Good materials make great pictures. Now here we have an HB office pencil. This is usually orange and everybody uses it. It the HP stands for the hardness, I'm going to be drawing on cardstock today, you can just use any sketch paper you want. But the smoother paper is a little easier to draw with than rough paper. The rough paper takes up a lot of the lead.

So here is what an HB pencil shades like. Now there's two ways to shade. You can shade with the pencil on an angle, which gives you a little more distance and it's more visible. Holding the pencil like a Tapi finger. Some people hold it like this, but I find this is great. It's like a magic wand.

You can go from dark to light simply by bearing down your weight with this finger here. So watch me go dark. So a good practice with an HB is to start very light. And as you go down, feel your muscles push to go dark. So that's an HB pencil. Now when you get down a little closer, you can hold your pencil a little closer like this.

But you will never get as good a control as when you hold it like this for the small areas. So for small shading areas, the closer you get to the tip, the more control you have, that's an HB. HB is the middle, in the middle between soft and hard, the harder the pencil, the less marks it makes. It's not a Dark. So hard pencil is very, very light. This is your four be basically the same thing.

Oh, that's pretty dark. I got to go a little less than. Okay, so can I match the HP? Yes, I can match the HP let me just put it beside. But let's see what the difference is the lead is a little softer so it creates more texture and it feels more velvety. And of course it goes darker, much quicker.

And with less effort, you have to bear down on the HP to get the same effect. This is definitely a little Granier than the HP because it's softer. Now this is my favorite. It's called a six B. The only drawback is you have to sharpen it more often because it's so soft. So I'm still going to go soft But right away, I can sink into it with very little pressure.

This is a blending stump. If you don't have one of these, you can purchase one for 95, and there's a holy two or three years worth of them and you can sharpen them with a razor blade. Once they get dirty, you can sharpen them right down, or you can sharpen the small ones with the sharpener or get one of those bigger sharpen. I'm going to blend the first one, which was HB or the normal office pencil. Let's see how much comes off on the blending stump. It's a good idea when you're blending to start at the light area, and then go to the dark if that's what you want to light dark transition but if you want To get some of the dark up in the light go this way, but there's what the pencil looks like.

Let's use the other pencil, the stump looks like let's use the other side. And let's go from the dark. This was the four v. I'm gonna pull it down a little bit this way, both directions. I like blending stumps, one, keep your finger a lot cleaner. And actually it works much better than your finger. Fingers are okay.

But I've decided to go over to blending stumps. And our next one, let's see how much came off. So it looks about the same. She's this end. And this is the six B. But you'll see row six B definitely deposits a little more.

And it definitely like it's almost like if you were drawing pitch of velvet, you would definitely be using a six B. So all in all, what we would say is that the softer the pencil, it will get darker. And there'll be a thicker layer of lead or graphite on the paper. And as far as erasing, it's a little harder to erase a six B. Now, if you don't have a blending stop, you can use q tips, but you put your finger on the tip, and they're great for blending. Also, you can put a little pencil down, I'll take my six p. Put a little mark like that, make it into a circle.

Start in the middle, bear down. So if you're not too good at drawing circles, you can take a little six B here Just go around and around. great exercise for getting good at circles. You know, it doesn't depend on the pencil depends on how often you go around around with your arm. And there we go. So that's one of the skills we'll be learning today's blending with either a Q tip, a blending stump, and three pencils, the common office pencil, a four B, and a six B.

Second thing is erasing. This is an eraser, I always have a cloth with my eraser because they get a little dirty. And you could just wipe them with this microfiber cloth keeps them nice and white is when you use your hand, you smudge what you're doing. So let's take a little eraser and let's use the eraser. Sir not to get rid of a mistake, but to create maybe light effects going through something. Now you'll see my eraser is probably getting dirty.

So there's where your, your little cloth comes in and look at that. It's all clean again. You can even cut your eraser with a pair of scissors and get a sharp edge. So rather than go like this, a brush is better and it doesn't smudge your pencil.