Today was unusual in that I got to join the Sunday evening figure drawing group at Whitaker Printmakers.. It was nice to see lots of familiar faces. I wasn’t sure how much room there would be to draw or paint, so I just took my iPad and figured I would be able to sketch with the least fuss.

I’m still learning how to make what I intend with Procreate. I’ve been focusing on using the Narinder Pencil in Procreate. What I realized tonight is that it is really three different brushes (a linear pencil, a hard light charcoal, and a soft dark charcoal; each selected based on the angle of the pen.

I didn’t find that pressure made much difference once I got the angle right. I’m going to spend more time doodling with this brush to see if I can develop some more subtlety, transitioning between the edges, reliably getting the edge I want, and getting some value gradation. From these drawings, you can see I experimented with each of the three angles, and then attempted to merge all three into one drawing. I wouldn’t say that any of these (or the many not pictured) were entirely successful, but they were all good experiments.

The dark soft charcoal and light hard charcoal.

The line

And a little bit of all three:

I was so focused on manipulating the angle and pressure of the pen, that I really only got down basic shapes and values with these quick sketches. With more practice, I hope to be faster and more decisive. Then I would have time to do a highlight pass, and then work the value transition and the edges. I spent a fair amount of time cleaning up my line work as I went because I was ending up with a lot of ‘hairy’ lines as a I struggled to get the line where I wanted. More practice!