Charcoal Drawing Exercises

Charcoal Drawing Exercise

Examples for Drawing	Charcoal Drawing Examples	Pastel Painting Examples
Still Life Exercise		My Watercolour Painting Videos

Images for Week 8 (16^th September) - Term 3 2022

This week I have chosen a couple of images from Andy Dolphin, an Australian Artist in Western Australia. The sheep image appeared on Facebook and I thought it might look good in charcoal,.. ?? So, I turned it into a black & white image.

Then I found another image on Andy's Blog I thought we may be able to use. Because Andy's Australian, we need to acknowledge that it's our version of Andy's paintings, so just jot it on the bottom or the back, if you're going to use it.

The other images are from the Hungarian bloke, Musa Çelik. He's really hard to contact so if you just mention your drawing is a copy of his work, we should be safe from copyright issues.

Here's the images,...

Sheep

Shed

Tree 1

tree 2

tree 3

Landscape

wagon

If you want to try working on coloured paper/card, this may give you some ideas of how to get some good colour coordination going,...

coloured tree

Images for Week 6 (9^th September) - Term 3 2022

This week we will be kinda reviewing the skills we have developed with charcoal,... That's because I haven't really organised a project for the week,... Oh well, I guess I kinda have in a way,...?? (see below)

One thing we should focus on is squinting,... Looking at your subject with your eyes mostly closed. The eyelashes filters out the complex and distracting details and you see a sort of blurred image.

This simplifies the tonal value range you see to just masses/shapes of light and dark. Copying the value and shape of these masses helps you get the correct proportions of your subject.

As you open your eyes further, the tonal range will widen allowing you to copy more detailed shapes/masses until you have a fairly good black and white copy of your subject. Adding the finer detail you see with your eyes open will give you that likeness you seek.

To help to understand this process, I took the image below from a free image by Hosein Shirvani on a website called www.unsplash.com. You can find royalty free images on this website to use for your art work.

I then manipulated the image to make it black and white, then I changed the tonal values to show the different ranges you would see as you squint,....

Squinting

This image only has two values
if you ignore the white,..

This image has about four values,...

And this image has a wider range of tonal values,...

Images for Week 6 (2^nd September) - Term 3 2022

This week we will be trying "Reductive Charcoal Drawing". To get started, I sent out an email last Saturday with some YouTube links (3) so you could see what we are going to try.

Part One looks pretty messy so it will be better if you prepare your paper (just sketch book paper) at home to save a big cleanup at Mirambeena on Friday afternoon. Maybe even prepare a couple of sheets of paper just in case ?

Here are the links again,...

Reductive Charcoal Drawing / Part 1,… https://youtu.be/VPoaGFxqDJk
Reductive Charcoal Drawing. Part 2,... https://youtu.be/UHtq3y4KBoo
Reductive Charcoal Drawing. Part 3,... https://youtu.be/bTFz9oiqgJI

I tried to find some good examples to use for this exercise but once again, there was mostly portrait studies, so I tried a different tact. I thought about grey-white animals/plants and looked for charcoal drawings of these.

That didn't work so I settled on "Owls", found some pictures and modified them in PhotoShop so I got black & white images. Then I separated the birds and put them on black backgrounds.

Week 6 - Reference Picture 1

Owl-1