ACEO Flower No. 18: Stage 7 and a Few of My Tools

Here the drawing is almost complete, just a little more at the bottom. Again, the background is done as a bokeh - seems like I'm getting addicted to it. I found that using a nylon brush with its bristles sort of dulled down from extensive use, like the second one in the picture below, produces rich darks making it perfect for creating bokeh.

From the top: a small, flat brush; dull #2 nylon brush; #4 Reeves brush; #2 Reeves brush; #000 Berkeley round brush and a #13 (I think - the number has faded out) Reeves mop brush

A couple of posts ago, I said I'll snap some pictures of my tools and share them with you here. Okay, here it goes: the one on the top is frequently used for general applications of graphite or charcoal, making it my main brush. The third, fourth and sixth are pony hair brushes which I use to lay initial layers of tones. The smallest one, I use to render small areas.

 

From the top: 8B Goldfaber Faber-Castell pencil; 8B Mars Lumograph Staedtler pencil ; 0.5 mm mechanical pencil loaded with 2B Faber- Castell lead; 0.5 mm mechanical pencil loaded with 2B Dong-A lead; Medium Faber-Castell charcoal pencil; empty felt-tipped color pen and two kinds of erasers, a kneaded eraser and stick eraser

I scrape the 8B Faber-Castell pencil to make the powder I use to apply to my drawings. In addition, I use powder from the Staedtler pencil to produce the darkest darks in graphite or charcoal drawings. Since it has very little glare compared to Faber-Castell's 8B, I also use it with charcoal to push the dark values even further. Two 0.5 mm 2B mechanical pencils loaded with the same grade of leads but different brands are for general detailing. Dong-A's 2B lead makes dark tones similar to a Faber-Castell 8B wooden pencil. Next is a medium charcoal pencil. I do the same with it, scraping it down to a fine powder. Most of the time I use a brush for blending, but for rendering edges or very small areas, I found blending with an empty felt-tipped pen works well. Finally, two kinds of erasers are in my drawing tools, a kneaded eraser which is quite handy to reach those edges or small areas that need highlights or erasing and a stick eraser in a dispenser which could be used to create larger and sharper streaks of highlights.

There you have it, these are basically all the tools I use for my drawings. Have a nice day!