Pencil Drawing

Echo Park drawn from studio window

As a young architecture student my older cousin and mentor architect Bill Clark introduced me to Theodore Kautzky’s Pencil Broadsides. This introduced me to drawing with a chisel point and was an interesting approach, but I was ore attracted to the fluidity of draftsman like Rico Lebrun and others.  These two drawings were done while at Cal in the mid-1960s using chisel points and the other by softening the edges with an eraser.

I seldom draw in pencil today seeming to prefer either rolling ball or technical type pens or traditional dip pens and ink.  This is probably because I can get blacker blacks with ink and I love pushing the value range from the whitest whites to the darkest blacks.  Nevertheless I sometimes do quick sketches using a thick pencil combined with color markers or watercolor washes.  Here the texture of the graphite can provide appealing contrast with the smooth color wash beneath as seen in these two flower studies.