Charcoal art
Self taught Artist and Freelance writer.Raised in a small town where there isnot a lot to do. Drawing became a way to pass the time.
Michaels Stores is a great place to purchase a charcoal pencil value set.
It comes with six charcoal pencils two soft, two medium and two hard pencil's
A 9x12 inch sketching pad with fifty sheets of paper.
A blending stump, sandpaper block and a information booklet .
The one package that has almost everything that you need to start your charcoal art.
The one important thing that it is missing is a good eraser.Erasiers are a big part of charcoal art. You will experience many smears and smudges that will need to be erased.
Charcoal pencils have a soft lead and you will need the sandpaper block to sharpen the pencils. If you use a regular pencil sharpener you will break the soft lead.
You also use the block to get the flat or sharp point that you need.
There are many methods of applying the charcoal. there is shading and highlighting,blending and softening, scribbling, scratching, lifting and stripping.
READY TO PLAY
Let's play a little to get the feel of what charcoal can do. It smudges very easy but can be cleaned up with an eraser.There will be many smudges when you are done with your drawing you will have to clean it up with the eraser.
Now that you have seen what charcoal can do let's start a simple drawing.
READY TO DRAW
We will start with something simple. Tree's are the easiest thing there is to draw and would be a good place to start. Let's do simple tree trunks.
To get started,you will need to sharpen your pencil's using the sandpaper block; rub until you get a point on your pencil.
Use the soft pencil, it will erase easier should you need to.
On the paper draw two straight lines from top to bottom (vertical)of the paper.This gives you the two dimensional look with the height and width.
Lightly Fill in the area with the soft pencil. Holding the pencil flat and not pressing to hard.Covering the whole tree trunk.
Now use the medium pencil and with small circular motions recover the same area holding it flat again making sure to use circular motion and to leave some not covered so the underneath layer shows.Notice the darker color where it overlaps the underneath layer.
Now we move to the hard pencil and again; begin with circular motion but do not cover the whole trunk but go over the darker area's that were made by the first two pencils, making sure to leave some light areas to give it the three dimensional look.
Use your eraser to remove any smudges. Do this as often as needed between layers.
With the smallest point on the eraser, start removing some of the areas where the light shines. start this by using your imagination as to where the light source may be coming from at that angle start to lighten up your tree trunk.This is called lifting and stripping.
Using the blending stump,(pencil looking object with two sharp ends) start blending and softening the darkest side of the tree trunk.
once you are satisfied with that one you can add another and another until you have a small forest of tree's.
