The Art Table—Graphite

06 Dec The Art Table—Graphite

I’ve been working on different illustration ideas for my book, The Oghalon Chronicles, for the past year, and my medium of choice was graphite. I love the feel of the pencil in my trained hand, as it glides across the smooth surface of the paper. My paper of choice for this project was bristol board, which has a very smooth surface. I still like some tooth, just enough to give it a textural feel, and bristol board fits the bill nicely. For lead weights in my pencils, I tend to use 2B, 3B and 6B because they add the dark values quickly. I do like the H leads when I need a hard edge, or to layout a sketch, but tend to stick with the B’s the most.

This particular drawing, the swan, is going to be part of my title page for every chapter (there is also another P.O.V. character, in which a bear will be part of the title page). I’m still working on an embellishment that will sit in between two identical swans, but once that is completed, I will post a layout of what an example title chapter page will look like.

I had originally created a swan with a crown, but I wasn’t happy with the results. It was too static and quite frankly, very ho, hum. I wanted the swan to have some human qualities because my protagonist, Hayley changes into one.

The way that I accomplished this was to show movement with the body and by making the feathers wispy and dramatic. Also, I replaced the swan’s eyes with the characters eyes (this is true in the story). For the final touch I lifted the foot, as if she were dancing. Swan feet, I discovered are not the daintiest of feet, so I used a little Illustrator magic. All in all, I’m pretty happy with the results.

What do you think?

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