and did two passes over two surfaces (4 & 2 paper towels thick). The order didn’t seem to matter. I’m not going to do that for all sketches, but it’s something to keep in mind for large areas of black like the grass. For general sketches I’ve moved over to drawing over a plastic folder filled with paper (where I keep my sketches).

I still have to try those notes/to-do’s I left myself.