Are you planning to start with your drawing endeavour? Then perhaps the easiest thing to do is to use only a limited amount of art materials to only the essential items. It will help reduce your stress when it comes to deciding among dozens of colours, pencils, surfaces and the stuff to use in your drawing classes. Mental tiredness can affect your state of mind to enjoy the process of art-making and creating your best pieces. Getting down and being contented of what are only the essentials will make mastering your drawing skills faster and easier. With that, here are the drawing and drawing materials you’ll need.
Drawing paper or any reasonable surfaces
For your everyday sketching or regular drawing classes, a cartridge paper would be enough. But for your great masterpieces, those drawings you want to keep for years or to give as gift to someone special, an acid free, archival paper is perfect. There are also those super white paper that comes in a smooth or vellum surface texture. For pen and ink drawings, a smooth surface is the best while for soft graphite and charcoal pencils, a vellum works best. While this paper is of great quality, it’s quite expensive so you skip it for your usual sketching or practicing.
A good set of graphite pencils
Graphite pencils come in the ranges of ‘B’ which stands for black and ‘H’ which stands for hard. While there are a hundred to consider, as little as 3 pencils would be enough for you to create plenty of drawings. Just have one soft pencil, and two good all-rounders to be able to create soft textures and for general drawing purposes. But in case you want to go advance with your skills and make photo-realistic drawings, there are other ranges graphite pencils to use. Have one of them and you’ll be good to go.
Charcoal pencils
Compared to graphite pencils, charcoal pencils can cover much bigger space of the paper, making them great for sketching. Unlike the traditional willow and compressed charcoal blocks, charcoal pencils are less messy and provide a minimalist approach to drawing. They come in different tints but it’s best to choose the basic black to start with. Just don’t forget to stock about 3 of them for your drawing classes since they wear down quickly.
Ink pens
Ink pens are fuss-free drawing medium that provides that nice feeling of seeing a jet black ink on white paper. If you haven’t done it before, give an ink pen a try in your next drawing piece. Pick a good nib size of 0.5mm for general use and a 0.25mm if you planning to draw a very detailed lines. There are also brush or graphic nib size ink pens which are perfect for filling large areas of dark value.