Life-Drawing, February 2024

In my post last month about life-drawing I mentioned that the amount of oil used in the Faber-Castell Pitt sanguine pencil meant that I couldn’t get the tonal variation from it that I could from graphite pencils.

I ordered myself an oil-free sanguine pencil, but then — as often happens — discovered I already had an alternative buried in one of my many art supplies boxes!

So this past weekend’s life-drawings are drawn with a Conté à Paris sanguine pencil, an oil-free pencil.

Conté à Paris produce a range of different shades: Sanguine, Sanguine XVIII (a much redder colour), Sanguine Medicis (a darker version of the sanguine), as well as a Sepia (more accurately described as burnt umber) and a White. This weekend’s drawings use their standard Sanguine pencil.

The lack of oil in the lead does make it much easier to produce tonal variations, but the trade-off is that sharpening them — and keeping them sharp — is much more difficult. The chalky lead is understandably brittle from the lack of oil, and has a tendency to snap in a pencil sharpener, so they’re best sharpened with a scalpel.

I tried two different approaches to become a bit more familiar with the chalkier sanguine pencils.

In the first drawing (a single 30-minute pose) I didn’t use any blending or smudging, and kept the drawing fairly loose and quick.

In the second drawing (two 30-minute poses with a break between) I heavily blended the shading, a technique which I found worked much better on the lightest shadows than it did on the darker ones.

I’ll continue using the Conté à Paris sanguine pencil over the next few weeks to get used to it a bit more.

Both drawings were drawn on A2 Hahnemühle Nostalgie 190gsm paper, then cropped down to A3 size.