The Mechanical Pencil might actually be my new favorite drawing supply. I never used a Mechanical Pencil for drawing before and I picked one up a few days ago. I've been drawing traditionally for about a year now after doing only digital since 2017. I mostly did crefied with a bit of charcoal and some experiments with ballpoint pen. I even painted on some of my drawings with nail polish, but not with a Mechanical Pencil. Unless the tool is just way too new and shiny for me, this might be my new go-to traditional drawing supply from now on. I beat you welcome or welcome back. To a video about traditional drawing, yes this is my first traditional drawing video and it's also a simple experiment. I only have a cheap 2018 smartphone for the recording that I use for my facecam on regular videos and I use my microphone stand and some hair bands to keep it in place for the recording. At the same time I've been doing some progress on my upcoming long video and I didn't want to leave the channel for another few days without an upload so this time I have a simple voiceover for you. Who are we going to draw today? I've been making some portraits with a Mechanical Pencil which is literally just a no-name pencil that was available in my local art supply shop and I recorded this one portrait for the video. And it might be one of my favorite traditional drawings I ever made. It is a fan art of the character named Spalding from American Horror Story Coven. I made a few other AHS pieces in the past on this channel but for anyone unfamiliar, Spalding is a butler in a secret boarding school located in New Orleans that teaches young witches how to use their powers. And Spalding, portrayed by Denis O'Hare, is a somewhat mysterious figure approximately in his 50s without any magic powers who is serving the cavern. He is mute because his tongue was cut out and we learn about his story during the season. I also included a personal doll on the picture. I unfortunately placed it really low on the page so you can't see the hand that is holding it properly. It is there because Spalding's personal interest is collecting and playing with vintage dolls. His room is in the attic of the boarding school and he keeps his entire collection of them there, among other personal belongings. No spoilers for you today. There is a joke in the story when he asks someone for a very special favor in exchange for some information. Something worth a small fortune and is hard to get. And it turns out that the item he wants in return is a vintage doll from the late 1800s that is a really expensive collector's item. And I was thinking about including that one but it was a realistic baby doll and to make the drawing more readable I added one of these. Forever iconic cute little girl dolls that reads a small version of an older child. For the technical aspect I am way too inexperienced so far to properly articulate why the mechanical pencil worked so well for me. I really often draw and erase or draw with small lines and the mechanical pencil that I used was easier to control and erase than any graphite pencil I tried before. It removes some of the anxiety that comes from the permanence of each stroke but still gives me the increased textarity that traditional medium can provide. I also did a lot of shading with it and it was surprising the easy for me. I'm pretty sure the consistency of the pencil is what really makes a difference when I use it. I know pretty much the point of the mechanical pencil is to make really precise and thin lines but I did hold the pencil almost horizontally for most of the process with deliberately doing out one side of the lead but it was much more comfortable for me than any other pencil I used before. I did not smudge this drawing. I did try smudging with the mechanical pencil it also gave me really smooth and nice results but I wanted this portrait to be kept as just shaded by layering the graphite on the paper. I feel like a simple graphite and charcoal doesn't allow me the same softness as this. If you have seen some of my videos I also go with soft tools in digital all the time. I even have my pencil settings set to softer than default. I feel that the mechanical pencil is closer to that method so it fits my habits a little bit better than regular graphite pencils. I only used an HB LED for this drawing. I have some B LED but I haven't really tried it. The HB gave me quite a lot of volume range by default. I keep it relatively light overall and I will scan the drawing and boost the contrast a little bit to see how it looks but it doesn't feel really light on the paper. It's not like 8B pencils and charcoal that's for sure but it really had an acceptable volume range and I didn't really dare to push that hard with it. So I am totally aware that you can push it much further than how much I managed to do it on this piece. For the video I did some editing because both my camera and my lights are you know everyday usage items instead of actually good equipment. I will make a quick comparison on the screen for you to see. I'm not planning to invest into video making equipment for the foreseeable future but if you happen to have some tips on how to make the currant footage better by some editing I would really be glad to hear it. I pretty much only modified the brightness and the contrast of the image. I know it loses some of the real feeling of what I record but I prefer an actually viewable footage instead of what is the closest to the reality that I cannot capture with what I have. So when I look at the picture with my own eyes and I look at the screen they feel as close to each other as possible due to boosting the contrast. Only with some amount of detail lost. Like I really aimed to bring back the feeling of the original drawing and not to push it further. Now I unfortunately didn't have much as to say here if you have any tips on mechanical pencils how to use it. What led you are using because I'm only using hb lead at the moment. I will might get another pencil in the future to fill that one with the pack of b2 lead that I have. Also I only really used it on smoother paper. I might totally change my mind when it comes to drawing on rougher paper. I still haven't tried out that one properly. So tell me what you think and as always thank you so much for watching. Have a nice day create something even if it's a random drawing of a character from the 2013 season of a series. I just realized that AHS Covent turned 10 years old last October but most importantly don't forget to have fun while doing that. Farewell. Wait for a second there is one more thing I wanted to do. I managed to scan this image and you know my scanner is losing a little amount of the contrast. So this is a little bit more faded than what it was before. I want to add some filter layers. First of all we will go with the color adjustment and boost the contrast of the picture. Something like this. Yep. Something like that. Levels I can like push the middle point a little bit towards one direction. I want I want to boost just the darks a little bit. Another color adjustment layer. Push it a little bit like this. Okay let's see the comparison. This is the RAS scan and this is the adjusted version. Now this is already like higher contrast than the original. I'm not entirely sure if I can really show you a comparison between the two. I don't know I will leave you to be the charge of that. Which has the naked eye if I put it next to the screen. The adjusted version itself looks a little bit more contrasty but maybe just the fact that it is on paper is going to give you that feeling of the piece having more contrast than how much it actually has. So I'm going to essentially read this one as the definitive digital version. Also let's just corrupt it really nicely. Curve out the spiral. Is it called the spiral of the of the sketchbook and there we go. AHS cover spouting with my beautiful handwriting and there we have my magnificent signature. That was it and I actually said goodbye for the first time so I'm not going to do it again. I realized that that was a rude joke for the end and I will actually do it twice. I really shouldn't have mirrored it it looks so bad. You know when you just see the little inaccuracies when you mirrored up image. Okay anyways