5 Men, a Horse & a Flautist

Daily Sketch Page for 13 April 2009, featuring 5 men, a horse & a flautist. Drawn with blue mechanical pencil on A4 copy paper
It’s been a while since I sketched, both in real life and certainly on this site. I’d like to change that, and whenever I finish a page — I’d like to do one every day or so — I’ll post it here.

In the past few months I’ve been trying out a blue pencil for the first time, and I love it so far. The rationale is that drawing in blue helps later on to separate the black inks drawn over them for easy clean-up. But even just at the sketch stage it’s nice to have this kind of separation (even though I didn’t ink this page). I’m using a 0.7 mechanical pencil lead which I picked up in blue (and orange of all things). I use mechanical pencils anyway for most sketches, and there’s been little to no learning curve to using them.

Here’s some detailed views of the page. I drew all of these from references, with one being a caricature (of Casino Royale actor Mads Mikkelsen), and others are from random pictures in my ‘stuff to draw for practice’ computer folder.

Detail of bearded man with hat covering eyes
Detail of caricature of actor Mads Mikkelsen
Detail of musician with long curly hair

Lastly, here’s a version of the page adjusted in GIMP to look black and white. I’m probably going to switch back to regular pencils, at least for reference based sketches like these since I don’t think I’d like to ink them.
Daily Sketch Page for 13 April 2009 adjusted in the GIMP to greyscale

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