If you recall, last post I said I wanted to work on the background for the ammonites. What I wanted to do was a gradation from light areas to dark areas, highlighting the lighter areas with dark ones, etc. I had a fair bit of difficulty achieving that! Turns out that fixative adds quite a bit of texture to the paper. Didn't seem to matter what I used to smudge the charcoal, all I got were small bits of the smudging tool on the paper and a lot of "lift" of the charcoal!
I decided to use my kneaded eraser and get rid of the whole background, when I noticed a cool pattern emerging. I continued with the eraser around the page and tried to keep the pattern going. Then I went over the darker areas with a bit of charcoal to bring them out a bit more and see what it looked like. The above image is what's happening so far. I haven't fully decided if I like it just yet. I think I will work with it some more. I haven't done anything permanent yet, so the good news is that if I ultimately don't like it I can still take it back!
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