Sketch of the Day

Recently, I went to an estate sale and picked up several wonderful art books including — “The Pencil” by Paul Calle. Every now and again I need to remind myself what a really good pencil artist looks like, and Paul Calle is one. The truth is that pencil artists and pen and ink artists have a lot in common, both use strokes/marks of different shapes and weights to create the illusion of texture and tone. I tend to forget this and use pencil as a tone medium only, that is to say, I use it as solid grey “color” in a range of values.

I’m working on book character designs at the moment and enjoyed getting some "character" into this fellow’s face using line marks instead of graded tones. You definitely get the sense of age here, as well as grit, which is just what I was looking for. There'll be more sketches of this old guy to come, he's a featured player in the story.

But pencil line marks are definitely something to investigate further, I like the way this drawing turned out. Although it felt like I was using a very limited set of marks, there is some variety here.

P.S. I'm trying to become a bit more blog savvy, hence the artsy-header. Apparently, people like colorful titles. So yes, I'm upping my "trendy" game. We'll see what comes of that!