From the course: Drawing Foundations: Fundamentals

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How to get the best tone from your pencils

How to get the best tone from your pencils

From the course: Drawing Foundations: Fundamentals

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How to get the best tone from your pencils

I'm going to show you how I sharpen a pencil that's got a longer lead. Which means you have more time drawing, and less time sharpening. And a quick illustration of the different tones that you can achieve with the different pencils. It's when you're sharpening your pencils you got a couple of options. The first one is a pencil sharpener. So this always sharpens and it gives a nice round tip to them. But I can find sometimes they're quite unreliable to get a really perfect edge. So on here you can see, part of it is sharpened really nicely, and parts of it is just, is very, very fine. It's not completely even all the way around. So what I like to do, is to sharpen my pencils with a craft knife, and this just enables me to get a bit more control with the lead, and just to get a longer lead on the natural pencil. So what I do, is I always work away from myself. And I just twist the pencil around. Because this is quite a hard lead, this one is a 2B. You can then start to sculpt the lead…

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