Tuesday, March 12, 2019
Learn the Basics of Charcoal Drawing and Its Most Popular Technique
mymodernmet.com: You’ve got a lot of choices for tools when it comes to drawing. Pencils are the most popular, simply because they are so ubiquitous. But the more you get into drawing, the more you’ll want to experiment with media to figure out what you like using the best. Charcoal, for instance, is a popular tool for artists—especially those that like to sketch and do it fast.
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I have not had that much drawing experience but, in our drawing class last semester, I really enjoyed, as the article says, using charcoal to do quick and rough sketches. With pencil, I think there’s a lot more pressure to be more exact and careful because you are able to have so much more control over the media. With charcoal, however, there is an expectation that the resulting image will be a little on the messy side and it is easier to just roughly sketch something out. I also think that there is a little more flexibility with charcoal once it is already on the page. I find pencil to be a little more permanent and it is hard to work with it once it is down on paper. With charcoal, however, it is easy to move it around with your finger and to lift parts of it off with a kneaded eraser. Overall, I think charcoal is a really great tool and it really helped me to get more comfortable with drawing.
One thing this article does not talk about that enough that I think, personally, is one of the greatest benefits of charcoal drawing is its potential for the more experimental. They briefly mention its capacity for quick and easy sketching, but want to push the fine controlled side of charcoal drawing to entice newcomers to the medium. I think that one of its draws is really its ability to let you work fast and get your ideas down as well as create finely polished drawings. It is an excellent medium to play with motion and capture gesture. It allows you to practice form and quickly recreate and reshape drawings as a light touch will transfer to page as well as easily be brushed away. It is an incredible medium to experiment, too, with light. As the article mentioned, the darks are true and range of shades layering and blending can achieve is far more impressive than many other media. I think that anyone looking to get into charcoal drawing should be aware of its versatility as the greatest benefit to your artistic toolbox.
I just started to move away to more than just a penciL, trying to use colored pens and markers, still have a lot more media i need to “experiment with”. I want to experiment with more mediums because I might find a medium that I like using as much as or even more than pencil.I haven’t experimented as much as I’d like because of how much I like to use pencil how I can achieve smooth shading. I want to try charcoal because of the deep shadows it can produce, far more than pencil. I’ve been a little afraid to use charcoal because I didn’t know (though I’m sure I have been told, recently got to experiment with charcoal a bit in my drawing class) the benefits of the different types of charcoal and when to use the. Good thing this article had a way to point out when it is appropriate to use the types of charcoal, I think I might go buy some at the art store and start to experiment on my own. I might get my compressed charcoal in pencil form.
I’ve done charcoal drawings in various different art classes throughout the years, and I’ve had a lot of fun with playing around with a medium that’s so much different from pen. I always like trying out new medias in art because the process of figuring out how something works and how to get certain looks with it is really enjoyable. The last few years I’ve been diving into digital drawing and trying to learn more about painting/watercolors. Most of the drawings I do are small scale pen drawings on 3inx3in size post-it notes, so the exploration of something that’s a lot more free flowing and on such a greater scale is really fun. I also really like how easy it is to lift the pigment off of the paper with erasers in to get good highlights. The only thing that really puts me off about using charcoals is how messy they tend to be.
Honestly, before coming here reading an article like this would never cross my mind, and if I had to read it I would find it so boring. But now that I have taken drawing class and have an appreciation for the different tools used in drawing I actually found this article quite interesting. I was very pleased that I actually knew many of the drawing elements they were talking about although I still learned about new things that I have never used before like Chamois and white charcoal. I really liked drawing with charcoal much more than I liked pencil and I think this article helped me realize why I liked it more. The article talked about how smooth charcoal is and I really liked that it was easy to draw with. They also talked about how easy it was to use charcoal to make shadows and add depth to the drawing which I also found very true. I also liked charcoal because it was easy to blend and I really liked the final product of charcoal drawing.
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