 Hello there, it's Sandy Allknock and today I'll be drawing a graphite portrait of a horse and talking about different blending techniques that you can use with graphite or colored pencils. In my previous video I talked about a comparison between graphite and colored pencil and most of the techniques that I will be using in this video and most of the supplies would be similar if you're using colored pencil but I will be using graphite instead and so I'm going to be trying out a different blending solution but you can use Gemsol, which is what I typically use and I wanted to see how this Windsor and Newton one goes. I'll be using a couple different erasers. I've got an electric eraser, some stick erasers. 9B is my favorite graphwood pencil by Caron Dash. I just love these pencils. I go through them by the dozens. So yes, I buy a lot of them but I have a cotton ball on hand as well, a kneaded eraser, and a dust brush. The pencil sharpener that I'll be using today is an AFMAT and this is a sharpener that you put your pencil in, you hand crank it. It's not difficult to hand crank. If you have arthritis it's not very hard to do and it gives you a long point. It doesn't give you a super sharp tip to it and sometimes I'll just take another sharpener and just take a turn or two that will sharpen just that very very tip and make it very sharp. It makes it a little weird shaped but it still has the long point and then it also has that tiny tip. But I don't usually worry about the tiny tip until I get into tiny detail. My first step of course was to get a line drawing done of most of the details but what I opted to do at the first phase of my drawing is to just put pigment everywhere and I just wanted graphite to cover the whole thing and then soften it using a cotton ball because that will get rid of any of the white space that's in there and any whites that I want to create I can lift up out of that because graphite is just immensely erasable and this is on Stonehenge and some people believe in using hot press watercolor paper for stuff like this. I have gone back and forth about that. I have not had as much success with hot press watercolor paper as I have found using Stonehenge and maybe it's just because I'm used to this for colored pencil. For the really black areas, I decided to use a brush and it's just a cheapo brush. Don't worry about getting a really fancy one and I dipped it into some pure liquid of the blending solution and you can dip it into, I have a little container that I use and I keep a cotton ball in it so that I can pick up just a little bit of the blending solution but when I want to get this black I just dip it straight into the bottle just totally completely straight in the bottle that gives me that really rich blackness and then in between like this this ear versus the other ear this one had more open areas in it so I was trying to get some variation in the darks, some darks that were completely dark and some darks that were less dark even using a q-tip to touch to the brush so I could control the exact amount of the liquid that I wanted to have on there. You can see how well the graphite lifts up. This is an electric eraser which spins and I have it cut. I use a pair of scissors to make a point out of it. You can carve that thing into any shape you want but remember it spins around so you need to take that into consideration for what kind of strokes you want but it was able to give me a really nice broken line for some of the hair in the main which was quite beautiful. I could get very very small detailed pieces of hair in there then with the hairs that were coming out of some of the darker areas I was just painting with the blending solution onto the lighter graphite that's there. I didn't add any extra pigment. I just painted with the blending solution and it grabbed other pigment that was already on the paper and made it darker so I was able to then go over all of that with the cotton ball to kind of blend it together a bit so it wasn't quite so harsh. That's one of the great things about graphite that you can do is just keep reworking it, erase some, add more color in more of the graphite. If you're trying to draw a horse in regular colored pencil and if you're going to do a full color drawing you're not going to approach it quite the same as this. Some of the blending techniques can be the same but you're not going to just throw color all over the whole thing the way I did with graphite but I would recommend that you do try to do a black and white study of your subject before you move into doing a color study. And the reason is because that's going to show you where the highlights and shadows are very clearly. Take the photograph and turn it into black and white. If you don't have a program to do that your phone probably does and if not you can find a website that will change your photo into black and white for you and you could even amp up the contrast if you want a more dramatic drawing and practice using that and do it either in graphite or in black colored pencil. Black colored pencil will allow you to practice some of your colored pencil techniques with whatever brand you're using. That was me just now making some powdered pencil. You could do that with graphite or with colored pencil using a t-strainer and so I just added more and more until I was satisfied with the amount as I was moving it around with a cotton ball and then with a blending stump and just kept adding more pigment both using the pencil and using the cotton ball and q-tip and all sorts of things to try to get that blended because I loved at the end of this horse's nose there were several different textures there was that big white area the big white spot and then something down below the nose I don't know what all that is but it was interesting because it had a very different texture than everything else and I wanted to do that justice there's also some some hairs on his chin chin chin that I was going to have to work out so I wanted that nose to get a lot of attention and I used some of the blending solution directly on the cotton ball you can see how wet that got for a moment there and just used it to pull all of that dark shadow underneath the horse's head together so that I could pull the those little tiny hairs out using a very sharpened eraser the electric eraser the final step I wanted to blend out some of the hairs in the main as it got into the light section because I wanted to fade softly into white without having a very hard edge and just use the brush and the blending solution in the container rather than using it straight up from the bottle cotton ball to finish it off lots of different layering on top of this but I enjoyed this drawing it was a really nice process if you have some comments please do leave them below the video supplies are all listed in the doobly-doo as well as a link to the blog post where there's a still photograph of this drawing if you're interested in examining it a little more closely I will see you again very soon let me know what you think I should draw next I've been drawing all kinds of fun stuff all month long and would love your suggestions what you'd like to see thank you so much have an awesome day go make something beautiful see you later