Fashion Wheel update and my new pen

A few people suggested trying coloured pencils might be less smeary. Well I gave that a go, and it wasn't terribly successful, but then I found a 3B Caran d'Ache graphite stick I had lying around and tried that instead. It was much better and I got a lot more of the detail. Unfortunately 3B is really quite soft and I managed to smear it with my hand while colouring in, plus the coloured pencil ran into it a bit, but it's definitely better. Next time I'm at the art shop I'll look for a harder graphite stick, I bet that would be perfect. Or maybe I could use some charcoal fixative before colouring... hmm. Click to embiggen - it's definitely clearer than the previous ones.

Oh and side note - Richard bought me a nice new oblique pen holder and some pointy nibs because I want to learn copperplate writing. The writing on the Fashion Wheel drawing is me trying out the pen. I'm not claiming that this is anything like copperplate, of course, because it's most definitely not! I can do decent italics, but italics really aren't anything like handwriting (they're more like shapes and parallel lines that all look the same), and my own handwriting is dead upright and not even joined up. This is going to take a lot of effort I think :) Pretty handwriting is most definitely a lost art.

PS: I haven't cleaned this up in Photoshop at all, whereas the previous efforts were very very grubby indeed.