Drawing cool stuff with charcoal
Drawing with charcoal is an intensely satisfying thing to do. The level of contrast available from charcoal produces a drawing imbued with presence. Controlling charcoal can be challenging, it’s a difficult medium to tame. Nevertheless, it’s all about the journey, and if there’s one medium I am guaranteed to lose myself in it’s charcoal, the combination of a steady, workmanlike process, and artistic judgement whilst working with a medium that is just waiting for you to lose focus, requires your attention.
First of, I just want to say that charcoal is a really great medium to work in, it’s gloriously messy and it really rewards a rapid and lose style of application. It’s also quite forgiving, you can mess up, remove the charcoal and have another go. Charcoal is not to be feared, it’s really a very easy going and flexible medium that rewards regardless of the style of application.
Drawing something like a train or ship in charcoal is all about making a correctly weighted and well defined edge. We use these edges to make shapes and lines, and our shapes and lines conspire together to create the image. To make these weighted and defined edges, we are going to need some tools.
Some tools you will need
We are going to need some tools. These tools will help us to create the edges we need to create the definition that will make our drawing. The number one tool you are going to use when working with charcoal is an eraser, lots of erasers. Don’t be shy when it comes to the acquisition of erasers, you will never have enough. I would also recommend an eraser pen for creating detail in tight corners, though you will also need to get used to cutting your erasers into sharp edges with a blade, the better to more accurately remove charcoal and create a more accurate edge. The number two tool is an eraser shield. With charcoal you are adding and then taking away, in a controlled manner, using edges created by the eraser shield and other items you will collect, and erasers. It is via this pruning that the drawing will emerge. Other tools all contribute to this end, knives and sandpaper to make an edge on our charcoal, cloth and sponges for working the charcoal, masking tape, if it can help you make or keep an edge, use it.
Materials - charcoal and paper
Not all charcoal is equal. In order to maintain some consistency you shouldn’t mix and match charcoal from different sources. Some charcoal behaves differently to others, some is a subtly different tone or hue to others. Generally, if you are buying charcoal from a supplier, they will offer different grades, soft, medium, hard, light, medium, dark, this is fine, just don’t mix charcoal from one supplier with charcoal from another.
When choosing paper, you need to consider the tooth of the paper, this is how rough the paper is to the touch . A toothy, grainy paper will result in a grainy image, this might be what you’re after but if you are looking for detail you will need something without too much tooth. While you can charcoal on pretty much anything, but the thinner the paper the more likely will be to rip it when you are working on it. A weight of 60-90lbs is about where you want to be, especially for a drawing that is going to be worked hard with lots of laying on and rubbing out
One last thing. Coloured paper. This stuff is great but you can’t make coloured paper lighter than it is, so if you use a mid-tone coloured paper you are going to have to use light coloured ‘charcoal’ like white for your bright tones and we are now moving away from the monochrome of charcoal and are in the realm of pastels. For now, lets stick with a white or off-white paper.
Drawing out your image
OK, you now have your paper and it’s taped on to a board. In addition helping protect the paper, you can turn the board as you work and stack it up out of the way to protect it from roving cups of coffee, paw prints, and doodling children.
Where to start? First off, you need a subject. What is it you want to draw? Chose your subject based on your taste and confidence. Don’t choose something that’s so daunting it is going to crush your soul, we all like and need a challenge but some mountains aren’t for climbing yet. Having decided on what we’re going to draw we need to transfer the image to the paper. You can draw this out free-hand, use the old grid method, or, as I do, use a projector. Using a projector guarantees a high fidelity transfer and is pretty straightforward. Inexpensive high resolution projectors are now widely available and the higher resolution allows you to throw a useful image that is a fraction of the screen size.
Doing it
Time to put charcoal to paper. The drawing I’m showing you is of a radial air plane engine. This drawing is about 80cm x 75xm. Mostly, I’ve chosen an air plane engine as a subject because there are lots of edges and textures in a piece like this, I’ll be trying to recreate the metal of the engine, reflections, the weave of the electrical connections to the spark plugs, the engine mounts. On the other hand, there is no recession, no depth in this image, it’s not a landscape. To generate depth we would use our harder, lighter charcoal in the distance, and our darker, softer charcoals for the foreground. That aside, this is a great subject to demonstrate how to control charcoal, how much control you can get with charcoal, and how delicate a drawing you can achieve with charcoal. It might seem a bit extreme, but I want to convince you, via this drawing, that charcoal can be used to create exquisitely defined drawings.
The keys to charcoal drawing are balance and form. In order to be successful you will need to balance your use of charcoal, and you will model the light and dark using edges to define shape and form. In art there is a word, chiaroscuro, it is the Italian words for light, chiaro, and dark, scuro, together. It refers to the use of light and shadow to create form. This is what we will be doing, creating the illusion of form through our control of light and shadow. Now if that isn’t worth doing I don’t know what is.
One thing to keep in mind when using charcoals is that the lighter/harder charcoal is harder to reverse, to erase, to remove, than the darker charcoal. Being hard, the lighter charcoal also crushes the paper, which is one of the reasons it’s so tough to lift. We do want to crush the medium on to our paper, but only when we are fairly confident we have the right tone as crushing the paper locks that tone in. Locking in is how we initially fix our charcoal, our medium, to our paper. Now we know this, let’s get going.
Take your dark charcoal and apply it to create dark areas, there’s no need to worry about getting it where you don’t want it just yet. Use your hands to gently apply the loose charcoal but don’t push too hard as we don’t want to ‘fix’ it in place. Pressure fixes charcoal in place and makes it more difficult to lift, the more pressure, the darker that area will be. Having applied the charcoal we now manipulate it using an eraser to create form. You can cut fine edges into an eraser using a blade, or you can use an edge such as an eraser shield or a ruler, or whatever you like, fine metal mesh from a sieve and a kneaded eraser on dark loose charcoal creates the illusion of fencing.
Be a little creative with how you create your edges and control your charcoal and erasure. Cutting shapes into the plastic of old tubs, that sort of thing, to create useful edges.
When you are working a charcoal drawing you don’t want to be working over parts of the drawing you have already worked on. You will smudge it, or worse. If you are right handed, work from the top left down and across, the more sinsitre’ amongst us should work from the top right. Alternatively you can always spin your drawing board to permit access to the area you want to work on.
The thing with a big white piece of paper is it’s a big white piece of paper. That’s a lot of white to conquer. It is difficult to get the tonal balance right from the get go because the tone you lay down, tone means the how much light or dark there is, it is having to compete with a lot of very light unworked paper. As such, it’s best not to commit tonally early in the work. Focus on laying down that looser dark charcoal and drawing form out of it using moderate pressure from your fingers and the tools you have to hand, and the removal of that charcoal by eraser, controlled by your eraser shields and other edges.
Now we’re getting somewhere. Notice what I’m using. I’ve an eraser propeller pen, erasers, charcoal pencils, and I’m using a lose piece of heavy weight paper as a shield to protect the drawing as I work on it. I’ve taped around the erasers to help keep them clean.
Now we’re on the downslope, we’ve put in enough work that we can start to make some decisions about tone, and can go back into the parts of the drawing we’ve already worked on. Now, for some of the lighter parts, where removing charcoal using erasers isn’t quite giving us the control we want, we can use the lighter/harder charcoal.
Use a light bristled brush to sweep away eraser debris and lose charcoal while to work. Sweep lightly, too much pressure and you’ll be drawing with your bristle. Charcoal drawings can create quite a bit of soot and dust, take care to clean up frequently.
The end is in sight. Once you have worked the whole surface of the drawing it is then time to balance it out. On a larger project, there will be some unevenness that has crept into the drawing. Challenges that need solving that are particular to the drawing, chances are you got better at doing that as the drawing went on. As you near completion, you should go back and make sure that the level of detail, tonal range, and quality of finish is even throughout your drawing.
Take the opportunity also to lock in your image by applying pressure via blending stumps, tortillons, your fingers, pieces of card, or whatever else you’ve found that gives you the control you need to pull form out of your light and dark. Finally, once you are satisfied that the drawing is balanced and uniform and you are sure there is nothing more to be done apply spray fixative to further lock in that charcoal and seal the image onto the paper.
The completed charcoal drawing represents about twenty hours of effort. I hope it conveys to you how much control that can be achieved with charcoal.
