Mr Bean

Drawing the way I do is a matter of zooming in and getting every line in the right spot, every shade correct in relation to every other shade, working from whole to part and part to whole.

Sometimes I wonder if it can actually be classified 'art' when I'm essentially copying another picture, without putting my spin or interpretation on it. Hmm...

It's amazing how lost in a drawing I can become. Our clock on the mantle piece dongs every half hour and hour - it seems that only five minutes goes by and the clock is at it again.

In starting out my venture of drawing, I made sure that I used a range of pencil hardnesses - 6H, to F, all the way to a 9B.

Something interesting has taken place and I'm not quite sure how I feel about it...

I've abandoned all of the above pencils, and now use only one:

It's a Papermate Pacer with 0.5mm HB leads.

When I first completed the picture of Mr Bean below, I was quite surprised at the range of shades I could achieve with just an HB pencil.



Granted, I can't get the same dark as an 8B or 9B, but it's not bad. I have found that with a 6B or above there is often a shine in the graphite at various angles. With the pacer there is none. 

I enjoyed drawing this picture very much, although his tweed jacket had me pulling my hair out. I just couldn't get the exact effect that I wanted. In the reference photo, portions of the jacket were out of focus, or seemingly inconsistent with the shade beside it. I resigned myself to the thought that good enough was going to have to be good enough.

What's funny is that when I finished the drawing, the one thing most people pointed out what how realistic they thought the jacket looked.