Pencil Fix from France’s Critters

 

10/24/22 "Gavi" (Prismacolor in Stillman & Birn Zeta sketchbook)

Although I’m thoroughly enjoying giving ballpoint crosshatching a solid workout for InkTober, I’ve also missed my pencils. Fortunately, just as this week’s rain has kept me indoors most of the time, France Van Stone released her newest course in drawing critters. Since the course is a follow-up to her three-part crosshatching series, the demos incorporate all the techniques taught previously with an emphasis on the quick-and-dirty methods of Part 3. Although she demos with her favorite Bic ballpoints, she encourages participants to use any medium and practice drawing from the same photo multiple times with different media. I appreciate her focus on the process of regular practice over results.

As a relaxing counterpoint to crosshatching human portraits with ballpoint, I decided to follow France’s critter lessons by crosshatching animal portraits with pencil – both colored and graphite. I say “relaxing,” but that doesn’t mean the exercises are less challenging – they definitely aren’t. Animal portraits are just as challenging as humans. The relaxing part is that there’s less pressure for the result to resemble the model (which is not the goal, France says, but the pressure is still there).

Many of the reference images come from France’s students. One is a beautiful photo of Gavi, a yellow lab, taken from below his chin. The lovely backlighting fringing one side of his head was challenging to capture. I wanted to spend only about 30 minutes on this exercise, but if I had taken more time, I would have put in a bit of dark background on that side of Gavi’s face to bring out the backlighting.

10/22/22 "Pixie" (Polychromos in S&B Zeta sketchbook)

Why didn’t I just take the time to do that? Maybe I will when I draw this dog again sometime; France encourages us to take as much time as we want to. Most of her demos are within 30 minutes, though, and I really enjoy pushing myself to finish small drawings (mine are all about 4 or 5 inches) within that timeframe. I’ve been doing that with all of my InkTober drawings too, and I can see that I’ve gotten better at blocking proportions and crosshatching darker values more quickly with practice. It’s remarkable how much France can accomplish in about 30 minutes, and I know she got there only with lots and lots of practice. I’m on it.

Pencil notes: These critter exercises are giving me my colored pencil fixes during InkTober, but I must say that it is not as satisfying as I would like. I made the same discovery when I tried crosshatching with graphite at the beginning of the month. One characteristic of using colored and graphite pencils that I love so much is the gorgeous tonal modulation that’s possible. The rigid marks of rapid crosshatching removes that beauty.

On “Pixie,” I used Faber-Castell Polychromos colored pencils. Their hardness made the crosshatching more visible and also made it difficult to build dark values. Polychromos pencils require more traditional (slow) layering of light pigment application for best effects.

To draw “Gavi,” I switched to a soft Prismacolor. I preferred the effect here with less visible crosshatching, and it was easier to build tones quickly with soft pencils (as I’m used to doing on location – slamming down color rapidly with super-soft Caran d’Ache Museum Aquarelles). The downside is that I had to sharpen frequently, which doesn’t bother me when I’m taking my leisurely time with a sketch, but it is annoying when I’m trying to work within a timeframe.

Images provided by France Van Stone