My review on Staedtler Mars Lumograph pencils is up on Youtube now! In the video I discuss my opinions and experiences using these pencils and show you how I used them for creating a drawing of my cat, Suki. Check it out if you’re interested in trying out this brand for your graphite drawings!
And here’s the finished drawing! I was having a bit of trouble photographing this piece without losing details because of the graphite shine. This is the best image I could get of it for now. Graphite can be a bit of a pain to photograph! I drew this as the companion piece of my drawing Toto, my other cat. I hope to eventually get them framed and have them side-by-side on my bedroom wall ❤

In the meantime my hard drive is in need of a serious clearout. I’ve currently been trawling through 480gb of wildlife photos and deleting the bad ones. And I only got into photography in January! I wish I hadn’t been so lazy and had deleted them as I went xD
There are so many. Help me.
Speaking of which, I’ve been spending some time uploading my photos to WildlifeReferencePhotos.com recently. This site provides artists with high quality reference photos that are royalty-free and high in detail for you to use in your artwork. You can find the jackdaw photo below and more on there, so check it out! 🙂

After a bit of an uphill struggle the background for my hyacinth macaw coloured pencil drawing is complete! I was almost going to scrap this drawing but I managed to rescue it last night. Sorry for the bad photo quality.
The pencils just weren’t sticking to the paper in the top right corner so I couldn’t get the area dark enough or a smooth gradient into the browns no matter how much I sprayed it with textured fixative, and I kept getting these ugly vertical lines from the texture of the paper showing through. I managed to rescue it by burnishing with my Luminance pencils, thankfully.
I think this is more an issue with Uart 800 paper than anything else. The sandy texture is so fine that it just can’t hold much pencil. The vertical lines are not something I’ve really noticed before in my previous drawing with this paper but I can see it being a bit of an issue. I’ll be trying out Fisher 400 paper soon and seeing how that compares.
In the meantime, I can’t wait to start colouring that macaw! I’ve been itching to draw something blue for ages!

Until next time!