How can botanical illustrators use graphite powder, graphite washes, and carbon pencil to enhance their illustrations?
DC: I always recommend experimenting with different techniques to see what “feels right”. The three techniques that you mentioned are fun to experiment with and can be very useful for the botanical artist. I like to use graphite powder as a quick way of creating a base tone. For example, to create a dark tone for some leaves, it is very easy to use a stump to apply graphite powder to develop quickly a dark base tone. Graphite washes are created using water-soluble graphite or watercolor pencils. These create watercolor effects and can be used as a base tone as well. Carbon pencils are great if you need to create a very deep black tone—the nature of graphite is such that you can only get a dark gray, but never a deep black tone. The important thing to remember when using carbon pencils is that carbon pencils have a matte finish, while graphite has a shinier “finish”. So if you use both types in a drawing, you must use the carbon as a first layer, you cannot draw with a carbon pencil on
