3rd entry for May 13, 3013

These are a 25-minute study and two 30-40 minute ones below. The in the gallery they use a strong cold LED spotlight which generates fairly harsh shadows.
It is a dramatic effect, and in the last one in particular, Zia was exploiting that in her pose choice.
The top study is 8B woodless graphite pencil on 18 x 24" Canson XL Drawing paper. The lower two are on 18 x 24" sheets of 120lb Maidstone rag paper that was prepared with a loosely blended layer of chalk pastel. The drawing on top is done with a black Prismacolour pencil, whose blackness worked well atop the chalk backgrounds. It was finer-grained than compressed charcoal and darker than graphite , which I have previously tried on this sort of prepared surface. There is also some erasing in the middle back view of Zia, which is always an option with a tonal underlayer.
The looser handling of the smudging makes a nice counterpoint to a more controlled rendering.