If you are new to drawing and learning it by yourself, like me, here is a high level view of kind of materials you need to achieve interesting results.
First off, start drawing with pencil. Drawing with pencil is a medium which offers you a lot of learning. Once you are good at pencil drawing,
you can draw successfuly using any medium. So don’t jump directly to digital or any other medium unless you are able to produce good results in
pencil drawing. This is how I started after having suggestions from many seasoned professionals.
When you are drawing with pencils, you need to care about different pencil grades. Hard pencils produce light marks on the paper and good for outlining.
Soft pencils produce darker marks on the paper and are good for shading the darker areas. This article is not about drawing and shading techniques so i would explain
these in any othere article. Here we focus only on materials that you need. See the image below to view the results of different grades of pencils.
Pencil Grading Chart
The above shades have been produced using graphite pencils. I also use charcoal pencils for better shading. See the image below, first from left is pure charcoal available in market in form of sticks. Two pencils on the right are charcoal pencils, one is soft and the other one is hard. The use of soft and hard charcoal is same as of the graphite.
I also use a woodless graphite pencil which is shown second from left in the picture.
charcoal and woodless graphite
You need different kind of erasers while drawing with pencils. One on the left is putty eraser. I use it to lighten the darker areas of the sketch.
Second one is soft eraser which you can use like you use a pencil. It gives better control over drawing areas. The last one on the right is a hard eraser which I use to scratch hard marks.
erasers
You can shape putty eraser as you want according to the area you are going to stomp or erase. Due to this quality, we also name it as
kneadable eraser. See the image below which I have taken from a web site (not mine)…
kneadable eraser
To blend the different shades of your drawing to bring smooth transitions from one shade to another, you can use the stomping pencils. See the image below…
stomping pencils
Here is another useful tool, sand paper. Use it to tune the pencil.
sand paper
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