15 Tips for Beginning with Pencil

Pencil is a great medium for drawing and it's often a favourite of beginners at drawing. There are many wonderful effects we can create drawing with pencil, varying the ways we draw our lines. If you're starting with pencil, let me give you 15 quick tips for using pencil, particularly aimed at beginners. The first tip is to realise that not all pencils are the same. And this may seem a bit obvious, but I was about 17 before I realised that all pencils weren't equal. I would look at the lovely dark tones that some of the other students in my school art class had in their sketching and I would think that they were able to create those simply because they were somehow better than I was. I didn't realise it was because they were using a darker pencil than I was using. The pencil most common is an HB because it's a middle of the range pencil. The H stands for hard and the B stands for black. It's a compromise between the hardness of the lead and the darkness of the lead. In one direction we go from B, 2B, 3B up to 6B. And in the other direction we go from H to 2H, 3H up to 6H. So B is softer and darker than HB. 2B is softer and darker than B or HB. And 6B traditionally is the softest and darkest. And what I discovered was that I was drawing with a 2H pencil. Which looks even lighter in life. And the people in my art class at school, whose work I so admired, they were drawing with a 4B pencil. And what I thought was somehow more talent was just a darker, softer pencil. For most artists who want to draw with pencil, something on the B side of the fence is going to be most useful. The drawings I just showed you I drew with a 2B. So it's really important when we start to get used to looking at the grade of the pencil and choosing one that's suitable. A pencil in the H direction gives a lighter line. It's a harder lead so it doesn't smudge so much. But if we press hard it can be difficult to erase. A darker line from the B range, if we press heavily, will also give a darker line. But because it smudges more, particularly if we draw with heavy lines, it can also be hard to erase. So the grade that works best for me is a very individual thing. But if someone were beginning with drawing, I would recommend experimenting from a 2B to a 4B. Probably having the best option. If we draw with pencil, we have to get used to broken pencils. When it comes to sharpening, most of us probably reach for a relic from our school days. But as an artist, this isn't the best option. Better is to use a blade. With a blade, you actually put less pressure on the graphite core, which is a relatively fragile substance. We can also produce a much longer length of usable graphite. Which means we won't need to sharpen it again quite as soon as when we have the considerably shorter amount of graphite with the traditional sharpeners. And now that I've got these sharp pencils, I can do tip number three. Which is to have sharpened pencils ready when we draw. And it's not just that sometimes we break our leads. The softer leads of the B range of pencils wears down more quickly. And at some point, we lose the sharpness of our point. And sometimes that matters. And if we have several pencils ready to go, we can just put one to one side and pick up another one when we need it. It's particularly useful if we're right in the flow of drawing and we drop our pencil and we break the end. The fourth tip is it's worth taking a little trouble not to let our pencils roll off the tables. Because when they do roll off, invariably we lose the end of them. And while we can sharpen this again, we can find that we wear down our pencils remarkably quickly. And a nice quality pencil is not necessarily cheap. The next few quick points are to do with this little object, the eraser. Erasers can be a great tool, but point number five is don't let an eraser become a taskmaster. Some of us know we have a tendency to wanting everything to be perfect and feeling really uncomfortable if we feel that it's not quite right. And can I suggest that if you feel like sometimes you spend more time erasing wrong lines than drawing right lines, that maybe this is an issue for you. We must make sure that our use of the eraser isn't feeding some sort of perfectionist taskmaster within us. My sixth point flows from that, and that is when we draw a wrong line, it's not quite in the place where we want it to be. Don't erase it immediately. Leave it there while you draw the right line. Because the line in the wrong place helps me guide my second line into a better position. And the seventh quick eraser point is that sometimes we want to erase lines that are quite close to other lines. And using our blade that we have on hand for when we need to sharpen our pencils, we can cut our eraser and get really sharp edges with it. And with those edges, we can come in very close to lines we've already drawn. Having just talked about blades and sharpening, the eighth point is don't rush to sharpen a pencil that we've been using for a while. Because what can often happen is that we're drawing something and at the start we want nice, crisp lines. Because we're developing form and shape and creating objects. But as our drawing develops, often the sort of line work we use shifts. And rather than developing edges, we're defining forms and we might be, depending how we're drawing, we might be doing hatching. And this sort of line work can, particularly with a softer pencil, can start to blunt the tip. And sometimes we can just rotate the pencil slightly to find that sharp place again. But after a while, the whole tip can become somewhat blunted. And while it may be useful to sharpen the pencil again, can I suggest sometimes the blunting somewhat of the end of our pencil fits in with the rhythm of our drawing. And I would suggest not to rush at that point to sharpen it again, because then we lose that nice weathered edge that we have to our lines. If we have another pencil that's sharpened ready, we can always go to this if for some reason we need a sharper line. But once we've developed perhaps a softer end, a more rounded weathered end, then that becomes a tool that we can exploit, that we can use in our drawing. So we shouldn't rush to destroy it with the knife. This is the sort of drawing where I think this can work. We're establishing the, if you like, the edges, the outline, the form of the architecture. When it comes to establishing some tone, adding some values to the scene, the edge is worn down and we can get a nice blunt effect to our quick gestural hatching lines. The thing about pencils is they start lovely and long. And as we use them, especially as we use our favorite pencils, they get shorter and shorter. And the sad truth is that for each of us, there's a point past which it's actually not helpful for us to keep using a given pencil. I suspect it partly depends on how large our hands are and how long our fingers are. But we get the greatest variety in line work, in penciling, in creating effects with our pencils when we hold our pencils relatively loosely and not too close to the end. Where we're free to move our whole arm, where it's easy to do almost flicking lines, nice gestural marks that we use to create whatever effect we're seeking. A nice loose attachment to the pencil is helpful in so many ways. But if our pencil is really short, we actually lack the space to hold our fingers away from the end. And it becomes quite cramped and difficult to maneuver the end of the pencil in the same way it is when we have a lot more space. It also means that our hand is a lot closer to what marks I'm putting on the paper. And so the risk of smudging, the ever-present danger in drawing with pencil is much greater. When our hand is well back from the end, it's far easier to maneuver and position so that we're not rubbing our hand against the lines we've just made. And point number 10 is avoid drawing on copy paper, which is exactly what I'm doing right now, if possible. Now copy paper can be great for lots of things such as exercises. If I want to practice doing straight lines, then copy paper is great. It's usually accessible and it's probably the cheapest paper I'll have available to me. If I want to practice doing hatching lines, or if I want to experiment with perspective, making perspective look correct. If I want to do little thumbnail sketches, before I do the main drawing, just to sort out composition or where I want to put things, then copy paper is great. But different papers are designed for different purposes and copy paper is actually designed to be printed on. It's designed to have ink sit on it. It's a very, very smooth surface. And one of the wonderful things about the darker shades of pencil is the way they deposit on the paper. And when we have a slightly textured paper, there's more scope for the graphite to remain on the surface. And that in the end gives us a lot more opportunity for variety of marks and effects. In the end, the best art materials to use are the ones I can afford to buy. The ones I can locate easily and that I can use and if necessary, even waste without having to be worried about saving them. And copy paper may be the only paper that fits that bill. But if there is some even relatively cheap sketching paper that I can locate, that I can afford, it certainly doesn't have to be expensive. It may just be the cheapest sketchbook available to me. Then that rough surface gives far more scope to create effect with parts of the paper receiving graphite, but other parts not receiving graphite in the same line. We can create far more subtle grayscales using even the same pencil. Just as not all pencils create the same drawing result, not all papers create the same drawing result. It's not so much the thickness of the paper as the surface of the paper. The 11th point is that great arch nemesis of all drawers with pencils, smudging. And that's to spend a moment just at the start considering the best way we can structure our drawing as to minimize smudging, which can't always be erased as much as we would like. The potential for smudging to be a problem changes with how we draw. It's potentially more of a problem if we're drawing something that looks like this than if our style is a more linear, more line focused one. But even if we're drawing somewhat like this, we still need to be positioning our hand when we draw that we're not rubbing it over what we've already drawn. So for this scene, I started at the top and I worked down because if I started at the ground or in the center, then when I was doing the top of the tower, my hand would have been resting on the part I'd already drawn. Now, one way to try and avoid this is to have a sheet of paper handy so that our hand isn't actually rubbing. The best solution is to draw in a way that we don't need to lean on what we've already drawn. And this is also where holding our pencil further towards the end can be very helpful. If I start here and then I come down here when I want to draw here, I haven't actually drawn this yet. So I can rest my hand here and there's length in the pencil to reach the part I want to draw for some of the lines that need to be drawn in this way. And for other lines, I can come over here and I can come down. So, again, I'm still not worried about needing to lean on what I've already drawn. And then when I draw this part here, it's the same. Now my hand can be off the paper, basically, as I draw this section and this very light indication of background. So planning the order of our drawing to minimize smudging is a really helpful habit. But when I'm drawing with pencil, it's very important not to clench the pencil hard. I really need to work at developing a loose hold on my pencil because when I clench the pencil, that puts the focus on down here and on drawing with my fingers or possibly at best with my wrist. When what I want to do is to draw with my whole arm, to draw from the shoulder, not from the fingertips. I will never develop a nice gestural, free, loose style of drawing with clenched fingers down the end. My 14th point is when it comes to drawing with line, avoid rushing to outline things. To realize the variation that pencil can give us, we can have heavy outlines, we can have lighter lines, we can have lines that really are defined by negative space. There's not really a line that we've drawn there, except maybe a guideline, but the line is defined by some sort of value coming up against it, more as a silhouette. Or we can have edges that are defined as much by the tone as the line, creating a softer, if you like, edge than a line would have given. And certainly try and avoid doing a heavy outline around an object. Varying the lines that we, if you like, capture the form, define the shape of an object with, we want to capture the form, we want to capture the sense of three dimensionality. And one of the ways we do this is by varying the type of line, or the way we create the boundary of the object using other means. And my last point flows from this, and my last point flows from this, and that's to experiment with line and texture. I find it's very helpful to think about making marks with our pencils, with our pens, rather than to think of making lines. Because if I think of drawing something by lines, then I'm going to have a great emphasis on lines. If I think of marks, then I'm going to be thinking more of possibilities with my pencil that outlines. And this opens up so many more options for creating effects in my drawing, in my artwork. So don't rush to produce artworks, but play around with the pencils. Choose the ones that suit your own temperament best, that suit the sorts of things that you'd like to draw and the way that you'd like to draw them. And then practice. G'day, I'm Stephen Travers. I hope you found this helpful. Graphite really is a wonderful medium to use in drawing. There's so much variety, so much nuance, so much sensitivity we can create with it. I hope these tips have been helpful. If you're just beginning on the pencil journey, as always, whatever you draw, however you're drawing it, and whatever you use to draw it with, pencil or pen, make sure you have fun. I'll see you next time. Bye.