The Amazing Pencil!

For ArTuesday, I want to talk about my favorite drawing tool, and one of the main attributes that makes it so cool for drawing: The Amazing Pencil!

Everybody knows how to draw with a pencil, right?

Something I often see kids (and adults) fail to notice about the pencil is the wide range of marks it can make. Take light and dark marks, for example:

What if you combine the light and dark marks? You can get such a wonderful variety of marks—and really awesome hair!

In art classes, you often have to make a bar like this one to prove that you know how to make different values with your pencil:

That's pretty boring! What if you were to draw, say, a fox, with and without dark and light lines?

Now you can start to see the difference that occurs when you use those light and dark and varied (hair-like) marks!

I like this exercise:

1. Draw a scribble:

2. Start to fill in some of the corners you see with a dark-to light gradation:

3. Keep going!

(I could spend a lot of hours on something like this—how about you?)

So... take out your pencil and try varying the lines. Try shading something. Try filling in the corners of a scribble! And HAVE FUN! Hooray for the Amazing Pencil!