Oh, how mistaken can one person be?!!!
And not necessarily because of the first or obvious reason that springs to mind. This isn't going to be easy to explain, but... go on Lemming, over the cliff...
Now that's helping me. It's all to do with concentration and focus. And, incidentally, I like those "islands" and wouldn't normally seek to remove them. If I was drawing photo-realistically, I might want to. But, personally, I like to retain the hand-drawn appearance while <i>suggesting</i> reality.I find the supplied tapered example unacceptable as an example of even shading. Yes it exhibits no "banding" but there are still dark and light islands which need attention. There is not a single person alive today who could lay down a perfectly smooth layer of graphite without those islands, and given that at some point you have to change your focus and begin to even out that shading.
So far, so good. Although a little biased towards technique. But I'll return to that.We attack the white islands first to fill them in - usually with circular strokes. Filling in the white islands first will make the image average a little darker, and some of what appear as dark islands now will disappear as our eye/brain takes in the new average image. Notice that most of the dreaded bands have disappeared or been absorbed into the average image - and we have NOT erased anything.
So, that's 10 minutes? Well, that's 10 minutes of using techniques to repair other techniques.Second step is to remove the remaining dark islands, so we put down our pencil, pick up the... eraser and gently tap out the dark islands AND what remains of the bands... I spent exactly 5 minutes with each step, including the scanning.
If you'd used tapered lines, you would have spent 10 minutes deep in your world creating more of it.
That's not dissimilar from the way I work. My sections probably take around 30 minutes. At that point, I'll step back before moving to the next section. The difference is that my previous section is complete. Yes, I might make a couple of tiny value changes, but probably not. As a rule, it's done, and I will never return to it....this is known as the POMODORO working technique, and the increased distance from the piece changes my focus to take in the whole image (my version of "What do you see?") and frankly it helps to improve the picture and the composition. So I don't mind having my focus disturbed every 25 minutes or whenever I finish a section and need to re-assess it...
Why don't I just move straight on to the next section? Well, very often, my first task is to fade the guidelines to mere shadows and then more accurately redraw the guidelines. That permits me to modify them to better reflect the completed drawing so far. The initial guidelines fix positions. The later ones begin to introduce required details.
I did say this was going to be difficult to explain, didn't I?
Not using tapered lines results in "repair sessions". Removing the islands and filling in gaps and pits. Your concentration is on technical perfection and elegance.
Using the tapered line permits you to flow your thoughts onto paper without the need for correction or finessing.
I should point out that, until you mentioned it, I wasn't aware of the tapered line being widely taught. I didn't even know it had a name until Darrel Tank christened it the Tapered Stroke.
Well, a STROKE is a quick, uncontrolled movement. So, I call it the Tapered Line, which is far more deliberate.
In my case, the TAPERED LINE emerged as a <b>necessity</b>. It removed blunt ends from the drawing hair. And I drew almost nothing but hair for my first 12 professional years (52 dog head-studies plus commissions). When the later work went into Limited Edition prints involving scenic studies, the tapered line served me very well with the drawing of smooth skies. All shaded in overlapping sections. And, except for minimal blending to remove any vestiges of line, each section was completed and never returned to. The same is true of areas of sand, or any other smooth area.
TAPERS permit me to spontaneously recreate what I see in my mind. Where creating banding and then repairing that would alter my approach and thought processes from ARTIST to ENGINEER. The first creates, the second builds to plans or repairs.
Finally, when I'm drawing a shaggy dog and working my way down its front leg, I'm thinking "Well, the leg's moving forwards, and the light is shining from here... so this lock of hair is long enough to be affected by the air currents. It will lift and trail back here... And this one will bend back here....."
I'm <i>not</i> thinking, "I need to remove that gap... and I must fix that dark island, because it's looking very unnatural..."
No - I'm thinking, "Surely it would split here.... maybe this half would twist and flow back here...... beneath this one..... and there would be wispy ends where it tails off......"
First, the more techniques you know, the better. But, ultimately, you have to let those techniques become second-nature and move on. The goal is to work <i>without having to think about techniques</i> and just use them as you create.
And second, I wouldn't have created any "dark islands" that need removal, because I use tapered lines. And use them to describe what I'm seeing in my mind. And what I see there is totally natural, so my drawing will always reflect what I expect everything to look like in Nature.
I think I'm starting to waffle.... time to stop.