Artist Daily : Charcoal Drawing

You Deserve It! Our Newest Free Video Lesson on Charcoal Drawing

Courtney Jordan — Fri, 09 Nov 2012 04:59:00 GMT


Click the picture above to view your free video lesson on charcoal drawing.

I was inspired recently when I went to an art gallery show and saw some wonderful charcoal drawings. For so many of us, charcoal lessons were part of our first explorations of art making, but to see these highly finished charcoal drawing art pieces was a real treat.

The best of these works depicted the human form—there was a charcoal figure drawing, a charcoal portrait drawing, and several other pieces. You could tell the artist was fine-tuned to the gradation of light and dark. The drawings truly captured the light effects of the scene, and the model's skin seemed to glow.

This got me thinking that the nuances of value—and how wide that spectrum can be from lightest light to darkest dark—are best explored in a charcoal drawing lesson. Seeing a skilled artist conduct a charcoal drawing demonstration will greatly help you work with value in any medium, and this is where our free video, Charcoal Drawing Lessons: Learn How to Draw Charcoal Art and Improve Your Charcoal Drawings, comes in.

In Charcoal Drawing Lessons, you'll see how artist Chris Wynter takes the raw material of a still life and transforms it with attention to the finer details of a charcoal drawing. Wynter discusses charcoal drawing details such as the subtleties of value, edges, and creating a path of light all of which he uses to create a successful drawing.


	Click the picture above to view your free video lesson on charcoal drawing.

He gives practical advice on when hard or soft charcoal is appropriate—for me it's the latter all the way, because soft charcoal allows you to pull back on value with ease. Wynter also delves into how he enhances the surface of his charcoal drawing using erasers, cloths, and even his fingers. Seeing him get in there and really refine his charcoal drawing gave me a whole new impetus to explore this medium further and see what it can teach me.

Take a look at Charcoal Drawing Lessons: Learn How to Draw Charcoal Art and Improve Your Charcoal Drawings, and see if you feel the same way. Enjoy!

He's So Sketchy

Courtney Jordan — Mon, 23 Apr 2012 03:03:00 GMT

But in the very best way! When I was trolling for artists who draw like they paint and vice versa, Giovanni Boldini immediately came to mind. His mark making is a tour de force, no matter if he is working in oils, pastels, or when charcoal painting.

Spanish Dancer at the Moulin Rouge by Giovanni Boldini,
oil on canvas, 49 x 40, 1905. All works by Giovanni Boldini.

Boldini has an undeniable aptitude for charcoal drawing because of the variety of his strokes and the physicality of his gesture. He really acts on the surface of his drawings and pencil sketches. Even a simple charcoal portrait or chalk drawing, when looked at through an abstract lens, becomes a maze of lines and movement.

These same characteristics in Boldini's approach to charcoal really stand out in his painting methods as well. His stroke is always in keeping with the direction or motion he is trying to convey, and usually that turns out to be a lot of motion indeed! In fact, Boldini was known as the "master of swish" because of the extensive amount of visual movement he worked into his paintings and drawings.


Girl in a Black Hat, pastel, 1890.		La Lettura, chalk on paper, 1931.

Most of all, I am intrigued by how "full" Boldini makes his paintings and drawings feel with lines, curves, and hatch marks alone. He can take the simplest building block of art and evolves it into something with so much force and depth, even when his compositions are fairly sparse. In fact, when I look at his work it is usually the strokes all around the figures that I tend to give my attention. They are just so free but give a sense of atmosphere and spatiality to the works.

Portrait of the Marquise, oil on canvas, 1914.

Even a single charcoal drawing lesson could be your much needed outlet to explore expressiveness and gesture—aspects of art that we all try to incorporate in our artistic repertoires. If you want to see what charcoal painting can offer you, Dynamic Charcoal Drawing Lessons could be just the guide you are looking for. And right now the Artist Daily Store is having their April Sale, which means you can get all the resources you want at a great deal. Enjoy!

P.S. Are you a fan of Boldini? Are there other artists you can name who draw and paint with the same style and power? Leave a comment and let me know.

How to Put On the Brakes

Courtney Jordan — Wed, 14 Dec 2011 04:44:00 GMT


Matthew Carr refused to use pure white in his drawings, treating his surface with charcoal before he began. (Gordon, 2006, conté pencil on prepared charcoal paper, 56 1/2 x 44.)

As you all might remember, charcoal drawing and I haven't always worked well together. Largely it's been my hang-ups that have been a sore spot between us, one of those being that I tend to stumble when going back and reworking a charcoal drawing. I was always uncertain how to retrace my steps, but here are a few of the tactics I use that have really helped me see charcoal in a new way.

I put myself in the mindset of working from dark to light. As an exercise I'll start by laying down the charcoal in really heavy strokes to cover the whole page with black. Then I'll do a simple drawing using just a kneaded eraser to pull back the charcoal to give me highlights and middle tones. It's messy but this gives me an awareness that a charcoal drawing doesn't have to start on white paper. Sometimes, I'll also cover the whole surface with a light layer of charcoal and create a drawing using the surface as my middle tone.

I've also learned the lesson that if I want to go back, using a really smooth paper works well because I don't have to press as hard with a kneaded eraser to remove marks. And charcoal sticks instead of pencils are a must. The charcoal goes on with broader, shallower strokes that way. Pencils tend to dig in and leave grooves in the paper.


	Carr's process was to use a hard eraser to remove passages of charcoal and expose the white of the paper. (Mimi, 2006, conté pencil on prepared charcoal paper, 78 x 56.)

Going in with a white conté crayon also allows me to revisit passages within a charcoal drawing. I usually have to use a kneaded eraser, but the addition of these white highlights can give dimension to a work if I haven't been deft enough to preserve those areas of the paper.

But I'd say the most successful tactic I've used is getting comfortable with the nature of the medium. Artist Chris Wynter would say that I don't need to put on the brakes with charcoal or need to learn how to draw charcoal "in reverse" because the point and power of the medium is the freedom and the gesture of it, and the subtle gradations you make with each successive layer. In his DVD, Dynamic Charcoal Drawing Lessons, Wynter shows how all of that is charcoal's power and beauty. I try to be mindful of this most of all because I want to be in tune with my medium—not fighting it—so that I can learn its full capabilities and make the best work I can. Enjoy!

Do you believe in going back when you are painting or drawing or do you think it is best to always make forward progress? Leave a comment and let me know.

My Artistic Love-Hate Relationship

Courtney Jordan — Mon, 24 Oct 2011 05:09:00 GMT

Untitled (#April 08) by Hilary Brace, charcoal on polyester film, 6 x 11.625.

In the past, I have had a love-hate thing going with charcoal. Basically, I love it and it hates me. Seriously! I love what charcoal can do. The fact that you can use a stick of charcoal to create so many different kinds of marks—you can get an almost wash-like effect with one swipe, or turn it on its edge and use it like a traditional pencil. You can make strong, stark lines or work with it so it seems like there are no lines at all, just pure shadow. I'm amazed by the subtle variations of gradation that charcoal can create, and I love the fact that charcoal drawing is all about big gestures and shapes and not the fussy little details.


Speak Easy by Timothy Jahn, charcoal drawing, 5 x 7.

But for all the things I love about it, I've never been sure how to harness its potential. I mean, charcoal can definitely be a challenge to control. You have to get into a good rhythm, working with a certain amount of pressure and a certain amount of natural fluidity. It's not easy, and it is hard to go back, which usually means I freeze up like a deer in headlights. I tend to tense up and overthink things when there is no reverse gear in a medium.

So even though I know it is going to be an uphill battle and I'm not going to turn into a skilled user overnight (or in the next decade), I'm still keeping my eyes on the prize. I would love to create charcoal drawings like Hilary Brace, whose abstract cloud-water-sky forms are so subtle and have such a force of motion that I kind of feel like I'm experiencing vertigo; or give my drawings a nostalgic feeling like Timothy Jahn, whose charcoals are like objects out of time. They look like old photographs and have a mysterious, shadowy quality that I'm drawn to.

Looking at the works of all these great artists and knowing how far the medium can be pushed, I'm glad to know that I'm on the right track now, too. I've had a breakthrough with artist and instructor Chris Wynter. His new DVD, Dynamic Charcoal Drawings Lessons, has given me the building blocks to capture an object spontaneously and accurately in charcoal. I can't believe it either, but in Dynamic Charcoal Drawing Lessons Wynter walked me through what the medium can do, how to control it, and how to achieve all the effects I'm interested in. Enjoy!

P.S. Whose work in charcoal inspires you? Leave a comment and let me know!

Fictitious Portraits Blur Photographic Reality With Artistic Choice

Courtney Jordan — Fri, 14 May 2010 03:31:00 GMT


All works by Joel Kelly. Courtesy Coup d'Oeil Art Consortium.

I’m from a card-playing family, so when it comes to discussions about artists using reference photographs, I always think in terms of watching for a “tell.” Like in poker—where players’ subtle mannerisms can reveal whether they are bluffing—portraits created by closely referencing photographs have certain giveaways. The work can seem overwhelmed with minute details or look stiff and belabored, as if the artist went back and forth, back and forth, foregoing vision for exactitude.

Artists avoid this by maintaining a strong awareness and control over what they incorporate from photos and how they convey certain effects, and that leads to less-visible tells in their artwork. A study or source photo might be used to reproduce certain details—the moue of a mouth or a strong brow line—that indicate the personality and presence of the sitter, but there’s enough left unsaid, artistically speaking, so that the viewer’s own ideas and perception come into play.

A recent series by Louisiana-based artist Joel Kelly speaks to some of the challenges of using photography as an aid to creating artwork. Kelly is neither a portraitist nor a realist. His oil paintings often include depictions of the human figure but on the whole tend toward abstraction. Therefore, his charcoal portraits in a recent show at the Coup d’Oeil Art Consortium, in New Orleans, were a departure on many levels. The group show, Obituaries 1913, was conceived around 22 fictitious characters, and their lives—and demises—were manifested through music, written obituaries, and portraits. Kelly’s part in the endeavor was the portraits—drawn on watercolor paper in a narrow format to resemble the thin columns of a newspaper, where obituaries are ever-present—and he walked the line between grounding them in a specific time and place and rendering them organically.

“There needed to be a certain level of detail to suggest the time period, but I didn’t get too heavy-handed,” Kelly says. “A moustache, the neckline of a dress—hinting at these was enough. I wanted to let the person looking at the drawing interact with it. An artist profits from that—leaving space for the imagination of the viewer. The human mind craves those areas where we can go in and let our imagination work.”

Joel Kelly's charcoal portraits are rendered to give each subject a distinct presence and demeanor,
but are not overburdened with distracting details.

Kelly consulted a variety of sources for the drawings, including era-appropriate photographs found in antique stores, old postcards, and family photographs. He sought out images of figures that were not necessarily crisp and clear or front and center in the composition. “I was drawn to people on the periphery,” he says. “There might be eight people in a family photo, and I was interested in the one figure blurred on the edge. Or in a photo of children running around in front of school I focused in on the teacher, caught unaware as the photo was taken.” Seeking out figures that appeared murky or inchoate allowed Kelly necessary artistic leeway and also reflects how our mind’s eye often sees. “Some of the portraits have one area of the face defined,” says Kelly. “I approached it akin to how memory might work. You remember certain details, but not necessarily everything.”

Judging the success of the invented characters’ portraits was a matter of stepping away from a piece and, when necessary, unflinchingly redrafting. “I’d work on a drawing one night and then the next night I’d think that it was boring or too literal,” the artist says. “I’d go back in on it, sometimes turning it over, scuffing it up, and recreating it without going as far back into the details as I did before.”

The portraits Kelly created are true figments of the imagination, but the mix of amorphousness and strong, defining features or expressions made each figure appear quite real. Learning how to draw people and how to draw portraits from photographs is a matter of understanding what to incorporate and what to leave behind. For more tips on how to draw realistic people, we are offering our free eBook, How to Draw People From a Photograph. You’ll find step-by-step portraiture instructions focusing on facial features and successful depictions of hair, as well as discussions on how to choose the right photos to work from.

And for more information on Joel Kelly's work, visit his website.