Two stages.
First: Carve back the wood and expose lead.
Second: Point/Shape the lead.
Carving is done with a knife or with specialist sharpners that just take off the wood. Pointing can be done with sandpaper or a lead pointer. Leaving a lot of lead exposed lets you repoint a number of times without carving. Repoint often. ( See T. French's discussion of drafting pencils ) - Personally I use sandpaper on a flat block and a BIG FAT MACHETE (box cutter).
Resulting in this (give or take, mine are cute blue cased ^.^ ):
Thanks to LeadHolder.com for the hotlinked images and for teaching me all that (and too much else about pencils), this's helped my style of life drawing immensly so I thought to share.
I use regular pencils for sketching - sketching as in, not things I'm planning to ink. The sheer, er, sketchiness of sketches means I don't have to re-sharpen very often at all (which is good because the only nice, electric sharpener is downstairs and I draw upstairs). For regular pictures I love using a photo-blue mechanical pencil... so easy.
The Use of The Pencil wrote:Never entertain the thought that poor penciling may be corrected in tracing.
OBEY THE USE OF THE PENCIL!
- oh wait, you're talking about sketching. Um. That's allowed then. THIS TIME.
*ahem*
Mechanical pencils are awesome but can't shade - which for life drawing is a bitch and a half. I've tried point shading but it's sooooooo hard ;-; Also, I'm actually finding my big lead pencils to be sharper at the point than thin mechanicals, I'm not sure why. Maybe I'm more intimate with the point or something...
Anyway, I'll stop now, talking too much about pencils gives me the urge to turn my collar up.
Cool! If I weren't so utterly attached to mechanical pencils, I might give this a shot. The result actually looks like a pencil that wouldn't annoy me with its dull bluntless like regular pencils do.
..ack, let me explain. I don't use pencils for my current comic unless I'm roughing out a complex character pose or something. But I do use pencils for my school projects, and mechanical pencils are the devil. Great for writing, sucky for drawing. I like my pencil lines to be somewhat dull and soft rather than razor-sharp.
The only sucky thing about mechanical pencils is that you CAN'T sharpen them, and sometimes the focal point of the lead shifts around when you're drawing something. It's not SO bad, though. It only bugs me because I draw on normal paper with tiny tiny boxes.
I'm with the mechanicals pencils, too.
However, sometimes they stop working properly and it starts a succession of leads breakage, which only can ends in the buying of a new pencil. O__o
I do my shading with mechanical pencils via parallel lines, ala Fred Gallagher. It may look dodgy in the begining, but the end-result looks pretty good.
LAGtheNoggin wrote:
Mechanical pencils are awesome but can't shade - which for life drawing is a bitch and a half.
I like shading with mechanical pencils because they are highly smudge able. I just do some thick scrubbles where I want the dark and blah blah blah. Then bust out the old eraser+ eraser shield to romove the excess smudge.
I tend to use mechanical pencils 'cuz they're easy, too - but I like the feel of a good wooden pencil... but if I had that much of my lead exposed, it would snap in a fraggin' second:
LAGtheNoggin wrote:
Maybe I press to hard... but that's how I draw, damnit!
The lead's actually pretty solid, I haven't snapped one yet and I've had one loose and thrown around in my bag for ages. Of course it's blunt as heck now but no breakage. I haven't tried putting a lot of pressure on them though:
Random Old Concept Artist wrote:
There are two rules in drawing.
The first rule of drawing is: You draw lightly.
The second rule of drawing is: You draw lightly.
And smudge sticks I can't get used to. The above Random Old Concept Artist raves about them so I have tried, but ehhh, give me a selection of graded pencils any day.
I'm curious. Is it necessary to expose the lead so much in order to get a sharper pencil? I used to use ordinary pencil a lot because it doesn't press the paper hard compare to mechanical pencil. But I've been using mechanical pencil to draw and shade since a few years ago. I'm pretty picky with the type of mechanical pencil I used these days. I find that the ones with a metal head, shorter cone-shaped slope on the tip, with a bit of weight at the tip, and a soft rubber coating for easy holding are best suited for drawing.
The way I understand sharpening with sandpaper, the idea is to sharpen it at an angle, therefore part of the pencil has a very sharp point, and the other side has a wide surface area for thick lines and shading.
