Drawing with pencil

For me drawing with a simple black pencil on a piece of paper is one of the most satisfying techniques.

Maybe that is so because I am a graphic artist.

I am always doodling with a pencil while listening to a lecture or in a conference room when waiting for food in a restaurant or traveling somewhere, talking on the phone, or watching the news.

It calms me down (as I am a huge introvert and being in public places is somewhat stressful) and it‘s easier to think that way. Sometimes I even get an idea for a bigger piece from those doodles.

I love making illustrations just with a pencil.

It‘s subtle and you can use it very differently.

You can do little fine details, soft or sharp edges, big strokes, different thickness lines, and all the palette of grey — from almost invisible silver lines to heavy black strokes.

When I was a student in the Academy of Art I liked academic drawing, which is basically drawing from nature, trying to recapture it as naturalistic as you can manage, with a pencil on a piece of paper.

My first academic drawing teacher — back in high school — Marijus Piekuras — was a brilliant teacher and a very talented artist.

Maybe that‘s why I still loved academic drawing in the Academy when the majority hated it.

The very first lesson he taught us — you can not draw if your pencil isn‘t sharp enough.

So, we tried our best to sharpen the pencils before he entered the classroom because somehow it was very embarrassing if he took your pencil and sharpened it himself before even starting explaining your mistakes.

The second thing he tried hard to hammer into our empty heads — you can‘t delude yourself that the thing you‘re looking at and the thing you‘re drawing is the same.

It‘s still just a piece of paper, and what you‘re doing here is creating an illusion of the real thing for everybody else.

So that if they look at your piece of paper they would say — „Hey, it‘s the head of Aphrodite“, or „Hey it‘s the pile of apples“, but not „Look, somebody tried to draw the head of Aphrodite (or a pile of apples) on this paper“. This illusion should be the goal of a good academic drawing.

After years of trying different techniques, drawing with a simple pencil on a piece of paper is still one of my favorite things to do.