Hi All, working on a mix charcoal/graphite piece and I’m struggling with thin/translucent fur. Below is a zoomed snip of the reference picture trying to show what I mean:
This is a gorilla, and I’m struggling with the thin fur around the forehead. I started with a base midtone in charcoal, and I’m going over the shiny spots with loose graphite for the shine and using a generals … 8B?? compressed charcoal pencil to pick out the fur. I go back and forth with the eraser, charcoal, and graphite to get the range of tones I’m looking for. This is a silverback so I need to get this down because I think I need to pick out the silver fur as well using an eraser and graphite. I forgot to get a picture of my work in progress last night (it’s back at the studio) and I am going to try to refine the technique before my next studio session. Part of my issue is I started on a very light/cream paper (studio supplies the paper and they don’t provide a true grey toned paper, which would have been my preference). Does anyone have any tips that could help?