Drawing Elements

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Some of us are self taught artists while many of us want to fine tune our skills to create a more professional piece of artwork.  Some artists take a while to get back at it when they have had a period of producing little art.  Some skills are rusty getting back into it.  One of the various ways that seem to be most difficult is the technique of shading with graphite.   While in my many first drawing courses, instructors would lend advice of what worked for them. For example, one process is to try out various pencils of various shades for the effects of your piece.  Perhaps it is mechanical pencils.  Somehow I prefer the mechanical pencils but the leads go up to 4B as I have recently searched on Amazon.com.
I tend to go back and forth a bit.  I prefer a toothy to smooth drawing paper such as bristol or other kind of bond paper.  As a frugal artist just looking for angles in my sketches, I just use regular computer paper then tracing paper to make the points of sketches to perspectives of my subject. 

In shading with graphite, it comes down to the direction of light and shade on an object.  I got to experiment with various still lifes to gain more practice and paying attention that each object on the display were just shapes and fabrics and how light fell on them from a window on a sunny day.

To draw shiny objects, lots of practice on metal objects such as wrenches, tools, and I do have letter opener swords as well.  It's kinda like making up a story with your still life as you display it how you want.

As I gravitated from my books to the illustration process, a bit rusty but nothing I can't handle by brushing up skills.  One of the challenges of illustrations in graphite is snow on a mountain slope.  Not deep powdery stuff but a light snow with patches of grass.   

Thinking back on my insttructors tips, if you can draw and shade well in graphite your paintings will be even better.   Keep in mind of the elements of art.  Line, shape, color, form, value, texture, space. I also want to add unity.  Art has unity as in nature.

How has your journey as an artist been similar or different?