Well, this is Magoo. He was second born of our litter. Magoo was the first to open his eyes.

Edit: The image originally is 6x6inches.

With this one, alot of experimentation happened. First, lacking softer lead, I attempted to use charcoal pencils. I achieved darkness, but it was messy. By halfway through, the drawing was looking fairly pathetic. A trip across the border to a real art store, found me with 4b and 6b lead, holders, sharpener and all. I also picked up a white charcoal and white prismacolor verithin pencils. I was one happy girl with my bag of pencils! (talk about easy to please? heh) The charcoal is very nice under certain conditions, the verithins were hopeless mixed with existing lead. The image began to recover. The reference was a photo I took, the fingers from yet another photo and shading from the live model of my hands.

Edit: Utterly dissatisfied with my results, and having reworked it twice only to realize that the paper is completely inappropriate for the soft, grainless shading I was going for...I brought this piece into photoshop to soften and blend a little further. I just couldn't leave be! I also realized that the crappy scanner really shows itself with the dark drawings. Time to invest in a new one!

Thanks to for inspiring me to darken it further with the pencils!

I can't say I am very happy with it, but it was a learning project and boy did I learn alot!
I hope you enjoy it!

90lb paper, hb, b, 2b, 4b, 6b pencils, mechanical. 4b and 6b charchoal pencils, along with a white charcoal pencil. Blending stump, tissue paper, cotton swabs and qtips. Kneaded eraser.