Thank you for another interesting topic Thomas. Let’s see if I can adequately address a few of the factors that you put forward regarding the consistent quality of the Ani drawings:
First I would just like to state that the example you chose was a great piece. I actually remember Helen drawing that in my first studio. It was her “gauntlet” capstone project. And I’ll add that the image truly does it zero justice. The resolution/definition of the drawing is absolutely incredible, and her handling…impeccable.
Ok, with that said, you put forward the following contributors to the quality.
1.The reference scene/photo is always under what I would call chiaroscuro lighting, and this helps hugely with realism, depth and general wow factor.
I would indeed argue that the manner in which something is illuminated will hold significant influence on how effectively/efficiently it is communicated. Without going into one of my long-winded ramblings here, I will just say that there is much here that has to do with processing fluency, categorical-canonical perspective, and I something I would dub canonical “illumination.”
2.Darkness in and of itself, seems to me to be a huge helping factor in creating the illusion of ‘realism’ and all these drawings are very dark. (Perhaps this is the same point as 2, but when a scene is dark, you can start to merge regions of the artwork, borders become less visible and this, I think, adds to the realism.)
In most contexts or representatrionalism, the inclusion of lost/found edges or other opportunities for visual completion will indeed contribute significantly to how “realistic” a representation will be perceived. This is because what we describe as “realistic” is not some exact accordance with absolute physical world properties/measurements—rather it is the degree of experienced relative similarity between a perceptual response to a surrogate, simulation, or other representation and the past perceptual responses to the stimulus, stimulus components, or experience that is being represented. As such, visual completion scenarios within a representation may push a viewer to become a much more active participant in achieving a brain state that is similar to one that was elicited by an appropriate, real-world perceptual event in the past.
You can explore this topic much further with my full paper on this here: https://www.smartermarx.com/t/what-does-realistic-look-like-free-download/645 or listen to the corresponding lecture here: https://www.smartermarx.com/t/video-slideshow-lecture-what-does-realistic-look-like/776
For a much shorter glance at this topic you can read my article for Art Aesthetics Magazine here: https://www.artaesthetics.net/publications/2018/11/30/what-does-realistic-look-like
Other than these two/three aspects, related to the composition itself, I presume everything else is a matter of technical excellence acquired by studious repetition of the Language of Drawing exercises.
This brings me onto the next main question of this post which is, can the same standard of work be achieved only using pencil, along with maybe carbon and black coloured pencil?
From a drawing standpoint—as long as you canachieve the same range of values, and the reflective properties of the material are not a detractor, I would think that you should be able to find the same level of “realistic” representation with many types of dry media other than charcoal.
However, there are many reasons we use compressed charcoal with our programs that fall beyond mere potential value range and ease-of-use. There is a somewhat lengthy article on this topic here: Charcoal/Pastel vs. Graphite as a Precursor to Oil Painting
Hope some of this is helpful!