Drawing Methods
I do most of my drawings on Fabriano hot-pressed watercolor paper, a 100% cotton paper with a soft and smooth surface. Cotton papers are always to be preferred over standard wood-pulp papers, due to the superior longevity of cotton and its more agreeable surface qualities. I soak the paper in water for 30 minutes and then stretch it as if I were preparing it for normal watercolor work, by fixing it securely to a drawing board with staples and allowing the paper to dry thoroughly.
While it's still stapled to the board, I tone the paper with a gesso mixture. I typically prepare this mixture by starting with white gesso, then adding shavings of pastel to achieve whatever sort of color I'd like to see. To this, I often add a small amount of black gesso to produce a darker tone. A generous amount of water keeps the mixture thin, and then I brush it onto the paper. When this dries, it provides a fine, consistent tone, and the gesso adds some extra durability to the paper's surface. Each tone is completely unique, and provides a richer surface on which to work than white paper alone could offer.
I prefer to create a middle-range tone, rather than one that's either too light or too dark. By working on such a tone, I'm beginning in the center of the value range, and can then build the drawing in two directions at once: rendering shadows by adding dark marks with charcoal, while also creating bright areas of light through the use of white charcoal or conte crayon. The bright marks are dynamically visible because they're isolated against the darker tone that covers the entire paper. This is a very effective technique, adding extra depth to a drawing.
My drawing tools include vine charcoal, charcoal pencils, and conte crayons (in various colors, including sanguine, sepia, black and white). My preferred variety of charcoal pencils are those in which the charcoal is surrounded by a wrapping of paper rather than wood - I find that wood is too difficult to sharpen with standard blade sharpeners, which go dull quite quickly and shatter the charcoal more often than not. Instead, the paper pencils are more practical because they can simply be unwrapped to reveal the charcoal interior, and then the charcoal can be sharpened by rubbing it against sandpaper. I get much more successful results from this method, and a lot less aggravation.
Although I do some drawings as independent, stand-alone works, many of them serve merely as relatively small scale drawings in preparation for subsequent paintings. I like to do these preparatory drawings on location whenever possible - the drawing helps me to get well acquainted with the subject as I finalize the composition and confidently determine the placement of all elements within the picture. I then transfer the drawing to the larger canvas by means of a grid system which allows me to reproduce the drawing with some accuracy at a larger scale.
This procedure is made easy by the use of a simple device: a sheet of clear plexiglass, on which I've drawn a grid of one-inch squares. I lay the plexiglass grid over my finished drawing - in this way, I can avoid having to render the grid lines directly onto the drawing itself, so the integrity of the drawing is preserved. I then establish a larger grid on the canvas, which may be two or three times bigger than the scale drawing, and then I simply copy the drawing one square at a time.