Illuminate

This was an interesting piece to do. I haven't done a still life drawing for over a year, and since there are so many good drawings of lightbulbs on dA I decided to try my hand at one.

Size: A4

Time: 50 h

Materials:

-Canson Smooth Bristol board
-Tombow Mono pencil set
-Pentel 500 Graph Gear mechanical pencils, 0.3mm (H and B leads)
-Papermate Tuff Stuff eraser stick
-Leather chamois/shammy
-Sakura electric eraser
-Staedtler Mars Lumograph 7B pencil (non-reflective black pencil)
-Staedtler eraser
-Stump; cotton ball

The background was a new thing for me. In my previous pieces I produced backgrounds with chalk pastel, but as my work got more detailed I decided that I was losing too many details around the edges of the drawings. This time I used pencil. I mainly used the H and B 0.3mm mechanical pencils, blending with a variety of different tools. It was probably the most difficult part of the drawing, and since I don't put paper over my drawing while working there were a few fingerprints I had to work around. Luckily they were not hard to remove. If you are thinking of doing a smooth, gray background such as this one I would recommend building up values with many, many hard (nothing above B) strokes. The background took me around 12 hours.

--

I'd like to thank ~TheMinx for providing the reference. [link]

And thank you for looking! If you have any comments or critiques I would love to hear them