Callous on my finger from drawing

I noticed a large hard callous on my index finger the other day. I was quite proud of it. A physical manifestation of the long hours spent sketching.  “Suffering for my art”

I think I’m taking this a bit too seriously.  There was of course a simple explanation. I was told I grip my pencil too tightly. I also noticed I tend to press too hard on the paper.

I found my previous sketches and blank pages were damaged with score marks, smudges and grooves.  I normally use a heavy 150gsm paper so I had not noticed this before. But I came across a very effective solution. John Romita, Jr a comic artist works up his sketch with a soft pencil then knocked them back with a putty rubber, then re-lined his final sketch.  I have found this technique so useful. On the other hand I saw another interesting approach which uses score marks and indentations to create a new layer of detail. I’m not brave enough to try this yet.

In the following sketches I started to move away from heavy shading and over working the drawing to simple lines, using the weight of the lines to indicate form as much as possible. It made me look more at what I was drawing as I think I relied too much on random chance in previous sketches.