That's rough! :[ Printer paper can be good for practicing also but we are on the tail end of a paper shortage right now so it's a little weird pricewise right now
@@ProkoTVyeah here as well. Strathmore is just extremely out of budget.. or even charcoal pencils.. maybe I'll be able to afford them one day.. until then it's the shiny annoying graphite ig
I've never been comfortable working with charcoal, the sound it makes and the texture of it when I draw are a sensory nightmare. However, I LOVE drawing on newsprint with crayons. Even lower stakes and I still focus more on the gestures more than the fine details.
I have the exact same problem. It really sucks because I like the look of charcoal but I have not found anything decent that has the same properties without the scratching. Some pencils have close to the same blackness but cant be smudged or the other way around. Charcoal would be perfect but the damn sound gives me freezing goosebumps and itch my teeth lol.
Tbh as long as you’re working in greyscale, that yellowing creates kind of a sick look. Makes it look like old papyrus or parchment or something. When painting, depending what I’m working on, I sometimes like to start by toning my canvases with “Parchment” colored paint, a diluted off-white yellow, a diluted reddish earth tone like Burnt Sienna, or other combos that intentionally create a kind of patina’d aged look… And it looks pretty consistently cool with pencil/charcoal drawings… Like da Vinci’s notebooks or something. Lol. So I can understand desiring perfect archivability for some serious works, & especially for anything with full color… But ultimately, especially for practice drawings, it really doesn’t seem like a bad trade off at all. My bigger concern would just be the paper becoming brittle & getting truly damaged, or water damaged- stuff like that. So as OP said, store it properly.
If you are on a really tight budget you can use acid free archival copy paper. Its not as smooth or as soft as newsprint but it might be a lot cheaper atleast where I live. Instead of charcoal you can use a black colored pencil like polychromos or Faber-Castell oilbase pencils. They are quite different but you can get pretty similar results and if its only for practice it wont matter😁
For y’all who aren’t worried about newsprint quality- you can get enormous amounts of the stuff in the packing section of hardware stores or a UPS store
I would normally laugh at the idea of selling ANYTHING that i draw, however, I painted over a thrifted print of 'Young Mother Sewing' by Mary Cassatt in 2014 to make it looks like deadpool fixing a halloween costume of the wolverine that the girl was wearing. Not only is that painting STILL hanging in my house today but MULTIPLE people have tried to buy it off me. You never know what you're capable of.
I say let the paper change in as many ways as it wants to for however long as it so gracefully chooses to do so... A vignette earned through time by way of said time is welcome to the eye of those who view through eyes that still see.
My reservations with using newsprint stems from the fact I make my own ink from charcoal rather than charcoal pencil. The key here being campfire wood rather than activated charcoal. My concern would be whether it would warp. But this has drawn odd looks from people knowing I paint on cotton canvases for comics. I also like blending Sumi with charcoal. But classical mulberry doesnt whether charcoal ink well.
Thanks for more tips! I notice several of my fine art paper sketches have some staining around the edges and corners. I thought it was my messy lifestyle choices. But nope! 😂
Let’s be honest, everybody. If any of us invested any significant time into sketching and drawing things for practice or for enjoyment, even if we may want to keep them they’ll still just lay there and no one will ever want to look at them unless some of us are lucky enough to become extremely famous somehow. All this old stuff is just taking up our limited space.
You don't know if people will later have an interest in your earliest drawings until people have that interest already But we can archive our work in the meantime and give it a good chance at surviving, just in case.
I use newsprint. It's got the right combination of characteristics I'm looking for when I'm typically using charcoal. But there's a space for using it with other papers as well.
The paper will still yellow and the ink will diffuse over time, softening your lines. Some people like the look it gives. That's up to your preference.
You can and should! This is just a warning to those sinking tons of time and effort into a drawing that they might want to keep pristine over the years. I have boxes and boxes of my drawings on cheap newsprint and even printer paper. It's not about using only the highest quality materials, just knowing what you'll get out of them.
