Sometimes you spend eight years of your life in post-secondary art training of various types, and then a further 14 years as a professional artist doing work that includes highly rendered graphite drawing, and you still open a video on youtube out of curiosity and discover a whole wealth of technical information about pencil rendering you didn’t know you didn’t know1.
And honestly sometimes it’s the best feeling in the world!
Here’s the video in question, by artist Mike Sibley:
There’s a lot of good info in this video! But here’s a screenshot that made me yell at my screen for how misinformed I’ve been till now:
I had a fundamental misunderstanding of how graphite works and how to layer it! I thought harder graphite was an opaque substance that was lighter in masstone than softer graphite. This is not correct. As you can see in the screenshot, a harder, “lighter” grade of graphite can darken a softer grade if applied overtop! Why?? How?? Go watch and find out.
Now, I don’t want you to think these videos are clickbait One Cool Trick style – I’ve watched a LOT of them now and Mike Sibley is clearly an experienced and capable art teacher; each video focuses on some core concepts and walks you through them multiple times. Some others I recommend are:
I’m not, really, an artist who focuses on photorealism in my professional work – I have neither time, dexterity, nor interest, in making that the core of my practice. I do, however, think careful drawing studies are key tools in learning how to draw something, even if I never plan to go as detailed in later work as I do in the study! And pencil is a very forgiving, rewarding, and accessible tool for doing those studies. This is what got me googling “pencil drawing techniques” in the first place.
Of course, then he said THIS in the Drawing Textures video and convinced me that he and I are on the exact same page around What Drawing Does, and now I am going to watch everything by him that I can get my hands on.
Hahaaa way to sum it up, Mike Sibley, and thanks so much for this great stuff!
This is the best case scenario of the internet, for me. The chance to discover new, useful information about something I’m interested in, no matter my current level of expertise. There’s a lot of trash out there for sure, but what a feeling, to find a vein of gold like this. I hope, if you’re interested in drawing with pencil, you’ll give one of these videos a try and see what else there is to learn on the subject!
- This is so key! I didn’t know how ignorant I was about how graphite works, which means I didn’t know the size or depth of the possibility space that exists within graphite art at all. Learning even just that there’s more to learn ahead of me is a thrilling feeling! Highly recommend it. ↩︎
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