The toolkit is short. Graphite pencils running the full range from 2H to 8B, a set of fineliners, and markers. That is close to all of it, and the narrowness is the point: everything the work does, it does with line and pressure.
Hard pencils hold the structure
A 2H is pale and unforgiving. It barely marks the paper, and what it puts down is difficult to lift again. It is the pencil for the decisions that have to be right — where a shoulder turns, where the weight of a body settles, how two figures are going to meet. Those lines are laid in faintly and then largely left alone.
At the other end, an 8B is soft enough to smear under a knuckle. It is where the darkness comes from: the shadow under a jaw, the density of hair, the places a drawing needs to go heavy so the rest can stay light. The distance between those two pencils is the whole tonal range of the work.
Colour arrives late, and rarely
Most of these drawings are not coloured at all, and the ones that are use very little. Colour is not a layer applied at the end so much as a decision about where the eye should stop — a flush of pink, a single warm passage in an otherwise grey image. Restraint here is doing real work: in a picture where almost nothing is coloured, the one thing that is becomes impossible to look away from.
The lettering is part of the drawing
Fragments of hand-lettered text sit inside many of the images. They are not captions and they are not titles. They read as something closer to the figure's own thinking — a line she might be telling herself, set in the same hand that drew her. Because the lettering is drawn rather than typeset, it belongs to the image instead of commenting on it from outside.
Why it stays this simple
Recent work threads in ornament — patterns pulled from Art Nouveau and from botanical photography — and those passages can get dense. But they are built from the same materials as everything else. There is no point in the process where the work leaves the paper and becomes something else. What you are looking at is graphite, ink, and the decisions made with them.
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