A starter kit for anyone who wants to learn how to draw is paper, pencil, and eraser. The arsenal for conveying light and shadow is quite wide: crisp and blurred lines, spots, surfaces, texture. Soft and strong contrast is achieved by hatching and stretching.
Stretching is done with paper napkins, sponges, special brushes and sticks, sometimes with fingers. But the classic level is the use of hatching (the lines are located very close to each other). Regardless of the approach, tone, composition, and overall impression will always be key.
Pencil, charcoal and pastel are soft materials. They are called soft precisely because they are easy to apply and are not too fixed on paper. It is possible to use paper of different grains and tones. Depends on the texture, how exactly the tone will lie on the surface.
Materials are divided into a base (pastel and watercolor paper, cotton, kraft, cardboard) and tools:
- pencil: simple and colored. Colored erase worse, colored can be simple and watercolor (that is, when you add water will spread like watercolor);
- Charcoal: Pressed charcoal differs from charcoal in its rich blackness and greasiness and comes in the form of pencils. On tinted or graph paper, pressed charcoal is friendly with chalk;
- pastel: the widest range of colors, easy to mix together, comes in hard, soft, ultra-soft, watercolor and oil; applied on a textured surface;
- sanguine: reddish-red color and velvety texture. If you wet the sheet and press it against the drawing, you can get a mirror-like print;
- Sauce and Sepia: a natural earthy color, can be diluted with water and drawn with a brush and eraser after drying.
Soft materials are easy to erase (except oil pastels), which is very liberating and teaches you to see the beauty in every line and spot. After completion, require fixation (with a fixative, or hairspray, for example).