Fishy

Hi all,
I keep trying to get around to doing some painting and drawing but wood turning keeps getting in the way. However, I did manage a drawing this week and I'm very pleased with it.

I've tried pencil drawing a few time but have been put off by the shading process. To shade a piece in I would go backwards and forwards across the part to be shaded lots of time. It was hard work and I was always left with a series of line, which didn't look very professional.

Anyway, I was perusing youtube the other day and fond somebody who used home made graphite powder to do their shading and it looked very good. The artist had a couple of very small jars in which were some broken up pieces of lead from her pencils. She had two pots, one for pencils from the high end of the B range, which she used for her very darks and another for pencils at the lower end of the B range, which she used for lighter shading.

So, I destroyed several pencils by removing the leads and crunching them to dust before putting it in their relative pots. I then went about doing a drawing of a fish called a perch to try out my new method. I wasn't expecting much but I was really impressed. The drawing below was completed in less than an hour and there aren't many shading lines to be seen.

Perhaps I'm seeing it through rose tinted glassses but I think it is quite good. I would be pleased to know what you think of it.

Woodturning.
Here's a few items that I finished recently. The first one is a pen with pyrography and stain.

The second one is a bird house made for the mother in laws birthday.

The third was a woodstained vase that I wanted to make look as if it was ceramic.

Lastly, this was a small pot with a shoal of pyrography fish.

Hope you enjoyed looking.