1st entry for Oct. 25, 2011

On the Tuesday, L-  was working over at Artists 25. As usual, I was fussing a fair bit over trying to set down her likeness, with slightly better th, from the top,an usual success.
These are, from the top, 3 studies on 18 x 24" sheets of bond paper.  The topmost one is all done with a hard U-Art compressed charcoal stick.
The three below are a mix of the U-art stick and Nobel `Super Sketching Sticks' (made with ` special carbon'). Th bottom one is on an 18 x 24" sheet of cartridge paper.
The Nobel charcoal sticks are small, very flat and narrow rhombus-shaped sticks. They are at once hard and more brittle than they ought to be, but do deliver a very fine-grained charcoal mark. I found it helped fill in some of the very light values in these studies.