This is my attempt to create a color piece from a black and white reference. I tried to not worry too much about achieving “natural” tones and focus solely on value.
Tag: Drawing
-
Charcoal Study: Lily
This is the first charcoal drawing in a long time. For years, I avoided charcoal in favor of graphite due to what I believed was the overall messiness and difficulty of the medium. Turns out, I just didn’t realize that charcoal has amazing versatility if you take advantage of all the forms it comes in. I always assumed that you had to tend with a solitary, single-toned charcoal “stick” to render an image, but last weekend, I saw a set of five charcoal pencils with a spectrum of hardnesses at my local art supply store and decided to give the medium another try.
After a few days of experimenting, I think charcoal will replace graphite as my go-to medium for black-and-white drawing. It occurs to me I might have previously been trying to make graphite respond like charcoal by aggressively smudging and blending to create mid-tones. Harder charcoal is similar to graphite in terms of control, but it’s far easier to blend in a way that keeps the initial pencil strokes invisible. That said, it certainly doesn’t make graphite obsolete, but it does change what I see as graphite’s strengths. Since graphite is naturally more unyielding, it creates a tight, “noisy” texture when laid on paper without blending. This allows for very interesting styles of drawing, though difficult to achieve without messing up.