How to Keep Your Drawing Clean?

When you need to work on a drawing that requires your hands and arms to rest on the artwork, these are some tips that can help you keep your artwork clean:

1) Cover the area of your drawing where your hands and arms are going to rest. You can cover it using a paper, newsprint paper or simple paper towels. You can tape the covering paper to your drawing board to prevent it from moving.

2) Try to begin drawing on the upper corner of the paper and work toward the opposite lower corner. So if you start on the upper left hand coner, you end up on your lower right corner.

3) If you are using different materails on the same drawing, lets say soft charcoal, conte and dark charcoal, leave the materail that smears very easily for the very last.

4) Use some fixative every so often can also keep the charcoal and pastel in place. But use this option as last resource since fixatives tend to change the texture of the paper.