Mixed Media Drawing 

Value Strip: 

I attempted to make four value strips varying from dark to light with charcoal and ink wash.  

The first strip was with a charcoal stick that I shaded all evenly to start out but then added the first half darker blending into lighter, and in the second half, I erased some of it gradually to vary it from darker to lighter. The second strip was with a charcoal pencil and this time I started from straight darker to lighter, and I immediately realized that it was harder to get charcoal lighter without erasing, so I just used a white charcoal pencil to make it much lighter. For the third one, I tried my best to use ink wash for the value strip, and I found it was difficult to make it lighter when ink, no matter what you put on is generally the same color, so I struggle with this one the most, even though I tried. And for the last one, I just took the tool that was used for drawing the ink, and I just put more streaks on the darker parts and fewer streaks on the lighter parts.  

My Cat Pebbles: 

For this drawing, I took a photo of my cat Pebbles who was laying on my bed.  I then edited this photo to black and white and attempted to draw it on a larger piece of paper than I am used to. I grided both the paper and the drawing into squares, and then I tried to match those squares as closely as possible. 

I used ink wash, and various charcoal, including black and white charcoal pencils, and black and white charcoal sticks. I also used tortillons for shading.  

I ended up starting from top to bottom, coloring in the squares very carefully and precisely. I quickly found out how difficult it was to get the charcoal color right without using a lot of it. I had to burnish the charcoal like four or five times over with the stick to get the really black parts, and I did the same for some of the really white parts. Another thing that I realized was difficult was how to make a lot of the white hair on my cat pop without having a black base. So I erased and re-drew those parts many times to make the hair streaks pop, and get them just right. Then for the last material I used, ink wash, I decided to incorporate it into the eye's pupols, and the nostrils. It make those two features really stick out, and this was good because the eyes are usually supposed to stick out. All in all, I was very proud of the artwork, it had a lot of detail and I was really proud of it. But most of all it legitimately looked like my cat Pebbles.