The Beginning and the End”

If you were to think about the entire process of drawing a freehand work in graphite from a blank piece of paper to a finished signed original as 100%, the first five percent and the last five percent in some ways can be seen as by far the most crucial as far as producing a successful drawing goes.

The very start and the very end are also most definitely very different and separate phases of a drawing in terms of techniques used and thought processes involved. The first few percent concerns the all important initial sketched layout and the last few the final touches to the innumerable details expressed as outlines and shapes. The other 90% is really in a lot of ways just one long refining and adjusting of the initial sketch with only changes in the scale, accuracy, and precision of the layout as more and more precisely outlined ‘shapes within shapes’ and carefully hatched and crosshatched tones are added and subtracted to the developing work until there is no more room and/or no more fine detail/s to add. The final stage (the last 5%) is then entered