of sketches to get the idea in my mind so I can go straight in and get drawing.

I’m using Bic Biro again because I haven’t used up the ink in my pen yet and I want an

empty pen for another video I’m going to make later. The last drawing of a Rhino took

up half the ink. How much will the snake drawing use, I wonder.

Well, let’s not talk about it. Let’s do it!

Biro is quite a sticky ink that will smear if I try to erase pencil lines at the end,

so I have to go straight in and lightly draw the outline, which I’ve sort of rehearsed

in the sketches.

Then I start to draw in detail and begin the shading process.

With Biro, you need to build up the tone slowly. The foreground features, like the head, can

be drawn in quite firmly while the the background, immediately behind it, needs to be drawn lightly

so it doesn’t merge into the foreground and confuse the viewer.

Then it’s just down to a lot of detail. Biros are quite unpredictable. They press

into the paper and dent the surface, so you sometimes have to find a different angle to

shade in to make any difference to the tonal value.

This drawing took about three and a half hours of solid drawing to slowly build up the effect,

which is not copied from a photograph but is coming straight out of my head after I’d

looked at a few photographs of snakes. It’s not any particular kind of snake either. Just

a blend of the pictures I looked at for inspiration.

The text is hard to plan again , because I can’t pencil it out, so I decided to just

be a bit loose and free with it.

And did I empty the pen? No! there’s another drawing’s worth of ink in there. What should

I do next week? Answers in the comments box below.

Well, I hope you enjoyed that, and if you did, go and have a look at the Rhino drawing

I did last week, In the meantime make sure you Practice practice Practice and keep drawing

drawing drawing, And I’ll see you next time, you take care now, Bye Bye.