I heart graphite

I have always loved drawing with pencils. If you look at any notebook of mine from any age, I can guarantee the margins are filled with scribbles and doodles. My teachers used to get so very frustrated with me because I was always drawing.

I can't help it! Sitting and listening to a lecture and not doing anything makes my mind wander to far off universes, and I miss whatever is being taught. If instead I can sit and doodle, my mind has sufficient occupation to tether it to the here and now.

I remember checking out every "how to draw _____" book that our school library had to offer. My favorites were the horse books, and I filled countless sheets of paper with sketches of horses of every shape and size. I used up a lot of tracing paper before I was confident enough to try out my own hand. I used to be able to draw a really good horse - they're slightly less proportionate now, as I'm rather out of practice.

This hobby grew for quite some time, until I finally was given a sketchbook and invested in some quality pencils and charcoals, and for a while I happily sketched away. If you look through the book, you can see the phases - anime, disney, dresses, precious moments, whatever I liked I drew a lot of. It slacked off a bit in Germany, and since then I can only really think of two pieces I've done that were any kind of good.

The first was a Christmas present for my friend Justin. Here's the original picture - one of his favorites, for some reason, from his tour in Iraq.
Here's my rendition - all in pencils, on a heavier-weight but otherwise regular computer paper.
I drew this in the fall of 2009, and it's the last ambitious thing I've attempted.

Until now.

I started working on this picture several months ago, after my best friend's wedding. I was her maid of honor, and as I was looking through the gorgeous pictures by Daniel Kim, I decided I wanted to draw one of them. This was one of my favorites - and one that didn't have a face for me to screw up. (you notice in Justin's picture, the majority of the facial details have some much-easier-to-draw object obscuring them?)


After months of inactivity, I decided to pull it out and finish it today. The sketch was completed, as was the shading of my dress and Taryn's arms, but none of her dress or the background had been touched. A few hours later, voila!

On the whole, it was a much less ambitious work than the drawing of Justin. However, I love dresses and textures, and although the scanner doesn't quite do it justice, I am happy with the results. Last time, I sent off the original without getting a high-quality scan, so the only copy I have is what is posted on facebook (shown here). This time, I will not make that mistake!

Drawing is so relaxing. It's painstaking and I'm kind of a perfectionist, so it absorbs my entire attention for hours at a time, nothing but me and the pencil, my dear erasers and my most favoritest linen blending stub. The sketching is fun, the inking intimidating, and the shading so satisfying. As Rebekah said, "it's like all your troubles get whisked away in the swish of lead on paper."

I'm hopeless with colors, or pretty much any other medium. There's something about pencil lead that just works in my brain in a way that paints, pastels, crayons, or colored pencils don't. I love my world all in shades of gray.

(also, bonus points if you can spot the one major change between the last two pictures!)