This is back to basics drawing skills challenge. However, it took a fair few hours. Using technical pencils, normal graphite pencils and finally a charcoal pencil.  I loved using the chamois cloth for blending and taking off the graphite to get the tonal values. This process is done many times and the gradual build up of graphite gives the whole drawing a real depth to it.  Depending on the paper used will determine the final finish.  Perhaps I should have used Bristol vellum paper instead of mixed media paper. The various stages took a few good hours. Here, I laid daown many layers of graphite and blended each layer as I went through the drawing. Using initially a technical pencil. Below is a more advanced stage of the drawing and the use of darker tones and charcaol pencil was also applied.  The whole porcess is very absorbing and the time does tnd to drift away from you.

I have been inspired to follow many pastel artists, one of whom is Jason Morgan . I have also looked at Les Darlow who is also inspiring. I bought a starter set of panpastels and gave them a go tonight. I used three surfaces, simple cartridge drawing paper below.  This was less successful and didient feel right.  The paper was too thin and the effect was less impressive. I also used normal. Cream pastel paper, this was typical pastel paper from the Range or Hobby craft.  It give nice colour but still not the fnish i was expecting. And finaly pastelmat anthracite paper. This was in my mind the best result and I even added pastel pencil ontop and it took this no problem, I can see myself looking to invest in more colours of Panpastel.  I think pastelmat is my favourite from today's experiment. More testing to come... .

This was not an easy task, I love visiting this Welsh attraction in Merthyr, and this castle entrance was taken from a photograph I snapped last year.   here are the stages I took to get this painting competed.

This drawing was done on pastelmat paper A4 size andI tried to render it in the same way as Degas.  I don't do many life studies as I find them very difficult to do, but as a challenge this was great, to make me use a media that is not easy and to use observational skills to seek to render a good likeness to his work.