Man in Turban
Thomas Eakins 1867
charcoal and graphite.
(source)

Look at your fingers right now. Are they clean? No? Well, they’re about to get even dirtier. We’re drawing with charcoal!

Creating a charcoal drawing uses the same fundamentals of line drawing. You still focus on edge, but shift your focus to include value. Like in line drawings, you look for those shapes within shapes, only now you are concerned with capturing the relationships between the value of each shape.

It’s gratifying to touch art to make art, to get your fingers in there and have a tactual experience that goes beyond keyboard keys and mouse buttons. Let me describe a process for making charcoal reduction drawings that my drawing instructor, Doug Norman, taught us this past week…

Burnt wood on your nose!

Self-Portrait
Kathe Kollwitz
charcoal drawing 1924
(source)

Charcoal drawing is fun! Charcoal drawing is frustrating!

Depending on what charcoal you use, your drawing can be worked and reworked, even after you spray it with fixative. Vine charcoal and charcoal powder work well for reworking. It’s delicate and can be easily blown off the page.

In fact, there is a story about a student art show that was in the process of being hung by a certain art school faculty. A professor was hanging a student’s delicate charcoal drawing and his arm brushed it, severely messing it up. The embarrassed prof, in a matter of minutes, worked the drawing back into shape as it hung on the wall. It turned out dramatically better than the original. Hopefully the student was smart enough to use that as a portfolio center piece.

Compressed charcoal sticks make dark marks that adhere to the paper due to the presence of a binder, often linseed oil. It also makes erasing difficult, depending on the amount of binder used.

Setting up your drawing - The Ground

Cover the paper with an even, medium gray tone. You can do this by rubbing charcoal onto your finger from a compressed stick and rubbing the paper. Pros: the charcoal will adhere to the paper better. Cons: It’s difficult to achieve an even tone. You can also dump a Wendy’s plastic spoonful of charcoal powder onto the paper and work it in with a chamois or toilet paper. This will create a nice even tone that will be very delicate - it will be easy to lift the charcoal completely off the paper with your otherwise well-intending fingers.

Drawing the line

Once your ground is set up, try to use a stick of vine charcoal for your measured line drawing. Blend mistakes back into the ground with your finger.

Charcoal wants to work big. If you’re drawing a portrait, keep the head taller than three or four inches. Anything smaller and you’ll be struggling to capture the detail you want.

Value-Add (Ugh, I hate this corporate buzz-word.)

Domenico Mainardi (After Rubens)
The Death of Decius Mus in the Battle of Veseris (Detail)
Charcoal 1733
(source)

Once your line drawing is setup, find the brightest areas and block those in with your kneaded eraser. I like to do this first because it feels good to see the figure pop out of the page. I start to feel like my drawing has some potential when I see those highlights contrast with the ground. (It’s usually a rollercoaster of highs and lows when I make a drawing.)

To size these blocks, use the same measuring techniques you would use in a line drawing to measure the size of the shapes within the shapes that make up your subject. To determine the major contrasting areas of dark and light value, squint your eyes.

Block in the larger dark tones with your compressed charcoal. You can use your finger and the compressed stick, but this gets “blobby”, or uneven in terms of shape and tone, pretty fast. Find a tool, like a paper blender or Q-tip to put in smaller black shapes. You can also define the edges of the dark shapes with your kneaded eraser.

Working out the details

Use your charcoal pencil to establish those details of the eyes, the nostrils, the mouth. If you’re like me, rejoice at the control over your drawing that the pencil provides.

Get your gear

Interested in giving it a shot? Here’s a quick list of tools to pick up:

• Compressed charcoal pencils (if anyone can find Ritmo pencils, let me know. I don’t think they’re around here.)
• compressed charcoal sticks, a variety of hardnesses
• vine charcoal
• charcoal powder Prepare to get messy!
• chamois (Tip: it’s cheaper at the auto parts store than the art store.)
• Q-Tips
• Paper - I don’t know much about the different types of paper yet. I know that it’s a good idea to pick up some chain-laid paper, the kind with the slight grid, and to start on the smooth side. Hold the paper up to a light at an angle and you’ll be able to discern which side is which.
• kneaded eraser. This will become your “charcoal-only” eraser.

So, charcoal reduction is just one of many ways to draw with charcoal. For example, a series of Bay Area artists in the 1960s, Richard Diebenkorn, Elmer Bischoff and Jim Dine, for example, used a brush with charcoal mixed with water and applied the charcoal like ink washes.

Untitled RD17 Richard Diebenkorn charcoal, no date (source)	Woman Looking Through Window Elmer Bischoff charcoal, 1960 (source)
The Skier Jim Dine charcoal, white chalk and pastel, 1976 (source)	Portrait of Chuck Close Jim Dine Charcoal, et al, 1993 (source)

Now go wash your hands. They’re filthy.