It's striking how talented artists can render an image with the simple use of a pencil. I'm often amazed and also curious as to how they can manage to compact so much detail via what appears to be a few strokes of the pencil.

I'm trying to draw every day and at the same time push myself, improve on every previous drawing to get to the point where I'm satisfied that the image I hold in my mind is reflected on the page. Every day I'm looking at what I've produced and muttering about the failings of the images, but at the same time uttering a little mantra: "Not quite right - but getting there".

It's important not to throw out rubbish drawings. Comparing them to the work you knock out 6 months later can be a real eye-opener. It's how you learn and it's how you improve (and I have a shed-full of rubbish drawings to prove it).

For the curious, I'm using a Faber Castell mechanical pencil with 0.7B leads (Also, excuse some of the crappy scans you may seen in my DA account. I'm actually snapping them with a digital camera rather than scanning them).