Painting With Graphite

“Practicing an art, no matter how well or badly, is a way to make your soul grow, for heaven’s sake.
Sing in the shower. Dance to the radio. Tell stories. Write a poem to a friend, even a lousy poem. Do it as well as you possibly can. You will get an enormous reward. You will have created something.”

― Kurt Vonnegut

 

Intro
Tools & Methods
Process

I’ve been drawn to working in graphite for as long as I can remember. When I was a kid it was simply what I always had on hand at school to doodle with during classes, bored and lost in my own imagination. There was no better feeling than getting  a brand new box of finely sharpened yellow HB pencils and filling my zippered binder pouch with them, knowing they would save me from the boredom of countless school days to come.

Later in adulthood, I explored dozens of different mediums but always came back to the humble pencil. No other medium feels so simple, so delicate, so powerful. Graphite is at once both intimate and immediate.

Love affair aside, graphite can still be quite a frustrating medium. I love that it’s a lot cleaner to use than charcoal, but always felt disappointed that I couldn’t get my darks as deep and rich as I wanted to with graphite. Graphite actually has a lot of shine to it when it is heavily applied to paper, so the dark areas such as eyes and shadows would reflect the light and drive me crazy.

I want the darks to recede, not stand out so garishly when viewed at an angle. At one point I tried using graphite powder to cover large areas of darks by applying it with a dry brush to sort of avoid that shiny effect, but you can imagine the giant mess all of that finely ground pencil lead created in the tiny apartments I’ve lived in over the years.

Overwhelmed by these hurdles, I continued to explore other artmaking tools, figuring I just hadn’t found “my thing” yet.

Thus my journey into watercolors and gouache began, and I spent a couple of years learning about color theory, paper quality, pigment characteristics, and specific techniques. Painting became a real joy and I loved that my work was becoming more colorful, but still I found myself scribbling on scrap paper with graphite and getting lost in the process like I had all those years ago as a kid.

It wasn’t until I started painting a watercolor sketch one day that I realized–oh! In the areas where I’d scribbled heavy amount of graphite, my brush was picking it up and smearing it around the page very much like it would with a watercolor pigment. I knew that graphite smudged when it was wet like this, but I never considered how intentionally “painting” with graphite could be a useful technique rather than an unwanted side effect of not erasing your sketch layer before starting a painting.

So I played around with wetting my pencil lines, laying down washes in my sketchbook. I soon realized that water soluble graphite pencils are a thing that are commonly sold in art stores–go figure! I scooped up a few of the darkest sticks of graphite I could find and got to work.

“Why not just paint with…well, paint?” you ask?

Honestly that’s a great question, and I have an answer! One of the qualities I love the most about graphite is the way it can be applied in delicate, soft layers with a smudging stump. I like using these paper stumps to blend the graphite onto the paper in a fast, loose way, creating erratic textures and sketching in the shapes of my subjects in the earliest stages of a piece. Each subsequent layer gets tighter and tighter as I use mechanical pencils, various erasers–and now painted graphite–to refine details and get crisp outlines. Watercolor allows for those nice layers, but you can’t erase it! This is just the way I’ve personally evolved to work over the years, and I’m sure it’ll continue to change overtime as I learn new techniques.

Anyway, if you are curious about my process and/or might want to try out water soluble graphite in your own work, read on for the tools and methods I use in the next section. Beyond that I go in depth on some of my recent drawings and explain a bit about how I paint with graphite to achieve the textures, lines, and forms I enjoy so much.

Painting With Graphite: Pros

• No graphite glare. Easily my favorite thing about it!
• Layers are relatively permanent, which allows for interesting transparent effects
• Using a brush allows for more varied line widths than a pencil nib
• Can cover larger areas at once
• Can apply more graphite to wet areas of the paper for “blooming” effects similar to watercolor
• Easy to use with masking fluid (remember to use an old brush to apply it!)
• WAY less messy than using graphite powder
• Doesn’t ruin brushes in any way (just be sure to rinse before using the same brushes for paint!)
• Great for outdoor sketching when you don’t want to bring paints but want nice washes for value studies

 

Painting With Graphite: Cons

• Does not fully erase once applied to paper
• Takes 4+ layers to get really dark, even backgrounds

Clearly the pros vastly outweigh the cons for me, and the latter aren’t ever much of an issue at all. There really is no special trick here, other than making sure to preserve the lightest areas of your piece since the graphite will not fully erase. Even if you apply the water soluble graphite too dark in an area, you can thin it out to a lighter value by simply going over it with a damp brush.

Below are some tips for getting started.

 

TOOLS & METHODS

 

 

Tools

1. Cretacolor Graphitone water soluble graphite, 8B, or any other brand really (Lyra is another brand, pictured here)
2. Mechanical pencil with 2B lead (any brand, but I use and love Pentel)
3. Princeton Velvetouch brushes, any size but I like sizes 4, 6 and 10 Rounds with the short handles
4. Fabriano Artistico Hot Press paper as a professional option, Stillman & Birm sketchbooks for playing around in. Those are just my preferences; use what you’ve got.

 

Methods

1. Graphite on dry paper

I use this method the least because it can be quite unpredictable, but it works just fine for large background areas. You just scribble your graphite onto your dry paper, wet a brush, and smooth it all out. This usually takes a few layers (letting the paper dry fully in between). The graphite does have the tendency to reactivate when it’s rewetted, so it’s important to use a light touch with your brush when applying new layers.

2. Graphite on wet paper

Similar to the first method, I only use this technique when I am filling in large backgrounds or am working in my sketchbook where I don’t mind a loose, unpredictable style.

 

 

3. Graphite applied from palette

This is the method I use the most often, as it is much easier to control. I just take the stick of graphite and scribble it into a container to grind it down. Here I am using an oyster shell I collected from a beach on a recent trip to Canada, simply because I had it lying around and it feels really nice to hold in my hand while I work! Before that I was using a little ceramic jar from a thrift store.

Once the graphite is ground down into your vessel of choice, you can take a wet brush to pick up the graphite and apply it to your paper like you would with watercolor. 

Because this graphite is, well, water soluble, it behaves quite like watercolor pigments. Which means you can do cool wet-on-wet techniques like “charging”, where you add more pigment to an area of the paper that is still wet to create the blooming sort of textures pictured below.

Once you get your dark areas in with water-soluble graphite washes, you can finish up the finer details with a regular pencil. I like to do this with details like tiny hairs, soft flyaway feathers, and crunchy lichen or branch texture (see more in the following section).

 

 

Process

 

Lately I’ve been working on some owl portraits using both traditional and painted graphite techniques. I started drawing them in using a combination of the smudge stick and a pencil with 2B lead (softer than the common HB and easier to smudge).

Once I was ready to add the middle and darkest values, I busted out my handy oyster shell full of graphite, sprayed it with a bit of water to reactivate it, swished my (damp) brush around in it, and applied it in thin washes to the areas of my paper I intended to darken. The shadow beneath this Barred Owl’s wing and her deep soulful eyes are two notable areas where I focused these dark washes in.

For other pieces, like these Western Grebes (still in the very earliest stage!), I sketched the basic composition in pencil, taped the edges with masking tape, then applied the dark graphite with a brush in layers. They’ll look incredibly messy and you won’t know what the hell you’re doing at first, but after 4-5 layers the background will even out quite a bit. I still have another layer or two to go at this point. 

For this piece I experimented using liquid masking fluid (also called frisket) to preserve some of the water droplets, unsure whether or not this technique would work with graphite…

Lo and behold! The liquefied graphite glided right over the masked areas, which in turn were super simple to rub off with a clean kneaded eraser! Some of the water droplets aren’t very defined because i was too impatient and didn’t let the masking fluid fully dry before applying my graphite wash on the background. Lesson learned! And that will be easy to fix by either just filling in the drops with more graphite like they never existed in the first place, or using white paint to enhance them.

CONCLUSION

Discovering the versatility and efficiency of working with graphite this way has really expanded my creative process and made it a whole lot more enjoyable. I love that I can still get all of the tiny details that add so much character to my wildlife portraits without the shiny glare from using regular pencils for darker areas. The higher contrast creates more drama, and I’m looking forward to pushing this quality a lot more in future pieces.

I am currently working on a couple of very large 22″ x 30″ illustrations using this method.  Follow along on Instagram  and Cara for behind the scenes photos and videos as they progress.

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Onward,

Jenn