Learning pencils

So far my penciling skills have been limited to simple sketching (lines and shitty shading, haha). So I really wanted to get into that realistic jazz! And what luck, we have/had artists in our family who left us with several boxes full of pencils, charcoal, charcoalpencils, white and black chalk, a sharpeningknife aaand lots of paint and other stuff, which I will be trying out in a while as well. I don't know why I never bothered to learn about the traditional media in a proper way, pff... Went digital at 14 and never decided to look back?

I decided to start with a start-up sketch in my own lazy "good enough as base" sketchingstyle so you will hopefully be able to see my progress. Source (hahaaa... looking back, it has pretty obvious mistakes).

Gentl erased the sketch and added cleaner lines and some basic shade.

Looked up more tutorials sice the second phase. I loved the idea of using regular graphite pencils for the light areas and charcoal to get the dark spots really dark. Didn't have a tortillon so made one from soft paper. Wish I had heard of these earlier!

Lovelovelove charcoal filled pencils!

Oh and I tried some other techniques and materials before filling the face, so for the sake of completeness I will add some of the scribbles.

Aaaand then I got to the hair... I will get back to that some other day, gonna try other media first.

Continuing pencils
Looking more into penciltypes and hardness as well as shading techniques now. I constantly find myself using the same techniques gah... Crosshatching always feels so messy, so everytime I use it, I get frustrated and throw it away instead of saving it as reference crapcrapcrap!

More shading and stuff.

Gotta learn how to create different textures! And more use of linethickness.