I’ve been enjoying the realistic graphite drawing course and I thought I’d bring my newly acquired skills into practice by drawing a portrait of one of my own cats. So far so good, but my cat’s fur is a mixture of white (or lighter coloured) and dark hairs (including black). On a separate piece of paper I’ve been trying to add different kinds of white (white charcoal, white soft pastel, white hard pastel, white coloured pencil, white gel pen) over graphite, but that doesn’t work. So far my solution has been to leave areas of white, or use my eraser pencils (for the whiskers), but is there any other way? For the finer hairs even the mono zero eraser pencil is too crude.
Thanks!
Edit: I’ve added my photo reference in case that helps. (the name on the photo is my partner’s, he took the picture) img_1_1624097256441|626x500
I wish I could take the credit, but this is the actual reference photo
I’m just wondering how to draw (or not draw) the white hairs between the dark ones.
i recently purchased and I think Matt may have shown them in a get sketchy episode a set of tools to carefully scratch lines in the paper before you apply graphite. Then when you make your marks the scratch marks are left without any graphite. Before i purchased the set i used the end of a paper clip .Try it on a practice sheet first to get the pressure right and see if you like the effect.
tom
Have you tried the edge of a white semi-hard pastel stick? I worked really hard on a picture of my Jack-Rat and because she is a white dog, I have used this after drawing her a darkish gray. I 1think it turned out well. I need to go ahead and sign it and post it here.
It was done with a stick (soft and semi-hard pastels. She is a Jack-Rat with a broken coat, so she has whiskers that are mostly around her face and neck (it was just a portrait. Even though I have not signed it, I will do so and maybe you can see how I used the edge of a semi-hard stick of the pastels to get it to look like her.
I posted a picture of my Jack-Rat, using the method I said earlier about spraying the soft pastels so that you can use a hard pastel (on its edge), or possibly pastel pencils if you like them better. I hope this helps you with white hair. It is named Cracker or CrackerHead.
I figured out a method that works for me, may not be the preferred method but a like the results. I use a fine mechanical pencil end with no graphite and indent the paper with it and the graphite will not fill it in leaving the white behind. This method was used many times in this piece. Hope this helps.
I’ve seen people use an X-
Acto knife tip rip/scrape off the top layer of paper to make stray hairs in super fine lines. That’s most often with colored pencil. You can get the electric eraser, which is like a mono zero but it spins upper fast, if you start with a new eraser in it with a squared off tip (opposed to used until it’s a cone or ball shape with no edge), you can spin it up then lightly zoom an arc over where you want the whisker and should give you good results. The X-Acto knife scraping is for stray hairs that run off edge of page as a quick swipe isn’t quite so accurate.
Give this a shot, you won’t regret it, stick with the micro 2.3mm tips or get 2 of them and use one for larger eraser for big areas and one for the super fine details, can make a MUCH thinner line than the standard round mono erasers even though the plastic is the same size, it doesn’t vanish from spinning like the electric eraser does. It’s like a portable laser beam to remove material, even colored pencil.
Electric eraser would be my suggestion as well. Practice with it before using it on your drawing. They can be a bit challenging when you first try to make a thin line, especially a curved one.
