I am rather proud of the fact that I have been able to sustain my plan for a daily (or more correctly, “nightly”) drawing session. It has become almost a matter of routine now and, apart from any benefit I might gain from this exercise from a technical point of view, I feel that I am able to sustain an active engagement with art which is otherwise being subverted by our preparations to move house. The process involves learning at a number of levels going beyond the basic exercise of drawing.
For the most part I have been working with graphite pencils. A couple of nights ago, however, by accident I picked out of the jar in which these things are kept an item made by the Swiss firm Caran D’Ache. It looks like a pencil, although I discovered very rapidly that it doesn’t behave like one. At first my central concern was to get right the perspective of the object I was drawing (actually, my tool box). It was not long, however, before I began to notice that the instrument with which I was drawing was behaving in a very different manner from the graphite to which I was accustomed. It is not easy to be specific about these differences, but it felt a great deal harder. Somehow graduated shading was more difficult to regulate, as was variation in the weight of a line.
To my surprise, I thought that the experience was very uncomfortable, and I abandoned the task before I had completed it.
Probably it is the case that had I persisted with this new medium I would have adapted to it, and learned to control it more expertly. I want to move on, however, to using colour instead of just black and white, and for that task I have in mind a very good set of Derwent pencils. It has been interesting to discover, however, what a difference can be made by what appear at first to be quite minor differences in the medium one is using.