I don’t draw and sketch as much as I want to, but last weekend I put together a little kit that may change that. In it I put:

• a piece of willow charcoal
• a piece of compressed charcoal
• a sharpened 6B pencil
• white oil pastel
• a black soft pastel
• a white soft pastel
• a good eraser

This was very satisfying to work with and for me overcame the tediousness of charcoal or pencil alone. Whites are easy to add back in, and the blacks will get black enough. Afterwards I sprayed it with this Spetrafix Degas Fixative.

In this post you can see the two resulting images, quickly achieved.

I’ll be doing more of this. Maybe you want to give it a try too.