10min studie with lots of shadow

Noreenja,

I think you might want to reconsider how you hold your pencil when you shade your work. Hatching is a great tool. But if you want your images to feel looser and flowier, instead of sketchy. Change your grip.

If you are physically able, try to use the knife method with a woodless pencil or a pencil with the wood severely shaved off.

• The combination of a highly exposed bit of graphite and the knife method forces your hand to make larger marks with greater directional flow. That is because this method uses your elbow and shoulder as the main points of rotation for expressing your lines in your drawing. 


• The wrist is great for the tiny, tiny details, but big, big swaths of shadow should be expressed with thicker marks made with as few strokes as possible. Fewer marks with long exposed graphite and the correct pressure tonally look more like a flat silhouette. We can then layer these to give the image more and more dimension.

Please know you are not alone, we are often taught how to hold our implement at a very young age. Changing to an artist's hold instead of a writer's hold takes time and lots of effort. It's very tempting to cheat and let the old habits ruin our drawing progress. Most of us don't learn to hold a pencil like an artist until sometime in college. It's really tough to break the habit.

If you are working from your elbow/shoulder and are using the knife method, try this:

A good exercise that can help you is: Thicker, Thinner, Lighter, Darker.

• This works best if you have a drawing buddy or someone to call out the above words. 

Some use this as an artist game. It can be very fun and competitive. It's also hard on the brain if you have never done it before. Be prepared to be more tired than you thought. Have a reward ready. This game is tough!!1. The drawer draws a continuous line in the knife hold and with a long, exposed pigment until they make a mistake or stop drawing due to thinking instead of drawing. If you stop or make a mistake, you get a point. 2-The caller calls from the four choices, trying to trick the drawer into making a mistake.           -Some put the caller on a timer, and if they do not choose one of the words above in (insert time) due to being mesmerised by watching the drawer draw, they get a point. Same if they call out faster than (insert time) and do not give the drawer a fair shot to switch the line to the next direction.3. First person to ten points loses. Some have a third person as the ref between the caller and the drawer. But that depends on how competitive your group gets. 

• But you can get a randomiser that will randomise times and the words, and you can follow the directions as the randomiser calls them out for you. In this case, once you get up to ten points, the drawing session is over. 

It is an exercise that works on line quality and accuracy, and has the lucky side benefit of improving your shading by helping you control your marksmanship. 


I hope this was helpful.


All of the best,


JCML Fine art