Charcoal Drawing Techniques

Charcoal drawing techniques on draped figure drawing

This figure drawing was done from a live model. I first observed the figure for a while to consider the challenges and planning ahead prior to drawing.

When I had a clear picture in mind ,I started out by laying in very lightly, the forms and the understructure of the figure, considering the perspective and the environment surrounding the figure as well. There are many charcoal drawing techniques but for this one I kept the drawing sketchy and rough.As soon as i felt comfortable about the lay-in or my understrucure, I went ahead with defining the forms more and inserting the features and accents on top of the lightly laid-in understructure. This is kind of a fun part, knowing all your problems have been solved during the lay in stage, and now i was able to just focus on making it look good and have fun without hinking too much about any charcoal drawing techniques.

It is important to be able to just forget the technques and be free with your art ,because thinking too much about the academic aspects can seriously hamper the producton of a good art. Any good art strikes a good balance between artistry and craftsmanship ,and i found that most good art have been executed freely and easily without much thinking about such things as tedious academicies which can be disturbing to ones artistic mind..

So I have continued to develope the forms, add more details, such as hair, facial features, skin textures ,etc. and also polishing and cleaning up the paper texture in general, Also I gave ore range to the values, introducing more variations of the halftones, etc. and i continued having fun trying to finish the piece nicely .

One thing that was the most challenging for this piece was definitely the foreshortening. Foreshortenings can be very difficult wthout deep knowledge of the forms and perspective. It is important to try and see through the form and dstinguish what is going on. Not just see but observe. Usually the parts that comes towards you appears a lot bigger.,but one needs to be kind of careful not to overdo it and give the figure a giant foot or something. There are some charcoal drawing techniques out there that uses means of measuring to achieve accuracy and it is a very nice tool to own, but one should try and combine it with the perspective and form knowledge as well to get the most out of their charcoal drawing techniques.

Rubbing out the lights using the erase is also a great method to use for figure drawing. It is also fun and one can draw pretty quickly using thi smethod because you start out on top of a middle toned shaded paper. So it is as if the halftones are already laid in for you. As a result you can achieve value relationshops more easily, quickly and efficiently. It is definitely one of my favourite charcoal drawing techniques and I will create a demonstration based on that as well soon in the near future.

Drawing from casts is also a great exercise. It is great to practice for a beginner because the sitter in front of you is a cast and will not move. Because for a beginner, a sitters contant movement can be a big challenge whil edrawing the figure, and when thay do ot know the forms well, it usually becomes imperative that the subject must stay completely still so the begnner can just copy what they see in front of them without an disturbances such as moving or fidgeting by live person sitting there.It is always good to practice your charcoal drawing techniques using the cast for this reason.

There are many ways to draw but i favor drawing with values rather than with a lot of lones, because I see mostly values in front of me and never really any lines, but linear drawings can be very beautiful as done by a lot of the old masters such as michelangelo and leonardo da vinci and raphael Soyer. They were great with their beautiful curvy lines wrappg around the form of the figure. They were painstakingly long drawings . and it shows their bloody effort preparing their own paper etc, to create such masterpieces that demonstrates masterful charcoal drawing techniques.

I use mostly the charcoal pencil, it s great for doing the details, but there are times when they dont get very dark as you will need. In those cases i recommend that you use the brick charcoal. the brick charcoal can achieve the most darkest darks, pretty much can get as dark as a black ink. The problem with the brick charcoal is though that you cannot get into thedetails very well because it is like a brick, but you can sharpen it to get a fine point to enable you to make a detailed mark but the problem with that is that the brick charcoals are very soft as with all the dark producing dry medias, and will probably keep breaking off easily as you are trying to sharpen it.

CHarcoal can be very fragile and you might want to spary fix the drawing after its completon to avoid the bleeding and smearing by hand or rain or spilling of the coke etc.But some charcoal drawing techniques do use liquid such as coke. The modern artist Jim Dine splatters coke on his pieces sometimes. He does great modern abstract drawings that demonstrated very interesting charcoal drawing techniques.

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