Progressing in monochrome - testing different mediums together

Although I have now created a few experiments with black shades, I haven't yet used much different mediums to acrylic paint or combined any. Considering this, I began some practices with dry mediums as I figured this would be the biggest possibly variation from acrylic paint.

The two photos above were my starting off points, here I was simply using Richter's painting marks as some kind of inspiration for line and tonal elements which was difficult. Using graphite, chalk (white and black), oil pastel and charcoal. Graphite was my favourite at this point and although I liked the texture of oil pastel I found it difficult to achieve my style of marks with.

After finding it difficult to use Richter's painting inspiration, I did some further research and found these images of work Richter had created using graphite on paper. This helped me massively in terms of movement and tonal contrast.

(1999)

Here in the picture above and the one just below shows how dramatically my marks had changed after finding inspiration in Richter's drawings. At this point I was mixing all of the materials that I have mentioned above in order to get a idea of the contrast they provide against each other.

The two images above use purely graphite. The reason for this is because I was trying to break down the previous experiments into layers and perfect each one before putting them back together again as I thought they lacked balance with light and dark tones. So I tried to create backgrounds that were gentle and curvaceous in order to layer them with dark sharp edged foregrounds. I did the backgrounds by using the side of the graphite stick and then smudging some areas afterwards.

Here I thought the best way to best the medium which provided the most dark defined finish for the foreground was to create small sketches of them next to each other. I came to the conclusion that chalk was the most affective material so on the right I did a piece which combined the two. The only thing I think would've made it better is if I added higher concentrations of chalk in small specific places like Richter did.