Night ride

I tried a new technique yesterday. This little work is the result. It's 5.5x7 inches, and its done in graphite pencil on black mat board. It's amazing the range of values that can be acheived against a black ground with pencils that make black marks themselves. To acheive this effect I used everything from a 4H to an 8B. The darkest darks are the 4H (which would make the lightest marks on white paper), and the lightest lights in the sky and on the mountaintops are 8B (which would make the darkests marks on white paper). The lines on the highway are in 2B.