Was doing a couple of pencil tonal studies in my sketchbook for some watercolours I’m working on, enjoyed doing them so much I got carried away and did a few more for the fun of it, very satisfying seeing the images emerge from the paper.

It’s a Moleskin 200gsm sketchbook, approx. 6″x4″ landscape. I used a Staedtler Mars 780 4B graphite pencil for the lightest applied tone and Mars Lumograph Black, 2B, 4B and 6B for the darker tones. These ‘Black” pencils have a higher proportion of carbon than normal graphite pencils giving a deep, matt, jet black coverage without the ‘shine’ you can get from normal graphite when applying the darkest tones.

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