Jay Greig – Editor

The Black Stone for Landscapes

Black stone is a tool that we do not necessarily think from the start.

However, it will give a new dimension to your drawings, since it allows you to make white drawings on colored paper.

The black stone is made of coal and clay. But do you wonder what it looks like?

In art stores, you can find black stone in wooden pencils or rectangular chalk. And the advantage is that it exists in white, black or other colors. You can find H, HB, B, 2B or 3B pencils.

It is possible to use it as the only material for your drawing.

My advice is to use a colored sheet, such as a sepia or even black sheet. The white black stone pencils will give originality to your portraits.

You will also see that next to black stone pencils, we often find strange white pencils in stores. It's about blurs. This tool, as the name implies, allows you to blur the stone strokes.

Thus, the black stone looks a bit like charcoal. It can be used on any support, but it soils less than charcoal.

This subject is ideal for making nudes, sketches, landscapes, portraits ...

Charcoal for sketches

Did you just start drawing classes?

Your teacher will surely begin by presenting the numerous techniques that a painter can use to start his drawing.

Among these techniques, we find charcoal.

It is one of the first subjects used by man to represent reality on a flat surface. It has long been used as a pencil to draw the contours of a drawing and even color it.

With the charcoal, you can make fine or wide strokes depending on the inclination you give it. Which makes him an amazing drawing partner. There is no need to have a whole palette of pencils: with a single charcoal it is enough to make a drawing.

You can use different variants of charcoal. It will help you to make your style progress in your learning of drawing.

The charcoal can be dry and hard or soft and therefore brittle.

When it comes to dry charcoal, it is easier to use to draw light strokes or to make a sketch, for example.
use the charcoal technique to start drawing
Some subjects are easier to use for portraits.

During my drawing course, some of my comrades used this type of charcoal to draw the first strokes of their drawing on the canvas. It is a way to make the first lines without being definitive.

Because charcoal is very easy to blur and erase!

But don't use the rubber you always use. To erase the charcoal, bread crumb paste is better. This elastic paste allows you to erase everything by tapping the drawing to avoid mistakes.

The soft and therefore very brittle charcoal is often used in order to contrast the drawing and obscure it. It allows to make some variations and adopt contrasts of shadows and lights.

With charcoal, it is much easier to get pretty gradients than with a graphite pencil. This is blurred in order to give blurred areas to your drawing. But it also allows you to make hard and fine strokes when you need it.

Pencil Drawing for Beginners

First of all you have to inform yourself and learn everything you need about the types of pencils that exist and the use of each of them. Standard pencils are often used for drawing; they have a variety of styles and sizes and, in turn, may contain softer to harder mines. The less the number, the softer the mine will be.
types of pencils to draw your drawings
Choose the pencil that best fits the drawing you want to make.

Soft mines are often used to add nuances and tones, while the toughest ones are used to trace the contours.

The technique of pencil drawing can be covered in two major stages: the first is based on drawing the lines that will configure the skeleton of the drawing; the second will address shading. There are different graduations of pencils - as I have said previously - that they will make the stroke more or less hard and will directly influence the technique of shading.

We can give open zigzags in both parallel and disparate lines. Other forms of shading that are less used are circulism and smoothing: they consist of passing a paper or a cloth over the graphite of the drawing. This technique will give a new look to our final result.

If you want to learn to draw without leaving home, do not hesitate to look for a pencil drawing course online through our platform.

Graphite Pencil Art

Drawing reports benefits to personality formation and intellectual expression. This art that expresses thoughts, drawing methods, experience and feelings.

The exercise of drawing can even refine the personality and change the way of seeing life.

Teaching the art of drawing and illustration is communication. This knowledge helps to form better people, with a less superficial judgment; The activity stimulates creativity, aesthetics and good taste. Obligation to analyze and analyze is to understand.

We can conceive the art of drawing in different ways: as something to do, an occupation that can open a space in the time of young people. It can be the escape from your world, it is also a way to reflect the way of life and the interior of the artist / artist.

A complete artist is an artist who knows how to use all kinds of techniques. But to get there, it is often necessary to spend many hours of work behind the easel or a blank sheet.

Charcoal, blood, graphite, colored pencils, black stone, pens, oil painting ... to name a few. The cartoonists have where to choose when it comes to selecting the subject or the different types of drawing they are going to make.

While some will prefer to draw a charcoal portrait, others will enjoy playing it with colored pencils.

Colored pencil

To use the technique of illustration of colored pencils, we must first have well learned the bases, those pillars of the drawing that will create the essence of our composition.

Technical Drawing Colored Pencil

These are:

Contour and profiles: they are all those lines that are in the limit and the interior of our drawings, although in the realistic illustration the line is over, we must keep in mind his contribution to our perception.

Occupied and empty spaces: this refers to the relationship with the contour of our drawings with the area of ​​“air” that contains them.

Proportion: the proportion is the ratio of internal and external measures that our drawings have.

Perspective: that means the power to represent with depth the lines in a two-dimensional plane as is our clean work surface. This supported by geometric principles of escape, foreshortening and point.

Light and shadow: it is the action of light rays on objects.

Color theory: it is the principle of the physical phenomenon where all colors originate from 3 primary colors, white and black.

Composition: this section results in the aesthetic and convenient distribution of the elements embodied in a format.

Once these elements have been reviewed, we proceed with the technique, which is reduced to the different types of saturation, gradient and blur.

The expressive possibilities of the technique depend on the roughness of the support and the degree of softness and thickness of the graphite.

There are different ways to take the pencil. If it is properly supported, you will illustrate correctly. There are some ways to do it, which are:

In case of small strokes take it as a normal pencil just a little further from the paper.
Take it as a knife, this form is advisable when drawing on vertical or inclined surfaces, when we draw features of a certain length that require agility and speed of resolution.

It is very important to remember that the tip taken with a cutter or blade is used for jobs of greater difficulty than those that require a normal pencil sharpener.

Likewise, as a primary advice, it is beneficial to have all the utensils organized, and always keep in mind that one of the basic rules in the techniques to be mentioned is always to paint "I miss you more."

The most used techniques for painting with colored pencil are:

LINEAR OR STRIPED TECHNIQUE: It uses the superposition of crossed lines that form frames, to obtain values, nuances and contrasts; in areas with more intensity it is suggested that more lines be drawn.

TONAL TECHNIQUE: It is the most used method, always try to work from less to more modeling volumes, it is valued and nuanced "staining" color with the pencil. You can look like a stain effect with overlapping lines, it is recommended.

GRATTAGE TECHNIQUE (or scraping): First the tonal technique is used as a base, then, very carefully, a dark colored layer is applied, a lancet is taken and it is about drawing a line drawing of the model with it. Each stroke made will carry the wax of the second color as a result of scraping, leaving the pigment of the first box underneath and visible.

BLEACHING TECHNIQUE: this method seeks to match the result obtained with the technique to the cake, for this the white color should be intensely applied, if, simply, to the mere style of the tonal technique, since the white color has the characteristic of melting color and strokes, disappearing the effects of the paper grain.