Aquent are a global leader focused solely on creative, digital and marketing talent helping companies adapt to change and find new ways to stay competitive. They offer a broad range of services to their clients including temporary and contract-to-hire staffing, employer of record, studios and web application development.

Vitamin T is the talent agency for digital creatives. They partner with clients and talent and take the time to make sure they connect people who can help one another. They provide ad agencies and mid sized companies with the best digital creatives on the planet across the Australian, UK and American markets.

Every year Aquent / Vitamin T release a talent Calendar which is delivered to the desks of their clients worldwide. I'm incredibly proud to be associated with this years and to have my artwork chosen for the cover of the 2017 calendar.  Competition is always tough for this and I'm delighted to join some fantastic artists included from around the world.

Following on from my initial attempts with these new Derwent graphic set this is a walk through of my process creating a sketch of this beautiful statue. I’d love to have been organised enough to make notes of what grade of graphite I used for each stage of this drawing. I’m not organised. Actually, that’s probably a good thing as I’m sure we all have different ways of working and I’m sure we all have a process of trial and error with each grade and how it can work best for us.

The first thing I did for this drawing was to sketch out a rough outline. I needed to make sure my scale and perspective looking upwards all worked right. The lightest grades (primarily H) worked best for the lightest of marks for this stage.
Working around grades HB, B and 2B I started to add the detail of the figure. With a strong light source coming in from the left the object was thrown into real contrast.
It took a few mistakes and redrawing certain areas to get the detail right. Learning to use the right pencil rather than increasing the pressure meant that I could easily erase and redraw as needed.  When I was happy with the composition it was time to start working on the detail. The lack of light higher on the cathedral wall here meant that this was the area that would dictate the tones for the rest of the picture. So I decided I would simply start at the top and work my way down, pulling the statue into the drawing as I went.
The grades around 5, 6 and 7B all did their job on the darkest areas with the lower B’s all helping with the slightly lighter elements of the brickwork. Another additional benefit of having such a range of grades to work with and not having to gauge into the paper meant that using a putty eraser was so much easier to lift little areas of graphite.
Being able to alternate between the lightest and darkest grades of graphite as the statue started to build really helped with the process.