One of my fondest memories of art school was doing subtractive charcoal sketching in Drawing 1. We started by covering white drawing paper with an even coat of medium grey vine charcoal. Then we made our drawings by erasing the light areas of the subject rather than drawing in the dark areas. Once some dark charcoal was added for the shadows and some white conte crayon drawn on for the highlights, the result was sfumato, a smoky blend of shades first made popular during the Renaissance.
On my last visit to an art supply store, I picked up a sketchbook of grey paper. I had some white ink from a set I bought awhile back, and I thought it would be fun to start with a mid-toned backdrop and work out into darks and lights from the middle rather than starting with light and adding color and darkness.
I’m pleased with the result. It was tricky to cross-hatch the lighter squares of the leaf rather than the darker squares (adding white ink making them lighter than the single-hatched darker parts). But otherwise this was a familiar process creating an unfamiliar result. Of all the ghosts so far, this is in many ways the most ghostly.
Notes on materials: the inks are Winsor & Newton White and Black Indian Ink. Because my usual 2H pencil was hard to see on the grey paper, I did the undersketch using a 4B.
The next time I return to this paper and these inks, I think I’ll switch and see how well the white works in the background.
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