Diane Cardaci   Comment Posted Oct.21st, 2009, viewed 7 times

John,
You may want to start out then with a smoother paper, which would be a hot press/plate finish paper. Once you feel very comfortable with controlling your values, you can start experimenting with different textures.

The trick would be, if you want to use the coarser paper, to do a lot of squinting. When you squint, it'll "smooth" out the values.

Paper should be an asset to your drawing--I tend to use smooth papers because I love detail work, but in some drawings I use coarser papers because I want to take advantage of the texture. Again, that is why it is so important to experiment.

So, my advice is, if it is feeling a bit too frustrating, use the smooth paper so you will only be focusing on the value issues.