Media: Charcoal

Charcoal: black, messy, and not a medium you would want to use while wearing your favorite light blue sweater. Yes, love it or leave it, charcoal is a very common medium used in drawing, and probably a medium that an art teacher or professor will make you grapple with sometime during your journey through the arts. I personally swore after my first encounter with charcoal that it was the bane of my existence and that I would never touch it again. Little did I know that I would decide to major in art in college and have to use it quite a bit more than “never again.”

In this blog, I’m not going to dwell on the logistics of charcoal (yes, there are “hard” and “soft” charcoals, and there are even different types of charcoal such as vine charcoal). Instead, I’ll talk about what you can do with charcoal and the types of processes you can use when drawing with charcoal.

First of all, the type of charcoal you use will greatly affect how your piece will turn out. Using compressed charcoal will create amazing areas of rich darkness, but is harder to erase. Vine charcoal is easier to erase, but it won’t give you a rich black like compressed charcoal will, and its also much easier to remove from the page even if you put fixative on it. I prefer using compressed charcoal because I really love to play up on the contrast by pushing the dark areas as dark as the charcoal will go.

There are three different drawing processes that you can use if you are, say, drawing a still life. One process is the traditional process of drawing the basic outline of your subject and then filling it in with lights and darks accordingly. The others are not quite as simple. One is called “additive process”. This is when you start with your lightest lights (such as the highlight that can be found on that lovely bowl of fruit), and you work your way to the darkest parts of color by simply adding darker and darker shades as can be found throughout your subject. The next process involves taking the charcoal of your choice and creating a “toned ground”. This basically means you put charcoal all over your page to make it a nice medium gray tone. Then you take your vinyl eraser and your charcoal and erase and add charcoal according to where the lights and darks are in your piece. This is where choosing your charcoal comes into play. As I mentioned before, vine charcoal is easier to erase, but compressed charcoal lets you bring stunning contrast into your piece. I would suggest playing around with the different types of charcoals first if you don’t know exactly how they can be manipulated.

A word of warning when using charcoal: Don’t wear nice clothes. As I’ve mentioned before, charcoal is always very messy and after using it, you’ll find it in places that you’d think were impossible for something that you hold mainly in your hand (a few places I’ve found charcoal stains: in my hair, on my forehead, on my neck, on my shoulders… and the list only gets longer). Also, be prepared to scrub, scrub, scrub after using charcoal. Compressed charcoal is one of the most stubborn mediums I’ve ever encountered even when I’ve attacked it multiple times with soap and hot water.

In short, charcoal, although very messy, is a popular medium to use. Some love it, some hate it, and some, like myself, find that what was once an aversion slowly turns into a fondness. Charcoal can be a very fun medium to use, and is quite possibly one of the easiest, most malleable of the media.

Tune in next time to hear about the Conte Crayon!

Image found here: http://www.artsupply.com/alvin/catagory/Charcoals.asp