In this simple skills lesson, I’ll be going over the basics of creating a smoother tone in pencil without using smudging techniques or damaging the paper.
Materials
- Paper
- Pencils
- Kneadable eraser
Process
- Start by lightly shading in the shadow element of the rectangular panel.
- Don’t press too hard at any stage as this will crush down the tooth of the paper and create a shiny surface.
- Keep going over this swatch in light passes.
- Eventually the tone will get darker and darker.
- However, you will notice that the specklediness gets more noticeable. This is because you are only shading the raised parts of the paper’s tooth.
- In order to smooth the swatch out more, you will need to get the fine tip of your pencil to get into the valley’s of the paper’s tooth.
- You can do this by rotating the pencil in your fingers and changing the position of the pencil relative to the paper.
- Keep darkening any lighter patches and gradually the tone will get smoother.
- You can keep doing this for as long as you like (or until you’re happy with the smoothness!)
