After attending a portrait drawing session led by Kieran Ingram at Northern Realist Sheffield, I was surprised, no, shocked, by how awkward a pencil felt in my hand. Having spent the past several months creating master studies digitally with a Wacom tablet and Photoshop, the transition back to traditional drawing was unexpectedly challenging. Sure, I’d been drawing with a pen on the tablet, but somehow, holding an actual pencil felt unfamiliar, even strange.
This wasn’t the first time I’d faced a transition like this. Before diving into digital art, I had been sketching traditionally, and shifting to a tablet came with its own learning curve. Now, the process felt reversed, but it highlighted just how different each medium truly is.
To ease back into using a pencil, I decided to start with the basics: creating a tonal range and rendering a sphere in graphite. This simple exercise is invaluable, not just for getting comfortable with traditional materials again but also for refining your understanding of form, light, and value transitions. It’s also a great way to test how your pencils perform. Interestingly, I found that my 4B and 6B pencils seemed to behave as if they’d swapped places—something I wouldn’t have noticed without this focused practice.
This exercise has reminded me of the importance of returning to foundational skills, no matter where you are in your artistic journey. No doubt, I’ll come back to this practice time and again. Each time, it helps me reconnect with the subtlety and control required to create form with a pencil, a skill that, as I learned in this session, is easy to lose but just as easy to rediscover with patience and persistence.
