Thing # 11 - Tagging a blog entry

Hi all,

This time the task is to write a blog entry about a hobby and then tag it. Well, one of my hobbies is art. I've always enjoyed drawing, and have worked primarily with graphite, although I've recently started with color pencils and watercolor pencils which I enjoy greatly. Initially, my graphite technique was to use very soft pencils. At the time, a very long time ago, I was not familiar with the large ranges of hard and soft pencils. I taught myself by doing, and I liked soft pencils because I could then use my fingers to get the shadings by smearing the graphite I had just put on the paper. This was a very intuitive way to work with graphite, and I could get good results quickly and easily. Much later I visited art stores on a regular basis and became familiar with various kinds of pencils. I bought my first set of full range graphite pencils (9H - 9B) only several years ago, and began working with them. At first, as can be expected, I favored the softer pencils. The B set (B - 9B) are the softer ones and the H set (H - 9H) are the harder ones. Then there is also HB and F, which fall in between. Using the softer pencils at first allowed me to transition from the method I was used to of using one very soft pencil with the smearing technique to produce the complete picture to using several softer pencils as a limited grayscale palette, while still relying on the smearing technique for blending and getting lighter grayscale shades. Eventually, I got used to the feel of changing pencils and of looking for the pencil that most accurately could replicate the shade I needed, and I could then broaden my selected pencils to include the harder ones on the palette to produce the lighter shades and to get crisper edges for lines. Practice, as they say, makes perfect, and my transitioning to a full palette including all graphite grayscale shades was complete.

Bye for now.