Discovering the Mighty Pencil

I’ve been going through my sketchbooks I’ve filled over the last four years. All of them have one thing in common - not a single sketch was done in pencil. I have always been a proud “hater” of pencil. Every time people asked me if I sketch in pencil before I ink my drawings, I would triumphantly say “no!”. The quicker the sketch, the better. Doing a pre-sketch in pencil would slow me down. 
So why did I pick up a pencil for the first time in four years?
This year I decided I wanted to get better at faces. They are REALLY HARD and so easy to get wrong. After some disastrous attempts in ink, Maa suggested I try them in pencil. A pencil? What’s that?!
The faces turned out okay (better than in ink), but what really surprised me was how much I enjoyed sketching with the pencils. 

Two Cretacolor pencils I got free from the Urban Sketchers symposium goodie bag in 2016. 

Compact tool for on-location drawing: With other materials, there is always a degree of complexity that you need to think about when planning to go on location. Dip pen and ink? You need to take your dip pen and a separate bottle of ink, as well as tissues to clean up spills. Fountain pen? Unless a very quick sketch, you either need to carry cartridge refills or an ink pot to refill your pen. But a pencil, if adequately sharpened (with a pen knife, not a sharpener), can last several drawings and can be shoved into a bag pack on its own. 

The range of tones made the pencil fun to sketch with. Easier to block in shadows and values. 

Range of tones: Yes, ink is bold and fun. But I found that pencils give me a range of values that I will still need several years to build up the skill to replicate in ink. 

A sketch that I would have thought three, four, five times about attempting with a pen.

Forgiving: This is an obvious one, but a pencil is much more forgiving than a pen. I will probably still never use an eraser, but even then I found pencils a nicer tool to work with when I’m drawing subjects I’m not comfortable with (people, faces). This means I’m more likely to draw them and get better at these subjects. I also found a pencil easier to control than a pen. You can always predict what the line on your page is going to look like when you put pencil to paper. This can be bad or good, but in the case of faces I found it to be a definite plus.

More playful, less dictated: This is not pencil-specific. I think when you spend years using only a couple of tools, you become very comfortable with them but you also get into a certain way of thinking about subjects. For me, the knowledge that I am using a dip pen dictates the way I think about a sketch I’m about to do to a certain extent. Using something you are not familiar with forces you to abandon your personal, traditional rules of drawing. 

This sketch of Trafalgar Square would certainly have looked different if I had used a pen.

I will probably still never pencil my drawings before I ink over them (still too lazy!), and I’m not sure a pencil will ever replace my pen’s primary role in my toolbox. But I am confident it has earned its permanent place there in its own right. 

- SANJUKTA