Added 1 new A* page:The "wrapping" subtitle threw people for a loop more than I'd expected--like, I didn't mean for people to think their browser was acting up! Oops! Hm although now the mischievous side of me is thinking how many wigs I'd blow off if I moved the subtitle bar one of these days...
I ran out to the art supply store and got a batch of Cretacolor Monolith woodless pencils today, 'cause I need something big and graphitey to fill in large dark areas since I'm not using ink at the moment. I wasn't sure what grade to get, so I just got one or two of each (I got two of the lightest and two of the darkest, since I figured I always take things to extremes and would most likely end up choosing one of those). You may remember about a year ago when I talked some about the grades of pencil "lead," ie how it's kind of a monochrome spectrum ranging from super light/hard to super dark/soft. The lead I've been using in my 0.5 mm drafting pencil all this time has been H (the softest of nine grades on the "hard" end of the spectrum), which for me is the perfect balance between non-scratchiness and non-smudginess. Well, the Monolith pencils only cover the soft side of the spectrum, going from HB, which is kind of the hardest of the soft side, to 9B, which is kinda more like a crayon than a pencil, it's so soft. Here's a little text patch I did with the various pencils:
Obviously HB is closest to my 0.5 mm H, so that's kind of naturally the one I'd go with, but I was wondering if maybe the softer ones would just be easier to fill in large areas with--but they really aren't, and in fact the super-soft ones are so soft that they start to flake a bit as you work them into the paper. They do get pretty awesomely dark, but since I'm adjusting contrast in Photoshop, what I'm more concerned about in the hard copy is being able to get a reasonable tone match between the 0.5 mm lines and the fill. So HB wins, and it's actually probably just as well that it's a little darker than the 0.5 mm's H, because I tend to press harder in certain areas of emphasis with the 0.5 mm, which makes them darker than normal--about as dark as a medium-pressure HB line, really. The eyes in the sketch there are pressed-in H, for instance, while the fill around the head is lighter-stroked HB, and they look about the same to me--and, more importantly, to Photoshop. So I think this pairing may work out pretty well.
I'm less sure about the filling method I used here, which I think was maybe a bit too slow and methodical, not brisk enough. So I'll have to see if I can loosen up with that a bit, but on this first try I was probably overly worried about getting it dark and even enough. And I was anxious about the regular 0.5 mm pencils, too, and ended up drawing *way* too light with them, which meant I had to apply more contrast in Photoshop, resulting in a grungy appearance to this page, even after some cleanup. I knew I'd start worrying more over the pencils if I knew they were to be the final version. Poo. Gotta work on that.
Oh yeah, one thing I forgot to mention is that I found that the softer the lead gets, the more difficult it is--at least for my white block Staedtler Mars eraser--to erase cleanly without leaving a smudge (on the other side of the spectrum, I know that I had a harder time erasing 2H lines than H lines, because the 2H lead was so tough I tended to dig channels into the paper with it, and the eraser had a hard time getting to the bottom of them to get all the graphite out); once the 9B is on there, it doesn't really want to leave and just smudges when the eraser hits it. Maybe those kneadable gray erasers are better for getting that super-soft stuff out? That would explain why they're still around, I guess. The large patch in the lower left of the test paper is a soft of gradient from 9B on top to HB at the bottom, and then I took the white block eraser up the left side of it.
Even the HB does smudge up on my hands and stuff a good deal, and I had to keep taking additional time to go back and clean up subsequent finger smudges on the paper. Hm. Maybe I'll try a page where I just do fills with the 0.5 mm H lead--will take longer to make a fill but might work out about the same, time-wise, if there's less cleanup necessary.
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