In week 3 of figure drawing we focused on tone by using charcoal. This is a medium I’ve used before and really enjoy using. The materials we used throughout this session were willow and compressed charcoal, brown chalks, erasers, a knife to cut the eraser and a tool to blend such as a blending stumps. One important thing I learnt was to add a mid tone background to the paper by roughly smudging some charcoal on the page. This way you can use an eraser to rub out the lighter areas and add charcoal to the darkest parts.
After doing some quick warm up sketches we had to complete 3 5 minute sketches of the model in different poses. We could use a combination of rubbing out and adding charcoal. Charcoal is a very versatile medium that can be redrawn and erased over and over without compromising the piece. This is something I began to understand more and take advantage of as the session went on. Even in these 3 images I can see clear improvement as I stopped drawing in such a linear way and focused more on empathising the light and dark areas to allow a figure to emerge from the mid tone background.
Then we moved onto some longer drawings. This one was a 15 minute piece. Once again we started with the mid tone background but there was more dramatic lighting as spot lights were added. To begin with we had to just use the eraser then after we could go in and add more charcoal and refine the drawing. The twist was that the lightest areas had to be drawn the darkest and the darkest areas had to be drawn the lightest. This was an interesting exercise and it made me really focus on the areas of light and dark. One technique that I think really helped to define the figure was adding areas of dark around the body.
For this piece we worked on a slightly coloured piece of paper to allow us to build tone around a on a different colour. This was a slightly longer piece, we did this one for 20 minutes. I started by using the charcoal to add in the darkest bits then moved into the mid tone brown to add in the mid tones and finished off with the lightest brown for the highlights. I really like this piece a liked building up tone this way and think that working on paper that isn’t white helped me visualise the tones better. Also I liked the rough mark making and the way the colours come to build a figure rather than a linear sketch.
This was the final sketch of the session. I find laying down poses more challenging so was happy to get more practice of that. This time I used the paper colour as the mid tone so only added charcoal for the shadows and the lightest chalk for the highlights. I think the was effective and I was able to create a figure by just drawing out the darkest and lightest areas.
It is important to ‘fix’ work one you’re finished with it to ensure that it doesn’t smudge. You can use hair spray for this.
These are 3 charcoal sketches I did for homework. I chose a range of poses including 2 sitting down ones to challenge myself. I used techniques that we learnt in the session such as adding a base layer and sculpting with shadow instead of using lines. I’m happy with the sketches and think that they show improvement as I am now using the medium more successfully.
An artist I took inspiration from for this project was Damien Goidich. He’s a contemporary charcoal artist and I really like how he uses tone to shape a subject rather that harsh lines.
Samuel Green Illustration 