Preliminary drawings - my tools

 I won't start the oil paintings until March or April, when it's warm enough to open a window and air out my workspace. I look forward to June, when I can actually work outdoors without freezing. At present, the snow is coming down in curtains and we're looking at minus 5 degree nights this week, or worse. It's a time for drawing, getting to know my subjects thoroughly before I apply the first stroke of paint. Probably my favorite among my drawing tools is the Creativo set from Cretacolor, with its selection of hard (carre) pastels in traditional colors (sanguine, sepia, white, black). It's incredibly useful for limited-palette or monochromatic drawing. I decided to use the carre pastels to make a series of 30x40 cm studies of the deans, occasionally picking up one of the white pencils in the set for gentler, more subtle strokes. 

I pulled out five more pastel pencils from my collection: a Caran d'ache Sanguine, a Faber Castell Pitt Caput Mortuum, and a green and two blue Staedtler Carbothellos. As support, I'd be using a brown-toned drawing paper from Doree with a relatively smooth surface. The absence of texture on the paper would make it difficult to work in layers, which would serve as a check on the temptation to repeatedly cover up mistakes. I figured that by using ordinary drawing paper and not, say, Pastelmat, I could keep the work fresh and not too precious. After all these would be studies, for the purpose of learning my subject's features.

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