I found an image I like to paint. Then I decided to do a preliminary drawing which I do quite often. When I looked into the pencil box, I found some charcoal pencils, a white and two brown conte crayon..so …I used them.  Because of the brown paper I pick for this image, I needed to use white to create the lighter side of the values. It turned out to be very chalky. I guess that I totally forgot about how to use white.

Then I remember one impressive drawing done by a very young artist in the magazine. Unfortunately I forgot her name..sorry. She applied the gold leaf to her graphite and carbon pencil drawing on coffee dyed paper. It was very beautiful. Of course I needed to do this gold leaf drawing myself.

I applied the gold leaf on the upper side of the tree trunks. Of course I dyed my paper with my morning coffee. My goodness, the gold leaf and the glue to attach them to the paper surface were hard to deal with when I drew. The gold leaf was also flat. I even could not finish this image. I was wondering why I started to do such a frustrating thing. I should just paint and forget about the gold leaf.

I must be a nut! I tried one more time.

This time I used the commercialy made brown paper with charcoal pencils, a carbon pencil, and the gold leaf. The carbon pencil is so soft and rather sticky compare with the charcoal pencils, it covers the smooth gold leaf. This is slightly better than the first try, but there need to be more adjustments, such as the process itself. I might have to glue the gold leaf after adding the values. Also paper can be white. Oh! I do not know. I am going to paint today.