Following on from yesterday's sketch, and my complaint regarding the limitation of shading in pencil, I've decided to try my hand at charcoal. Reputedly this is a great medium for attaining deep shadows with flowing transitions while retaining real malleability in the drawing. Also, almost by chance, the next chapter in Drawing for the Absolute and Utter Beginner covers the use of charcoal and kicks off with a sampler of techniques:
Suitable encouraged by this I picked up a nice piece of vine charcoal and began the suggested exercises. In practice these ranged from simply moving the charcoal around in various ways, with differing amounts of pressure, to drawing out squares of graduated intensity and messing around with smudging and erasing. The latter technique, with a blended eraser, felt quite arresting as it provides a mechanism for adding lightness back into the picture with some accuracy:
That said charcoal is undoubtedly great for blending and smudging it with your fingers (or a cotton bud) is really quite therapeutic; you really can achieve some subtle effects that are much harder to achieve in graphite. Also, at a stroke, the blacks with charcoal are just the more, well, black while even the softest pencils are merely dark grey by contrast. It's just a shame that it's so easy to smudge with an unintended sweep of your hand or even by simple leaning too heavily!