I am taking a few classes on graphite drawing at the moment, and my favourite thing about graphite is its ability to smear around, rather than leaving the clean lines that I associate with wax-based coloured pencils.
With this in mind, a forewent focusing on realistic textures and went more stylised, trying to create lines from the soft and hard edges of the graphite. I pulled graphite across the trunk of the tree and lifted the highlight with a zero-eraser, and created lost-edges on the fence posts with the blurred shadows.
One area of improvement would be better command of which pencils to use for which job - some of the branches were slightly ghostly and would have looked more solid with a darker pencil with less pressure.
I’ll apply the learning from this class to the other projects I am working on, incorporating better pencil choice and a greater range of blending tools!