Pencil on Paper
I’m kicking off my Finding My Style journey with the most elemental medium I know—pencil on paper. From the early days of bringing a box of #2 pencils to school and grinding them through the ancient wall-mounted pencil sharpener ’til I got just the right point, to today and my ever-growing pencil collection, pencils have made me happy.
There is just something so darned satisfying about that stick of wood with its vein of graphite running through. I can’t look at a picture of a pencil without a mood boost. That may be one of the reasons I have a print of Dalton M. Ghetti’s Alphabet hanging above my work area. (For those of you unfamiliar with Ghetti’s work, he’s a master pencil lead carver. It’s absolutely worth your while to visit his gallery and check out his mind-boggling creations.)
I am such a fan of the pencil that when I stumbled across CW Pencil Enterprise‘s Instagram account, I started following it avidly, and immediately started planning a pilgrimage of sorts to their beautiful shop, dedicated to all things pencil. Sadly, CW is no longer with us. (I’ve added its demise to my list of reasons to hate and detest COVID.) But it was pencil heaven while it lasted.
Enough nostalgia, though. I need to figure out how pencils can help me on my journey toward finding my style.
One thing I can say right off the bat is that I will not be a graphite-pencil-centric artist. I adore color, and know my style won’t be limited to the palette offered by working with graphite alone. (Colored pencils are a whole other universe—one I plan to explore here soon.) There are some brilliant artists out there, though, who create gorgeous graphite-only work. If you’re looking for inspiration, you may want to check these folks out:
Paul Cadden’s landscapes & portraits
Cath Riley (Her “Flesh” series is luminous.)
My very favorite pencil art inspiration comes from Amedeo Modigliani. A billion years ago, when I was studying in London, I went to the Unknown Modigliani exhibit at the Royal Academy. The exhibit introduced me to Modigliani’s sketches, many of which were done in pencil. I couldn’t get enough of his use of confident, joyous line—a few beautifully-placed curves coming together into these magically-balanced figure studies. If you can get your hands on a copy of Modigliani Unmasked, grab the opportunity and page through his gorgeous work.
So, will I use pencil in my work at all? Definitely! For sketching, absolutely. As part of my final pieces, combined with other media in color, quite possibly.
How best to explore this possibility? First, I turned to my own personal library, which includes a number of books on drawing, sketchbooking, figure studies, etc. (More on that in a future post.)
I also logged in to my Skillshare account and rooted around ’til I found Mike Lowery’s funny, approachable Always Drawing classes. I dived into Always Drawing: How to Start and Keep a Daily Sketchbook and got to work. Surprise, surprise, my sketchbook pages took on a cartoon-y feel. Is it because I was influenced by Lowery’s drawings, or because this is part of the direction my own style will take? Only time will tell.
This next page evolved out of boredom. I was sketching during movie time, and the movie—The Eternals—was so excruciatingly dull, I went into a sort of fugue state. It’s interesting to see what came out of it. It’s early days, but my guess is this may be a glimpse of one avenue toward my style. Time will tell.
So, that’s graphite. Will it be my one-and-only medium of choice? No. Will pencils play a huge role in my creating in the future? Oh, yeah. Most definitely.