Showing posts with label charcoal. Show all posts
Showing posts with label charcoal. Show all posts

Wednesday 3 May 2017

Recent sketches

A bunch of random sketches of various things, partly as studies, partly just for fun.

I just love drawing camels, which strike me as somehow simultaneously graceful and goofy:




A ceramic jug in charcoal:


And using a still from a film as reference:


For copyright reasons, one cannot really use stills from films directly as references, but such studies can help one get a better understanding of such things as old style clothing, weapons and buildings. 

Monday 23 January 2017

Charcoal sketches

I have been messing around with charcoal. And messing is the right word - fragile, powdery stuff that smudges all over the page, and about as easy to control as a feral cat. But I like the broad, painterly effects, and I'm thinking I should do a lot more. They seem to be a good antidote to my tendency to nitpick drawings to death when working with more precise media.



Saturday 1 February 2014

A plethora of pigeons

I have been trying to use bold, black charcoal outlines to create something of an expressionist style. I have seen extremely detailed, refined work done in charcoal, but I don't think I could ever manage that (not even in pencil!) Hence, for me, charcoal is a medium for fast, playful work.

I like birds, so here I drew one pigeon after the other.






Friday 29 July 2011

Charcoal

In a fit of madness, I decided to try out drawing with charcoal. Well, it is like watercolour: impossible to control, and quickly turns into a powdery mess. The drawing also tends to be extremely fragile compared to a pencil drawing: the slightest accidental touch, and your carefully placed line is smeared all over the paper. I am astonished at the way in which classically trained artists can use it to produce highly detailed and precisely naturalistic drawings. Perhaps practice will make perfect.

I do like the medium's rich, velvety blacks and grays, and its essential simplicity: it is the one drawing tool you can easily produce yourself (and indeed, until fairly recently, artists did burn their own charcoal instead of buying it). The drawing process itself is also an exercise in simplicity and minimalism: stick of charcoal, paper, eraser, and nothing more. In the old days, artists used a piece of old bread as eraser; these days we have a thing called a kneaded eraser that can work miracles in forgiving our artistic sins.

Without further ado, here's the powdery, murky, messy horror that resulted from my first excursion into this medium; it is about size A5:


This is going to take some practice...