Cindy Wider   Comment Posted Aug.10th, 2009, viewed 5 times

Hi Darla, beautiful work here with your pencil techniques. In general you have done very well all round and I just have a few little suggestions to help you improve even more;

Broad strokes; these are good, but you could draw this stroke a little more confidently and a bit more quickly to gain a neater result. I can see you did get more confident as you made your way accross, the ones on the right look best.

Smooth shading; this is possibly the most important stroke of all to master as we use this one alot in the next unit 'shade.' Your pencil appears a little scratchy, if it is, just re-sharpen your pencil and rub it a fair bit on scrap paper to dislodge the particle that is causing the scratch. You have done well with this section but I would also like to see some more (make sure you don't blend it with the cotton bud) just to see this stroke more clearly.

Chisel point; these are quite good but the base is a bit narrow. This can be caused by one of two things; either you haven't prepared a large enough tip to begin with or..you aren't placing the large flat area onto your paper correctly to begin with. Please double check these things and to create a larger ellipse shape on the end of your pencil you need to drop your pencil closer to the table surface (ie: less of an angle off the surface of the sandpaper.) Use that exact same angle to place your pencil on the paper before you stroke the page.

your fine lines, hatching and cross hatching are all quite good. You need a little more practice with hatching and then your strokes will appear confident. The main thing you need to concentrate on with hatching is that the lines taper and are equidistant apart.

All round great work Darla!