The Gradient

In secondary school we started to pay visits to the museum of fine art. I couldn't understand how an artist could make such a fine transition from one color to another. That "gradient" always fascinated me.
The eye, just like any scanner, has a limiter hardware resolution. Beyond certain detail the eye can no longer see.
Some artists (including the Japanese classical ones, kudos to them!) work a lot with suggestion: a dot here, a line there and here you have an expressive portrait.
Im still in love with the gradient, which now I try to refine in my graphite pencil. "Where does one value end and the other begins?" The eye cannot tell, if you work hard enough (or soft enough, to be more precise). I think Im gonna stick to this method for a while, Im so in love with the subtlety on the gentle transition.

Here under a portrait I have just finished. I worked on it for 6 days (I know...) It's based on one of my first drawings (the colored one, I hope it's obvious). I just wanted to age the boy a bit, yet still show the same person.
I photographed the drawing on the terrace, between two showers of rain. It's been raining all August in Holland. I still dont have an A3 scanner :-(

Smell this!

finished August 23rd 2011. The pleasure is immense! Drawing makes me experience first hand the way light works and the innumerable ways Nature creates people based on one formula, yet each and everyone different. Even toes can have a "personality"! I look at the world with brand new eyes.

Smell These!

Never Break the Chain

finished August 21st, trying new pencils, harder, that would allow me to get more detail in there.

Never Break the Chain, August 21, 2K11

Bearballs

finished August 20, 2011. Aquarelle pencils on gray paper.
The aquarelle pencils are very fat. I like the feeling of drawing with them but they dont offer the same precision as a harder tip would.
The texture of the paper is rather coarse. It sort of responds to you, accepting the color in some areas, while in others not. I like to preserve this texture, to include it in the drawing itself, so I dont press hard.

Creating a large dragon drawing stencil which eventually got sprayed on a room's wall.

After sketching comes the inking phase,  to test the final look. Then comes the cutting, mounting the beast on the wall, and spraying.

street scars

As Im on holidays and cannot finish and post any new drawings yet, here's a bit of personal history: I made a few graphic "contributions" to the streets of Rome, this is one pasteup, the first.