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I don't know if you saw Peggy Baumgaertner's demonstration. For me, that was a big eye opener. She ground up the sauce with a mortar and pestle and poured the powder into a black tight, itself a messy undertaking. Then she covered the surface of the paper with a light coating of the sauce-in-the-tight, and then proceeded with drawing, with a kneaded eraser for lighter areas, and with a tortillon or brush, for darks.
I started out that way, too. You can make a kneaded eraser into quite a refined tool if you hold it in your hand long enough to be able to model it. Going lighter was much easier than going darker. I had to smear many coats of sauce to build up areas of dark.
I stayed away from wetting the sauce until I was fairly satisfied with the placement and shapes of the drawing, mindful that once wet sauce dries, it stays. Using a dry brush or tortillon results only in a subtle darkening. Wetting it later, once you're sure you want it, is the best way to procede. Even then, the darkening of the sauce is not radical, and you can put a fresh layer of dry sauce atop the dried wet sauce and repeat the process to deepen the darks.
Applying sauce directly with the stick will give you a dark and not very smearable line. For really dark areas, a little hatching with the sauce stick will do. Don't allow it to get too different from the rest of the drawing.
With sauce, the best way to go is to proceed with caution. I felt as if I were "tickling" the drawing out of the paper, not my usual way of getting started or proceeding. Therefore, I found it to be an intriguing experience.
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