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Just so much patience, and having a lot of gradient-making under your belt. And keeping the pencil very sharp. Dull pencils glide on top of the fibers and make dotty marks because they can’t work into the small weave. Just patiently working into the paper and leaving no irregularities unaddressed.
Edit: you post this Da Vinci level drawing and I see 38 upvotes meanwhile I saw a 3k upvotes drawing of a toddler yesterday. I guess internet points are not for real. Amazing job!!!
Very high praise. It’s funny, the better i get at drawing and painting, the further away from me Rembrandt feels. He was so good it’s unbelievable. The greatest ever, in my opinion.
Most of this drawing was actually done with a colored pencil. Prismacolor Col-Erase, black. It’s 95% that one pencil. I love the texture that pencil gives and it feels amazing to draw with. The other 5% is graining with a staedtler 2H pencil.
Thanks for filling me in. Interesting to know. I’m always surprised how many of the works I admire are done with fewer graphite pencils than I imagine. Great stuff you are doing.
The trick is getting your pencil very long and sharp and meandering in and out of the fibers of the paper, so the gradient is as continuous as possible. Any little dot should be picked out with a kneaded eraser, or worked around and integrated into the tone with the sharp pencil. It’s taken me years at this point to really develop the patience to actually dedicate the time to cleaning the drawing.
I always thought that hatching had to be done quickly and confidently, like it’s just an incident of the draftsman’s hand. But hatching, along with everything else in drawing, (at least when you’re learning how to do it) is better when it is done slowly and deliberately. I drew those hatch marks much slower than you might think, and then i carved them with a kneaded eraser to make them the right thickness and shape. And if it looked wrong i erased and tried again. What Da Vinci and all the other great draftsmen of the past did so well was making the slow and meticulous work look nonchalant, flippant and effortless. It’s called sprezzatura.
Thank you! The paper is Fabriano Artistico watercolor hot press. The thinner kind, because it’s a little less toothy. And i toned it with watered down Sennelier ink. I mixed their walnut stain and grey to get a warmish grey tone. The ink has shellac in it as well so it can take a beating and hold the dry medium well
It’s a mixture of white chalk and gouache! The highlight just above her eyebrow is gouache. If you zoom in you can see the texture, it looks like paint
New to drawing. How do you get such perfect precise shading? Do you use special pens or is there a method behind it? When I use a pencil and brush it becomes a lot messier
I don’t blend with a brush to get a smooth gradient, it’s just a pencil with a long, needle-like tip to the graphite. Just be patient and work into the fibers of the paper so there’s no dots interrupting the form. As for smooth blends being overrated as the other commenter said, i half agree and disagree. In my opinion everything has its place in a drawing. Smooth blends suck when the entire drawing is one big smooth blur. But they can be so effective when paired with hatching, texture, contour and shape design. Drawings need moments of rest and moments of activity.
Stop brushing pencils on anything less than 18x24. On big formats like that, the scale of your strokes is smaller than any possible blend, so it works. On small formats, you're just smearing away your precision. Use a softer hand or softer graphite with ample patience.
Also, (all respect due to OP's excellent work) smooth blends are wildly overrated. I said what I said.
This drawing is done almost completely with a black prismacolor colerase pencil. There was a little bit of cleanup done with a 2h. I did some light blending on the forehead and other quickly turning momentswith a small synthetic round brush.
I used a black prismacolor col-erase pencil for nearly the whole drawing. A little bit of 2H to clean things up as well. If you want to go very, very dark, use Staedtler Mars Lumograph Black pencils. Those things are crazy
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u/link-navi May 27 '26
Thank you for your submission, u/Plane_Fail4664!
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