Weekly Theme: Favorite Art Supplies

For sketching, I love to use nice, soft 4B graphite pencils on tracing vellum. I keep a fistful of pencils ready, so when one point dulls, I have sharp ones ready to go. My favorite vellum is Clearprint Design Vellum. It's translucent, but not so thin that marks on different layers are distracting. It is 100% cotton fiber, erases beautifully and scans nice and sharp. I love the tooth, it's a nice tug against the soft pencil.

I draw as if I'm in a big hurry and I make a mess. Graphite is smeared on my hands, face, clothes and anything else within my reach. Snippets of paper are flying around and bits of graphite-grungy tape are stuck on everything. It's fortunate that I finish my work digitally. On a computer, clean-up is a snap!

My digital tools include my beloved Mac, Wacom drawing tablet and the program Painter.