Pencil Artist of the Week: Pyokola

This week’s featured pencil artist is Pyokola, a self-taught pencil artist who creates graphite sketches and watercolor paintings of creatures, critters and characters of her own design. Pyokola’s drawings feature a distinct style that is characterized by soft colors, subtle shading and fine details bound by the strong lines that make up the general shape of her subjects. This style gives her drawings a woodblock print look that I just can’t get enough of.

For those unfamiliar, woodblock printing was a printing technique used by many Japanese artists during the Edo period (1603-1867). At its most basic level, the process involved carving the outlines of an image into a block of wood to essentially create a large, wooden equivalent to a rubber stamp. Ink was then applied to the block and stamped onto paper, leaving the outline of the image behind.

While the end result may be similar in style, Pyokola doesn’t rely on centuries-old printing techniques to create her pieces. Pyokola uses a variety of tools to create her drawings, but her main rotation features a trio of mechanical pencils loaded with 0.3, 0.4 and 0.5 mm graphite. The fine points on these pencils allow her to create the hard outlines featured in her work. After these outlines are in place, she uses a combination of graphite, watercolors and acrylic paints to finish each piece.