Paintings & Stories: 9. Pencil, Pencil, Pencil..... Drawing Hairy Plants!

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 Acorn, cattail & hairy stem drawing - ©Heeyoung Kim

Drawing hairy subjects with pencil is quite challenging, because it gets darker and darker as the pencil strokes are repeated. 
What is the solution?
                                 Do not draw! 
                                 Just shadow!

I started with simple lines. Then, I had to think in a completely reversed way. I mean, I started shadowing the  first lines instead of drawing more lines. At first it didn't look right, but with erasing and shadowing repeated, I finally could have the hairy effect. 
For the acorn, I had relatively big black negative space under each hair. Then I divided the space into a couple of more hairs, again by shadowing, not drawing.

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