Toad Hollow Studio - Page 56 of 328

Imaginary Tongue Shellfish — Tongue Shellfish

This Tongue shellfish lives in warm blue waters surrounding the Isle of Carol. It can swim along in an inelegant way by flipping its short tongue back and forth through the water. It moves gracefully, however, when inching across the bottom of the sea, one tongue length at a time, creating small tornadoes of sea bottom at each spot it pushes off from.

This drawing was generated from thinking about soft bodies in hard shells. I think I managed to make the shell look hard and the tongue look soft. What a silly thing to be proud of.

I wasn’t actively looking for a new drawing when I found this one. I was letting my lazy mind drift while doodling, and I sort of threw a net over this one as it floated by.

And here is the joyfully nerdy part: How to make a “soft” texture.

Even though I’ve tried many different types of pencils and paper over the years, I’ve always stuck with a few that I consider the best while waiting for the next promising thing to come along. I get to know my tools very well this way, so when I used a 2B pencil over a 2H to draw this tongue texture, I wasn’t surprised. Although soft over hard is the opposite of how I usually mix pencil grades.

Here’s how I drew the tongue.

soft texture drawing steps — Soft Tongue Texture

I used 2H and 2B pencils on Moleskine sketchbook drawing paper.

In the top right sketch, I drew the shape, added relatively dark hatching for the shadow on the side and front edges, and the light over-all shading with the 2H pencil.

In the bottom right sketch, I refined (re-hatched) some over-all hatching at the tip of the tongue with a sharp 2H pencil to see if I wanted that look. And I added the darker crease details with the 2B.

In the sketch to the left, I used a 2B to shade the entire surface into a darker key. (When you change key, you change the value range of the drawing.)

I added darker details with the tip of the 2B, too.

In this case, the 2H hatching was so lightly applied that the 2B over hatching was able to catch enough grain to build a darker value. Soft pencil over hard pencil usually leads to tears. Great big artist tears.

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