Charcoal, etc.

Hello! So i went to Micheal's yesterday and stocked up on art supplies, i bought some canvases, paint brushes, this great book of card stock patterns, vine, willow and compressed charcoal and i kneaded eraser as well as a sweet sketch book for charcoal, and some mod podge paint on glue stuff... oh and some pretty cloth.




So i'm all set for a while at least.

Well, anyway, i got bored yesterday/today and decided to try out my new charcoal stuff. This is what i did:



So, admittedly the first two were free hand and the last i used a picture.

I like my lily. ^.^

I learned how to charcoal from my art teacher when we started our section on values. I was totally shocked to find out how you actually charcoal; i fiddled around before the art class and never really understood how to do it and now that i know its great! So, i thought i would spread the knowledge. Here's how to charcoal:

You may have noticed that i mentioned three different kinds of charcoal that i bought above:

Vine, willow, and compressed. Vine and willow are basically the same thing, both of them are light, in weight and is more like gray than black. Compressed is heavier in both ways. When you draw with charcoal first you want to pick out the shadows mid tones and highlights of your subject or photo. DO NOT SKETCH IT OUT WITH PENCIL OR PEN OR ANYTHING! It will show through. If you look at my lily picture, there are a couple of white lines in it because i mapped out the highlights etc. on the photo i printed out, drawing on top of the page i was going to draw on. Those are the marks that went THROUGH the page, like i said, don't do that it looks bad, believe me i know how much your going to want to sketch it out. Don't.

Anyway, the next step is to draw out the shadows with the vine or willow charcoal. Then you take a paper towel and rub the vine around, creating mid tones in the picture, don't worry about the highlights yet, i'll explain that later. Make sure it's mixed around really good so you can't really tell which was the grain is going then take the compressed and sketch out the shadows again with that. Paper towel again, rub around really well, you may have to outline it a couple times, use your own digression. Then take the kneaded eraser, (mentioned above also) and erase out the highlights. Lastly, make the finishing touches, it may be erasing out more highlights adding more mid tones with the vine or willow or adding some contours with the compressed. Once again use your own digression.