Hi Chris, I think it's a great topic and gets to the heart of why we do art. I wanted to post this history making ice skating choreography, as we all appreciative figurative art, which this is quite literally: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KFnGYQKAm7w I thought the combination of the music, the text, and what the body language of the poses evokes is quite powerful.

I actually recently did some conscious testing of these graphite pencils: Faber Castell, Mitsubishi Hi Uni, Tombow Mono, Staedtler, Cretacolor. Here my summary: -Staedtler and Cretacolor got disqualified for me, as the consistency of the graphite is not that great, and they blend much worse than the others. One advantage of Staedtler I found though is that their darkest pencil is darker then the darkest versions of Faber Castell, Mitsubishi and Tombow... -Faber Castell: I love the look and feel of the graphite. I don't know if it's the temperature of the grey it creates or the texture, but I like how it "feels", especially if you blend it. My preferred pencils is the 2B. It's soft enough to get some light blending, but it's hard enough to draw linearly. Overall FC is a bit "harder" than the other pencils I tried. That means when drawing with an HB in the lights it can be a bit tough, because if you press too hard it marks the paper. While the softer grades are too dark. -Mitsubishi Hi Uni: I wanted to try those as some say it's the best quality. They feel like "butter" when you draw with them. They are significantly softer than Faber Castell, even the harder pencils (H, 2H), are as soft as a FC 2B... This is why I found them to be very nice for tonal mass drawing. They are super smooth, high quality, and super nice to blend. I'm currently experiment with combining Faber Castell and Mitsubishi. -Tombow: Similar to Mitsubishi pencils, these are also softer than Faber Castell. They feel like the Mitsubishis, maybe a tiny bit less "perfect". Definitely also a great pencil. Given I have the Mitsubishis though, I'll stick to those for now. It was very useful to experiment consciously with those, as every graphite isn't the same, and they vary in temperatur (if you think of it as a "color"), blendability, and how hard or soft different grades are.

Hi Chris, ah that's a shame! But I completely understand you have to focus on your own priorities. I do still believe if you would offer your courses on your site, people would buy them :) Youtube traffic -> website - > courses sales page. Those that don't buy become leads, and you can send a 7 day sales sequence to them for every course. Given your many courses that's many sequences. That's the marketer in me seeing the great value you have :) Good luck though with the kickstarter and book! I'll definitely get it.

I still am surprised how strong the 2 value effect actually is, and often hesitate to make this clear decision. Basically the figure is just this light effect on the top plane.