My Pencil's Grave

I have posted many pencil sketches on this blog and some of them are really good. One of the keys to making maximum use of your pencil is contrast.

You can get the best contrast by making your outlines in a light pencil led and slowly working your way up to darker pencil leads as you shade more and more. You can't generally get past 4B pencils, which are softer and darker than regular 2B pencils.

That is the foundation for my story. At career night I decided to bring my notebook and sketch the speakers. It was a really good idea and gave me something to do.

The first few speakers I drew in pencil, as you can see and then I transferred over to pen. The comparison is rather clear to me. The pencil is drab, boring and smudgeable, while the pen is crisp and contrasting.

There is, of course, that lingering doubt. "What if you make a mistake?" While there is still argument for me, I haven't noticed myself making that many mistakes. If I do, I can still correct it with more lines or with white-out. I put my picture of Louis Armstrong to show how my fear of mistakes is generally not in step with reality. (I did, however, make some minor mistakes with his lower trumpet pipes.)

This is why I want to put my pencil to rest. I will still use my pencil, but I want to move on from creating finished products of carbon lines. I want to use pens, and markers, and my computer too, to make art in the future!