Charcoal Drawing Boot Camp: Tools, Techniques, Tips for Beginners

1. Introduction: [MUSIC] Hi, I'm Jen Dixon, I'm a full-time multi-disciplinary artist, living in North Cornwall in the UK. Multi-disciplinary means I work with lots of things including oil, acrylic, watercolor, inks, and more. But you know what I would choose if I had only one material for the rest of my career? I think you do. This ain't your typical art school fundamentals class. Oh, no. Were going to put the fun in fundamentals. [MUSIC] That was bad, I know. Oh, charcoal. How I love thee, so simple and so capable, so messy. Maybe I'm the messy one in the relationship, but seriously, I love charcoal so dang much. I have a dish of it on my easel, a dish of it on my desk, heck, I've even learned how to cook up my own charcoal from willow I have harvested myself. It is the first material I use with workshop and private students, because it is the most direct, no BS, drawing medium there is. It's like drawing with nature itself, because you are. In this class, we are going to get to know charcoal, and its closest cousins, through a series of exercises designed to get you creating interesting, expressive and enjoyable drawings, with basically just a bit of burnt wood in your fingertips. We will free up your creativity, get you experimenting, build real skills you can integrate into the rest of your art practice, all while having fun. Fun and fundamentals. I have honestly wanted to make this class for years, seriously, I have been thinking about this for years. Welcome to Charcoal Drawing Boot Camp, so get that tasty beverage, and let's get started. 2. Your Project Overview: Let's talk a little about your project. Being one of my boot camp classes, I aim to give you an understanding of charcoal and build your familiarity and skill with it. You'll learn to use it to achieve your desired results with a process you can always rely on, preserve it, and I'll even give you some next steps and inspiration to keep your curiosity flame burning bright with possibilities. How much and what you post to the project section is always up to you. But to really grow your skills, I suggest these as the specific exercises I'd like to see to watch you progress. First things first, we do a warm-up. I do the same warm-up with my in-person students before we get into the core of the lessons. Even if the lesson isn't about charcoal, warm-ups are crucial for drawing and painting just as they are for athletics or performing. We'll do it in a few chapters from now. After some other stuff, you'll need to know first about the materials. I want to see your warm-up scribbles in your project. Part 1 of 4; mastering, seeing, and creating values in willow or vine charcoal. I'll give tips for seeing values, tweaking them where needed, and we'll practice control with willow or vine charcoal as we lay down values from light to dark. I've created and included a value scale, you can print out for reference in the downloadable PDF. Part 2 of 4; manipulating and erasing charcoal. Lots of getting to know your materials in this one. This exercise will save potential heartache in the future because you'll be able to anticipate the behavior of your tools. I'll show you my reference sheets if you show me yours. Part 3 of 4, building a drawing in willow charcoal. I'll show you my no-fail way to tackle your subject and sculpt your way to a drawing you love. I want to see your drawing in stages. If possible, take a few progress shots along the way and upload those. This drawing building process always works. Part 4 of 4. This is about experimentation and encouraging yourself to be loose and expressive. I'll introduce a handful of charcoals' close cousins, and will inspire your further exploration with mixed media uses for charcoal. The handy chart to all of this is in the downloadable PDFs in case you want to print a copy of it. But wait, there's more. Of course, there's more. I wouldn't let you into my charcoal passion without opening up a bunch of next steps for you. Here are some optional ideas for stuff you might like to do after your core project is completed. Use my provided references to practice your build a drawing in charcoals skills. Use your handy value scale tool to help. If you didn't make that value scale earlier, now is your chance. Make your own liquid charcoal using the tips I share, it's very cool to use. Make your own willow charcoal. I tell you about my personal experience and process late in the class. You've got a lot to do, so hop to it, my dusty fingered soldiers, I mean students. Remember, you can pause and revisit this class whenever you need to, to catch up or refresh your skills. I'm here for you. The more you practice, the more you will achieve. I want to see some real sweat in those projects. I promise you will improve and discover some new ways to work along the way. I'm so thrilled you're here today. Let's get to it. 3. Materials: There will be many things demonstrated in this class, but for most of the project exercises, you'll only need a bit of willow or vine charcoal, an eraser, and some basic paper, like sketchbook paper. Beyond those items, I'll use a variety of materials and papers including pastel papers, newsprint paper, construction or sugar paper, and also various plastic, rubber and kneaded erasers, a bunch of willow charcoals cousins and pencil and stick form, and a whole gaggles of things to blend, manipulate, and preserve your charcoal art. In the lesson about mixed media, I want you to be open to trying whatever you have on hand for art supplies and not be too concerned whether or not you have what you are seeing on screen. Basically, I want you to start simple. If you want to take your charcoal drawing further, then add some tools slowly, to give yourself time to learn how to get the most out of each one. Let's get started. 4. Types of Charcoal & Paper: [NOISE] Willow and vine charcoal are accessible, cheap, soft, smudgy, adjustable, and just plain fun. You have no option but to become physically involved with it as it will get your fingers and probably your face a bit dirty with its soft burnt wood goodness. It comes in different thicknesses based on the diameter of the sticks that cook until blacken through and through, and if you get posh stuff like Nitram brand charcoal, you can even get relative hardnesses of marks similar to pencil grades. Willow charcoal is my go-to art supply for sketching and mapping paintings on canvas, teaching values and perspective, and I use it in my art regularly, alone and in mixed media. I even make my own, which we'll talk about later. Compressed charcoal sticks. Compressed charcoal is a less brittle cousin to basic charcoal, and this is achieved by blending charcoal as a pigment with binder of some sort. Some like Faber-Castell brand also add a little slightly sticky soot, which is also lampblack or carbon to the mix for a richer black tone. Compressed charcoals can be blended, smudged, and you can build values with them, but they can be a little bit trickier to master for lighter values and graduations of tone due to their density. Willow or vine charcoal is often used with them for the lighter or more preliminary tones. Some are really difficult to erase, so testing first is a must. Charcoal pencils. Very similar to compress charcoal sticks, compressed charcoal pencils offer a tidy way to draw with a charcoal substance, but are also a blend of binders and possibly other substances like soot or carbon, along with the basic charcoal. Many artists use the term charcoal to mean charcoal pencils, but the actual materials are significantly different to willow and vine charcoal. Compressed charcoal pencils can also come in different hardnesses, which is really handy, especially if you want to add detail to your drawing, and because it's a pencil, it's easy to sharpen and get those finer lines. That brings me to carbon pencils. Carbon pencils are lumped in with charcoal and compressed charcoal but are made with lampblack, not charcoal or graphite at all. Lampblack comes from the residue left by burning oil, and so they have a sticky consistency that is smooth and dark but can be really tricky to try and erase. Conte pencils, crayons, and sticks. Conte is a drawing medium composed of compressed, powdered graphite or charcoal mixed with a clay base. They're square in cross-section and they were invented around 1800 by Nicholas-Jacques Conte, who created the combination of clay and graphite in response to the shortage of graphite caused by import issues during war. Not only were Conte crayons cost-effective to produce, they could be manufactured in controlled grades of hardness. You'll find them in shades of black and also white and colors, too. They are tricky to erase and a little bit waxy depending on the color or hardness. Pastel pencils and white charcoal. Exactly as the name suggests, pastel pencils are chalk-like pastels encased in wood. White charcoal is not actually charcoal at all, but more closely related to a pastel pencil. The formulation for anything that calls itself white charcoal is something of a guarded secret with manufacturers. But typically, you'll find a soft white pencil that is calcium carbonate mixed with a binder such as mineral oil, wax, gum arabic, or clay. White pencils are also wildly different in intensity and often have cool hue biases. Willow charcoal is typically warmer and hue, so adding a cool bias white pencil can make for a strange and very gray mess. So keep this in mind and consider using off-white standard stick pastels for a better match and test, test, test. Choosing a paper to use the charcoal art doesn't need to be complicated. It just needs a little bit of texture for the charcoal particles to grab onto for best results. In the life drawing classes I taught, we use a lot of newsprint paper because it's cheap and large. Great for experimenting and learning, but not so good for lasting a long time. It's not acid-free and it will yellow with age. Cartridge sketch paper is a great alternative and also typically very affordable. You'll get it in sketchbooks, pads, or loose bulk sheets. I use this the most with charcoal and I always opt for acid-free stock. Numerous types of pastel papers are made by many reputable art supply and paper companies. You can get some that are a lot like construction or sugar paper only with a much higher quality. Some are called laid, which has a striped pattern embedded into the sheets, and there are velvety papers, too. My advice is to buy a few types when they're on sale and test them out. You could also ask artist friends to do paper swaps for samples. I mentioned construction paper, which is called sugar paper in the UK. It is a step up from newsprint paper, it is cheap, and has a little bit of a tooth to the texture, but it is only really good for practice and experiment as most of the colors will fade over time and they are not likely to be acid-free. It's really fun to try, though. [NOISE] For this class, I'll be mostly using cartridge paper. Use what you have and try others when you can. 5. History, Inspiration, & Warm-Up: [NOISE] Hi Jen, why are you so jazzed about charcoal? I hear you ask, maybe you asked. Well, I'm going to tell you anyway because if you haven't asked, for real this is my favorite drawing medium, and I'm going to get you jazzed for it to. It is so accessible and simple, it's burnt wood, it's ancient. Charcoal is one of the few art materials our cave-drawing ancestors had available to them and in the Chauvet Cave in Southern France, we see how they learned to apply in thin layers for shading, 36,000 years ago. This was a radical development in art history. Interestingly, ancient cave artists rarely drew humans, instead favoring animals and symbols as subjects. However, they did sometimes draw human genitalia, so next time you see some rude bits drawn on the bathroom wall, imagine it's part of a long tradition going back tens of thousands of years. That's nice. But seriously though, if you want to learn more about the Chauvet Cave in particular, Werner Herzog was allowed to make a documentary film about it in 2010, so have a look for a film called Cave of Forgotten Dreams. Moving swiftly forward through time, more modern humans in the 15th century started experimenting with preserving this dusty stuff, but progress was slow on that front, so it wasn't until the 20th century, which is 1901 - 2000, that charcoal became a more popular medium on its own. Fixatives have come a long way in 500 years and we'll talk more about them later. Oh my goodness, Jen, history, it's great and all but what about today, this class? Okay, in a nutshell, why I love charcoal, and why you're going too. Its potential is broad and it can be used to create loosely or in brilliant detail. It's great for sketching on canvas prior to a painting. It's perfect for knocking out quick ideas for compositions. It's a natural for sketching outside, it's inexpensive, it's messy, which I believe really connects you to the work in a way most materials do not. It invites you to play. It teaches you to work with values. It's just so dang good. In this class, I'm going to do my very best to show you how and why charcoal is almost always the first drawing medium I pick up when I want to explore, experiment, draft, deepen, express, and connect with my art. So put on an apron or clothes that you can get dirty in, gather up your materials and let's dive in. Time for a warm up exercise. I do this with all of my workshop and private students to break the ice and get the marks flowing. Take down large sheet of any kind of paper. I'm going to use cartridge paper in this demonstration and I want you to make marks considering opposites. You're going to want to allow two or three minutes to do this. I'm setting a timer for two minutes. Think about light and heavy, quiet and loud, small and large, rounded and angular, crisp and smudged, and any other opposites you can think of. You'll be done when the page is mostly covered, your timer goes off and your hands are no longer clean. Give yourself that time limit, otherwise you run the risk of running over and just taking it too long. The time limit is actually really good for getting your creative juices flowing. Work quickly. Don't overthink it, and don't draw anything in particular, just marks. A charcoal warm up is such a good exercise to do before any project, any medium, so consider this day one of your new habit to loosen up before you draw or paint. When you're finished, set it aside and start the values lesson. If you aren't ready for that next lesson right now, save the warm up for when you are. [NOISE] 6. Value Control with Willow Charcoal: If you've been my student before, you know how I go on and on about light, medium, and dark. These tonal values are crucial to making your art no matter what the medium pop. These values give visual cues about light, weight, shape, distance, texture, gravity, and so much more. Failure to bravely use light, medium, and dark will flatten your art and suck the life out of it. Our eyes crave contrast. Give those papers what they want. Seeing values is sometimes tricky, especially in color. Here's a color wheel in color and then reduced in saturation. Notice how yellow, green, and orange are essentially the same gray, and how looking at the color card below seems to show red, green, magenta, and cyan as almost identical gray values too. Translating color into shades of gray can be tricky in art. But as you practice with these values, you'll know where you can do that little artist thing by fudging the truth a little between what you see and improving the contrast between elements for the viewer. Photographers have been doing this for ever by using dodge and burn techniques in the darkroom and also using colored filters on black and white film. Filters work by throttling color information from the visible spectrum on its way to the film. Knowing how the color wheel translates in gray, this brightly colored landscape achieves very different results when simulating colored photo filters. Elements in the photo shift in light, medium, and dark values becoming easier for our eyes to distinguish. If I were drawing this in charcoal, I would probably create a mix of a few of these results like the sky could be from this one, and the nearest flowers from this one and so on. Now that we fully understand the necessity of these tonal value differences, let's practice consistently creating them. For reference, you'll find a PDF in the downloadables of a value scale. It's a visual representation of the nine-step Denman Ross Value Scale combined with my light, medium, and dark values, but also I've added grayscale percentages for reference. I encourage you to print it out and use this scale to help you see values. If translating color to the scale is tricky, and I totally understand that because it is hard, then snap a digital photo of the art or object and reduce the saturation to zero or change it to mono in the filters. Other black and white filters will tweak things similar to a filter on a camera. But zero percent saturation and mono are pretty reliable. Then think like a photographer and tweak the values as needed. I regularly do this when I create art, and it makes a huge difference in giving an art work that visual pop.On a large sheet of sketch or cartridge paper, I'm using A3 size cartridge, we'll create a grid. I'm using the width of my ruler, which is about an inch and a half or four centimeters. Create three full height rows with label space between them. If you have smaller paper, you might need to do this in portrait orientation. Next, we need three squares across a gap, then five squares across. Again, if your paper is smaller, create the five across part on a separate sheet. Larger squares thinness are fine, but try not to go smaller. Under the first three squares in that label space, mark L, M, and D for light, medium, and dark. Repeat that for the next sections down. For the five across squares, mark them L, LM, M, MD, and D. This is similar to the Denman Ross Scale but with fewer steps. This is light, light medium, medium, medium dark, and finally dark. These are the minimum tonal value levels I want you to master. In the first three on the left, we will use willow or vine charcoal to gently make a very light even tone in the whole square. Do not blend this with your finger or anything else. This is purely laying down the smoothest lightest tone you can with charcoal. This is not easy. You will need to do a lot of these practice sheets. Here are some I did at another time and my notes on how I achieved the results. You may wish to practice separately to get a pressure and direction that feels best for you. After you fill the square with light, medium is next. Try to make the same direction mark as if it is a continuation of the light square. Think about a cube, a basic cube needs a light side, a medium side, and a dark side to show that it is a cube. Of course, dark is the last in the trio and typically the easiest to achieve. You can now build that cube if you wanted to. In the next row of light, medium, and dark, you can blend it with your finger. Blending is usually easier to produce that nice even tone, but not always the effect you need in a drawing. That's why we practice with the pure marks too. Blending can change the visual texture of an object completely for the viewer, so use it sparingly. Use layers of blended charcoal to achieve the value you need. The darkest value creates a lot of dust, so I like to clean my finger a few times when blending. It also picks up the excess instead of blowing it around the rest of the drawing. Keep checking your values to your value scale and adjust as needed. Finally, a row of light, medium, and dark using a pattern. Hatches or squiggles are perfect for this. This skill will help you to translate textures into values. These hatched marks are going to look slightly fatter from more pressure and contact with the paper in the medium and dark blocks. But if you want to avoid that, use thinner charcoal or sharpen your charcoal frequently with a little bit of sandpaper. I felt it was important to show you many of these squares being filled in, in real time, so you get a real sense of how slow and carefully I go. Filling areas evenly takes practice and patience. After this, it's time to dive into adding another value between light, medium, and dark. White can always be the white of the paper. We are starting from the lightest charcoal we can lay down to the darkest and creating the steps in between. This section of five across took me just over 12 minutes in reality to create, but I've speeded it up only to five minutes to show you the complete process. But you'll want to pause after each row to give yourself time to finish your own. I typically do them in this order. I put down the light, the medium, and then the dark. Then I go back and I fill in the middle ones, tweaking them as needed. You guessed it. Do this for unblended, blended, and a pattern. Please pause and come back when you've completed these scales. Take as long as you need for this. It is the foundation for everything that follows. You remember how the dark square in the three across example, had excess charcoal. By filling in the light, medium, and dark boxes first on the five square side, I had leftover charcoal dust. I can just work that into the middle values of light, medium, and medium dark. Every time you intentionally practice your tonal values, you are building a skill that translates to every medium you use. Your training, not only your hand in material handling skill, but also your eyes and brain for seeing and recognizing values. It can be helpful to keep a sketchbook devoted to value studies in a variety of mediums. A dedicated sketchbook means you can grab it and practice anytime you want. If you want to try a few cubes to practice these three terminal values, then go for it. When practicing, try making a cube that seems darkest in color, like imagine a black or a dark blue cube de-saturated. Also challenge yourself to create one as light as possible, but still showing three tones. How would you show a white cube? Sometimes cubes are tricky shapes to draw, so you'll find a PDF of two cube frames in the downloadable area. Slip it under your paper to give you a faint outline to follow so you don't have to divide your attention with concerns about drawing a perfect cube. That's all for part 1 of your project. The cubes are optional and should come after the warm-up and values squares. But if you do make them, upload them with your part 1 work. We'd love to see them. 7. Erasing & Manipulating Willow Charcoal - Part One: Willow charcoal is ideal for a technique called subtractive drawing, where the surface of the paper is covered in a value of charcoal to begin with, then alternating with an eraser and more charcoal to bring the more extreme values into focus. Charcoal is so easy to smudge, but that's also a huge reason to use it. It's easy to manipulate and change, which makes it easy to revise and correct as you go. There are a bewildering number of erasers available to buy, but in general, they fall into only a few categories. Kneaded or putty erasers are made of a soft rubber that can be molded by your hands which is great for pinching skinny bits of the stuff to do detail work or left as a big blobby ball that can quickly cut through a lot of charcoal at once. Kneaded erasers require frequent kneading to fold the residue it lifts into the ball, revealing fresher surface for use. They do get full, but that typically takes a really long time. I mean, look at this one that I'm using, it's absolutely filthy. It used to be light blue, you'd never know it now. Kneaded erasers don't leave crumbs like other erasers. Many artists love the lack of brushing or blowing away, which could potentially damage the drawing in progress. If you find it difficult to knead or blend the eraser, stick it into the palm of your hand for a few minutes to warm it up. I use my kneaded erasers as fidget things to knead when I'm stuck on a Zoom call or watching a webinar. Here is how I use a kneaded eraser. Knead it in your warm hands and then you can try different techniques like dragging and dabbing or you can do sweeping movements and of course, rubbing and blending. Kneaded erasers are really versatile. They don't pull up everything and they're a little bit clumsy, but they are extremely useful for charcoal drawing. You want to test your kneaded erasers on a variety of papers because the tooth and the thickness of the different papers will hold the charcoal differently and it will release to the eraser differently. As you can see on these samples that I've done on the laid paper, on the construction paper, also known as sugar paper, as well as pastelmat. I've done all of these tests and it can sometimes feel like a waste to be doing a test on expensive paper, but I promise you it's far more worth it to do it on a test sheet than it is to have heartache on your final artwork. Also, kneaded erasers, they do behave differently from different manufacturers. I have several different kinds and I find that they do pick up a little bit differently to one another. Sometimes you can use a second one where the first one didn't pick up quite enough. It might be a little bit full of particles or maybe it just has a slightly different rubber formula to it. You just never know. That's why these tests are important. Before we move into the section on plastic erasers, I just want to talk really quickly about how to get rid of all of the dusty bits and eraser crumbs that you're going to be leaving on your work. Everybody does the mouth blow and you can do that, but I would recommend short, quick, little gentle puffs. Don't breathe back in over top of your work because you run a risk of getting some of the charcoal dust in you, and the one downside is you might spit on your work, nobody likes that. So what would you do instead of that? Well, a brush, it's just going to make a bigger mess of things. So I don't recommend those. You could tip the work, shake things off. But that's going to make a pretty big mess of things also. If you do that or if you're working on an easel and you get that gravity fall, you can clean things up with a kneaded eraser. You could have the option of using a bit of tape. If you do use tape, it's a really good idea to put it on some fabric first, just to get a bit of lint on it so it's not quite as sticky. But depending on your paper, you could potentially tear your paper surface. So do test this before you try it. It's only going to pick up so much. Might be better on the eraser crumbs than the charcoal. You could, of course, use the eraser itself to pick up some of the crumbs. One of my favorite methods to cleaning up a little bit around your piece is to use a mechanical air blower. This one, in particular, is for photographers and it's meant to clean dust off of lenses, so you're not spitting on your lens, you're not touching your lens. It just gives a little puff and you can be really precise with it. You can do little puffs or you can do much bigger blasts. They're really easy to direct. If you get it in an area where you don't want to remove any of the charcoal, like you can see, I've got excess charcoal built up on top of that heavy coverage, give just a gentle puff. It might remove just a little bit off the surface, but you can always go back over that. Then once it's at the outskirts, it's a fair game. You can also use them with a stronger bit of force to do some interesting removal. You can do a Google search for camera lens, air blower, or something similar to that and you will find loads of these things. I think this one, in particular, is called a rocket. If you don't want to go out and buy one of these, you might actually have a solution in your recycling bin. This is a food grade, I use it for paint, but it's a squeeze bottle, just a plastic squeeze bottle and it's a little bit flexible. So it will puff air. You can get a little bit more force if you leave the nozzle a bit smaller. Finally, this is a little bit heavy-handed. This is a spray duster, also known as canned air. Now, the one downside with this, well, there are a couple of downsides. A, it's expensive, it's not particularly environmentally friendly, and also you run the risk of it being too heavy-handed and blasting your work with propellant which is going to leave a mark. They are really difficult to control. Little puffs, there we go. They might do a really good job at cleaning around the edges. However, I can already hear a difference in it. I thought it was going to leave some propellant, but let me show you a time when it did. Now you know how to remove dust from your charcoal and crumbs from your erasers in several different ways. Some are better than others, and as always, test first. The term plastic eraser basically includes all the non-latex, non-rubber style erasers often found in white, semi-translucent, black, maybe dark green for artists, but in all colors for schools and novelties. They will leave crumbs, some better than others. But these erasers do a very good job at picking up charcoal. Like any eraser, you'll want to try a variety of application methods beyond just rubbing and scrubbing the charcoal away. For highly detailed and precise erasing, you can get these plastic erasers in pen format. These are my favorites and they can be good for applying just a little extra pressure for pulling out those highlights that a typical eraser cannot. Here's the technique where I've made a dimensional basket weave pattern by first laying down dark charcoal, then letting a plastic eraser rub out the lines of the weave. But then the real star is using those pen style plastic erasers like the Tombow mono. It pulls out just that little bit of extra charcoal to create bright highlights in the middles of those lines. This is even more effective because I've chosen a tinted paper, which adds to the effect of it being maybe basket material. One more plastic eraser to show you is this Derwent battery operated eraser. There are also newer USB rechargeable style ones, but I've got a couple of AAA rechargeable batteries. Use light pressure and let the motor do the work. I never liked these things in the past because they felt clunky and disconnected from the art when charcoal is just so tactile. But things change and I now have osteoarthritis in my hands and so saving a little pressure on my hand joints is actually really welcome. There are lots of other erasers out there and I'll quickly blast through the ones here. Pencil eraser with brush. I don't like this, but it does work pretty well with charcoal. The brush is pointless because it's so rough, it would damage the work more than just gently puffing air or tapping the crumbs away. Remember these from school. I loved pencil topper erasers. I thought since it's not so easy to get one of the oft recommended pink pearls on this side of the Atlantic that I'd try another from being a kid and you know what? They actually work pretty well with charcoal and they're cheap. The rubber is slightly abrasive, but that's actually working in our favor on heavier papers. Definitely worth checking your school supplies for these. Finally, it isn't an eraser, but rather it's an eraser shield. They often come as part of a sketching kit like this one from Jakar, but I rarely use them. The shapes are a little bit harsh. They're cut edges for sharp details, but I'd say experiment with it. You can also use it as a stencil to apply charcoal. But again, you're limited to the machine cut metal. A better stencil idea is to cut your own from card stock or heavy paper if you need one. If you do want to use these with an eraser to pull out highlights, or maybe you want the dot effect or something like that, but you don't want to accidentally get into the next hole. Well, use a little bit of tape so that the sticky side is up. That way, you don't accidentally remove some of your charcoal by laying it down. 8. Erasing & Manipulating Willow Charcoal - Part Two: Moving on from erasers to other techniques in moving and removing willow charcoal, using a large sheet of paper. I'm using A3 size, and it's 130 GSM cartridge sketch paper, but use what you have. I recommend it has just a little bit of a tooth for the surface texture, and heavy paper will put up with more techniques. I will also be showing you some techniques, specifically on some of the specialist pastel papers to show you differences. The first thing I want to show you is the easiest way to quickly lay down a blanket of charcoal to start with. Using some scrap cloth or a thinly woven rag, we're going to put some crushed willow charcoal and or some powdered charcoal into that, and then close it up with a string, or in my case, a rubber band. To make the crushed charcoal to fill it, use a mortar and pestle or a little rolling pin, or use some coarse grit sandpaper. But if you're using sandpaper, wear a mask to avoid breathing in the dust. This is a good use for all the little broken bits you may save. I save loads of them. That looks great. Time to bundle that up. Now practice ways of dabbing, swirling, and rubbing the charcoal on the paper with this new fabric applicator. It makes a lovely, soft, smudgy mark, and it's really good for just getting a big amount of surface coverage really quickly. If you'd like to experiment with masking and drawing with charcoal, I can suggest trying a bit of scrap paper, which you can also cut stencils into, or washi tape. Let's see. I'm just going to put a couple of pieces randomly. There we go. A bit of washi tape and paper. Pushing away from the paper's edge, I can make a nice hard line. I'm just going to take it right over to that washi tape. I'm not pushing under the paper, but rather pulling off the edge. It's going to be slightly softer than if I butted up against it. I accidentally peeled it up. See, that's the problem, is you might actually peel it up if you go against it. Here we go. Just a little bit more of the edge of it. I don't know what these shapes are going to be. It's just shapes. Cool. I'm going to use our fabric tool, just do a little bit of blending. Maybe just a little bit more dark charcoal for fun. What have we got? You can see how that works really well to give you some clean edges. I can see right now that this would be really useful to be able to maybe do a mountain range or something like that. Because then I could have maybe a night sky behind it, but a lovely crisp line for my mountain. As long as we're at it, let's go with the obvious, and that is blending. Charcoal, being a very tactile medium, is very easy to blend with your finger. Now that is falling. There's something lovely about being in contact with the charcoal. Keep in mind that no matter who you are, no matter if you never use hand lotion or whatever, you are going to have oil in your skin, and that will end up affecting things ever so slightly. You can see the difference between the blending that I can do with my fingertip versus what I could do with the fabric. The fabric, with its little fibers, rubs it into all the little fibers of the paper. My finger does not have any fibers and it's got oil on it, so it's behaving differently with the tooth of the paper. It's a little more mottled than that fabric was. Now you can also use sponges, so we're going to dig into a few different types of those. For blending with sponges, first thing I'm going to show you is a really low quality. This is more like a packing foam, I think this was packing foam for something that I bought. It feels rough, I guess would be a good way to say it. It's going to be a little bit scratchy. You can actually see a very delicate, stripy, most furry pattern that it makes. That could be useful actually. Next one I'm going to show you is in the same family as that stuff, but you can get them at craft stores or DIY places. They are just a little cheap sponges on a stick. The foam is very similar, a slightly scratchy texture coming out. Here we go. You can really see how stripy it is there. That can be good for water as well. Looks very water-like actually. Next thing we'll get into our cosmetic sponges. Cosmetic sponges are very soft, rubbery, very dense, but very soft and can imagine why? Because if you're going to put makeup on with them, you want it to be good to your face. Now, I think these probably are latex. If you are allergic to latex, makeup sponges may not be for you, but there might be a latex free version that you can find. Makeup sponges, as I said, you can imagine they're going to be very soft on the face. They are also really soft with charcoal, and that makes a lot of sense, because charcoal, it's just this really finely ground powder. You can just wipe that away. The scratches you see are actually because of the charcoal. Obviously, I've been using this one for a little while, but I could just rinse it, maybe give it a little bit of a soap and water bath, and it will be fairly clean again. Not clean enough to use on the face but that's all right. I didn't get these form [inaudible]. Here we go. Beautiful soft smoky strokes. If you don't want it to be streaky, get a bigger sponge if you want, or you can ball it up so that it doesn't have any edges. That can help you keep it very nice and soft. You can see here I'm just tapping, dabbing. That's a really nice effect. There are people who use a different kind of sponge blunder on a pallet knife. Now, this is just me putting together a version so I can show you a little bit about what it's like. I've got a picture of them. They're used with pen pastel that are in sticks like those. Use this and rub into the pen pastel, and then paint with it that way. You can imagine using this on a stick of some sort is a really nice tool. Now it's time to move on a little more quickly as we look at paper towels, t-shirt material, different paint brushes, some soft leather shammy, as well as blending stumps, and tortillon. As I've asked for you to do, I am doing myself. I am testing these methods of blending on several different paper types. On screen right now, we've got a sheet of white Jaxell Ingress pastellblock which has laid finish. Also some green sugar paper, which is just construction paper. Also a sheet of the Fabriano Pastello Tiziano. Each one of these papers takes charcoal differently. Each one of these methods will have a slightly different result, depending on which paper stock I'm applying it to. If my project were to involve finger blending, I think I would choose the Jaxell. Again, obvious differences between these different papers stocks. I'm going to try three different paint brushes. The first one I choose is a hog bristle brush by Diala Brownie. Next I've got a stabilo. It's just a general purpose synthetic bristle brush. It moves the charcoal around in a much softer way, and I can get these little wispy bits out of it. Then of course I've got this huge mop brush, which is just so soft. It's almost like a cosmetic brush, it's so big and fluffy. Next is a little piece of shammy leather. Now, this usually comes in those sketch kits that also have the sandpaper and the blending stump, that thing. It is a really good blender. I like to put something inside it, wrap it around it, so that it's almost like a ball. The terms blending stump and tortillon get used interchangeably, but that's not really correct. A blending stump is tighter. It's almost solid paper, and is typically double-ended. A tortillon on the other hand, is hollow and is a much looser wound paper. Both can be cleaned with sandpaper, but be sure to wear a mask because the paper dust is very fine. They're really good for blending and pushing around charcoal. You can get these little wispy bits almost like blades of grass or fur or whiskers, that sort of thing. Finally, another method of moving around charcoal on the paper, it's using silicon color shaper tools. They look like paint brushes, but they have silicon ends. They come in different hardnesses, so gray and white there. One is softer than the other and they come in a variety of end type. They are really good way of moving charcoal around without absorbing it, and also it doesn't erase any of it. Once again, don't forget to label all of your samples that you've done on your different kinds of paper. I would also recommend putting a little fixative over them. We're going to talk a little bit more about fixative later in the class. You can see that while I'm working on that basket weave, I've got this funny thing under my hand. Now that is similar to a mahl stick. It's basically some bits of wood that I hot glued together, and I put a foam pad across it, and hot glue that down as well. Basically it just keeps my hand from touching the paper, but it gives me something steady to rest on. Really handy. 9. Building a Charcoal Drawing: One of the things I love about charcoal is that it feels like a bridge between drawing and sculpting. To use it in its best way possible in the context of figurative work like still-life subjects or people, I believe you need to think like a sculptor. You need to believe you can hold in your hands the object you are creating as if it has three dimensions. This relies on values and process discipline. Here's what I mean. Here are examples of how my life drawings begin. One of them results in a quick portrait. You can see in the first two photos of a full model pose that I start with a feel for how the model occupies space, like a lump of clay. I shape the major observations without detail. In the second photo, I begin refining my initial observations. Everything is temporary at this stage and can be re-sculpted by manipulating the charcoal to make corrections. In the second pair of photos showing a different pose, I'm going from that refining stage of my observations to details that make the subject recognizable. The time between those two stages for this particular drawing is only about 30 minutes. Following the sculpting process is quick and it only has three steps, but it relies totally on the skills you built earlier in this class with values, erasing and manipulating, but also seeing where to enhance things with a little art fiction. Trust this no-fail process and don't be tempted by details too early on. If this all still sounds a bit daunting, think about the first stage like a balloon animal. Get those big basic things in place, then refine in stages until you have a dog. Grab some paper and your willow charcoal. We're going to start with a drawing of a little pumpkin. Grab the photos from a PDF in the downloads area. Pumpkins are more exciting to draw than a traditional sphere subject. Even though I'm such a big fan of the tonal sphere, that it was actually the very first thing I drew in digital charcoal when I got my iPad Pro and Procreate. That's how much I love the sphere. But the pumpkin, it's going to be cute and it uses the same principles. For this no fail process, we have three stages to the drawing. For the first stage, we start really loose. I want you to feel your way around the pumpkin visually, and I want you to not worry about being messy. Don't worry about accuracy at this stage. This is just about getting to know the subject. We'll work quickly, but don't lose heart if you're not as fast as I am. I've been doing this process for decades. But the good news is, is that with just a little bit of practice, you are going to be fast too. I've taught this method to complete beginners who have created amazing results in just a short amount of time with me. This first stage of the charcoal drawing is about feeling your way. So just do that. Everything else can wait. The process we're doing here is very loose, but the same method can be used more carefully for more complicated work. That can come later after we get the basics down. Especially in this first stage, try to move your arm, get physical, use broad gestural movements, moving more instinctively and quickly will put more feeling into what you're drawing. For the second stage of the drawing, we're going to refine it a little bit. We're thinking like a sculptor and we've got this almost wire form tangle that we've got to work with. Imagine that as a ball of clay and now we're going to start smoothing out bits of it. We're refining some of the sizes and the shapes and the proportions. You're sculpting this. Allow yourself to smudge things, erase things, add more things. This is still part of the investigation of the pumpkin. Resist all the details at this stage. If you want to put in a little place holder is like a mark for where the stem will appear later. That's fine, but resist adding a detailed stem. Now is not the time for that. Right now we're just refining and it's like pulling something slowly into focus. Allow some of your light, medium, and dark values to sort organically and naturally during this part of the refining. You can see how using a variety of tools we tested in the erasing and manipulating willow charcoal lesson really come into practice with this pumpkin. Smudges of crushed charcoal using brushes and blending stumps as well as erasers, all part of the sculpting of this drawing. Stage 3, the final and third stage of your drawing. This one is about the details. We're going to make this drawing sing by deepening the values where needed, pulling out highlights, sharpening edges, adding the lumps and bumps and I really don't want you to concern yourself about making it perfectly like the photo reference. I want you to make this yours, but with the framework of your new techniques and skills as a strong foundation. Our subject isn't particularly complicated, but it has an interesting surface. We have both yellow and orange splotches. If we look at it in black and white, those colors seem to fade a lot. The pumpkin becomes a perfect candidate for artistic license with the values. I admit that I took a little longer with this third stage of the drawing than I had planned, but eventually, I had to wrap it up and just stop adjusting. That's one of the things to get used to when working with willow charcoal, is how infinitely changeable it is. When I teach this process to students in workshops and privately, we often use a timer to keep ourselves disciplined. I divide the amount of time into thirds, such as a nine-minute drawing into three-minute chunks for each stage. I encourage you to do the same, but if the pumpkin demonstration felt too fast for you, I encourage you to try this, but also feel free to just pause and take a little bit longer. Like maybe you want to do five-minute chunks. To better see your values without pausing to take a photo to change into mono, try squinting your eyes. Doing this can temporarily blur the drawing, reducing the details so that the values are more obvious. There comes a point where you just have to let an artwork be done. You have to find a place of peace with it and take whatever you've learned to the next drawing instead of overworking the one in front of you. This process is now yours too. I want you to practice it often with a variety of subjects. This isn't just a one-and-done thing. This is a foundational skill that you can now apply to everything you do. Like if you're planning a painting, anything, you can begin to figure things out using this process of starting really loose like a sculptor, figuring things out, then deepening some values, maybe adding some detail. I want to see progress shots for all three of your stages. Please upload them along with your final pumpkin, to the projects area. I have a little secret to let you in on and that is the eye I actually filmed the pumpkin demonstration twice. The only difference is one of these took twice as long as the other to draw. I'd like you to think just for a moment, which one do you think it is? Time for the big reveal. Anytime you think that by working quickly, you won't get good results. I want you to think of this. The way to get quicker is to practice your techniques. Then I promise you can cut your time and still come up with something that is very pleasing as a result. While I encourage you to practice with charcoal alone, I want to show you an example of how the same technique can be used with a pencil drawing as the first stage. Here's a chicken drawing using the same loose lines to find my way around the subject, then brought into focus using willow charcoal and an eraser. The techniques rely on exactly the same knowledge built in the erasing and manipulating willow charcoal lesson, and the end drawing is fairly detailed, but started with the same three-stage process we've just used for the pumpkin. In the next chapter, we'll dig into exploring some of charcoals, cousins, and a little bit of mixed media. 10. Preserving Charcoal Art: [NOISE] Fixatives. Let's talk about your options real quick. Standard aerosol sprays are available from most big art supply companies like Daler-Rowney, or Winsor & Newton, Sennelier, and others. If they say they're good for graphite or pastels, but not oil pastels, that's a different kind of fixative, whatever you pick up will do an adequate or better job. There is always a risk with a spray fixative that you will see a slight color shift or diminish your whites. But I sometimes hit areas I want really white with a second bit of pastel or white charcoal pencil after a light coat of spray, then after it's dry spray again until I've bumped up that area of contrast. The first time you spray light colors with fix will make you freak out a little, but as it dries, the shift will be less obvious. I recommend for testing a swatch of similar marks and materials to see what the fix does to avoid surprises. There are also non-aerosol sprays, like this one from Spectra Fix and I like it, but it does come out of the nozzle a little heavier than an aerosol can. The good thing is you can decant it into a smaller bottle, and that's really great for travel or sketch kits, and sometimes you can find one that does make a finer mist. Workable fixative is one that helps you gently hold down a layer of work, but still allows you to easily draw on top, and in some cases, even erase the original layer of graphite or charcoal. I used to use this a lot when I did a lot more graphite work. But anymore, I pretty much always stick to Daler-Rowney's perfect aerosol. I found that if I want to deepen an area of black charcoal, I can really lightly spray with perfects then add more charcoal. Again, this is the kind of thing that you want to test first on some scrap paper. But Jen what about spray varnishes? You can use them, sure, but they may seem a little bit heavy. I do use them when creating mixed media work though, as I need to protect more than just charcoal. I often spray them with a bit of fix, and then after I'm totally finished with the work, I go over it with a mat spray varnish like this one. It will protect acrylic, crayon, oil, whatever might be in the artwork. All sprays should have their nozzles tested first before spraying on the actual artwork. To do this, give it a good shake, which we're not going to do because [NOISE] it's really noisy, but give it a good shake for a while, and then spray your test paper to check for splutter. Then if it's coming out clean on the test paper, then you can move to spraying the actual artwork. To do that, you're going to want to hold the can about 20 - 30 centimeters above the work and spray lightly, from side to side and overshoot the paper. Go off the edge, that way you don't create any unnecessary heaviness when you switch directions. Allow that coat to dry. Go make a cup of tea, feed the cat, and then come back. If you want to rotate the thing so that you're still spraying left to right, that's fine. But basically, you're going to do one coat in one direction, one coat in the next direction. After that, you're going to be good to go and it should be enough to protect the work. After you are done using an aerosol, you want to hold it upside down and spray towards that scrap paper to clear the nozzle. I like to give it a good wipe with a cloth as well. Non-aerosols can be wiped clean with a no need for the upside down thing because it doesn't have a propellant. A word of warning for using hairspray as fixative, don't, not even on your practice stuff. Hey man, I've been there and I've done that in old art school days and for newsprint paper sketches that I did in life drawing. But honestly, no matter what info you find on the Internet with ingredients to avoid, etc, just get into the habit of respecting your work with the right tool for the job. There are other ways to cut expenses in art, but don't let this be one of them because it will deteriorate your drawings, and I regret damaging some really excellent work with cheap hairspray instead of proper fixative. Last thing I want to mention, don't forget to wear a mask and spray only in well ventilated areas. Even non-aerosol fumes have no business being in your body. Fixing outdoors is great if there isn't any wind, but indoors, take care of your lungs since chances are they're the only ones you're going to have. I hope this helps to give you a little bit more insight on how to use fixative to preserve your delicate charcoal work. 11. Exploring Charcoal's Cousins & Mixed Media: Welcome to this, the fourth part of your 4-part project. In this chapter, we're going to look at explore. 12. Further Practice: Hey, you're still here. That means you are now completely smitten with charcoal as I am. We've done the techniques exercises and now you might be dying to try them on something more meaty. If you're ready for that challenge, I have hand-picked some excellent subject references for you to flex your skills. When looking for these references, I headed to my favorite stock site, Pexels.com, P-E-X-E-L dot com and here's what I look for when I choose a good practice photo. Look for light, medium and dark values. Look for mostly lighter backgrounds so you're not just filling in a black background for ever. Look for interesting compositions or compositions you can edit down into something you really like. Look for shapes and details that are interesting, but suit the medium. I chose these for you and they are available for download, I've created a thumbnail reference sheet with that information for you. I'd love to see whatever you practice, whether it is the chapter by chapter techniques work, or if you're feeling like a challenge, some of these specially selected photos will give you just that interesting topic to try. Remember to build loosely and like a sculpture, you're going to rework and refine until slowly but surely, you're ready to finally add the details. That workflow, will never let you down. 13. Making Charcoal: I like digging deep into how things work. Charcoal making was a natural thing for me to try for a couple of reasons. To satisfy my curiosity because I love to learn, and to make an endless supply I could use with my students, give away, and I even sold a bit at exhibitions and studio sales. It took a lot of trial and error, putting together information from the Internet and adjusting to my equipment limitations. But by golly, I got some good stuff after a few tries. Worth it? Well, yes. I loved the process. Everything from connecting with friends who had willow to trim back, to the peeling of the bark, cutting the lengths, drying the sticks on window sills for weeks and finally, figuring out the best way to cook it without curling and cracking the sticks too much, or cooking it too hot and making ash and fire instead of usable drawing charcoal. Totally not worth it to sell it on. I actually gave away lots of it for free. It is labor-intensive and it takes a lot of time, but I loved every minute of it. Frankly, I made some of the best charcoal I have ever used in the process. If you'd like to make your own, do it. There are many resources online that describe different ways of going about it. But I found that with what I had available to me at the time, that perfectly dried links of willow bundled tightly in foil, then packed into an old military ammunition box. I remove the seal so it didn't melt, and also it vented out the steam. Cooking at a medium temperature wood stove slowly for hours was my best method. Some cooking steel drums outside, some in an oven. You just need to look at the info and find your way with it. I totally recommend it, but it will take hours, and hours, and hours, and hours, and hours of your time. Mostly in the stripping of bark with the pruning knife. But hey, I did it and you can too. 14. Final Thoughts & Thank You: [MUSIC] Here we are at the end. But it's also the beginning because you have new skills and you are ready to leave our little nest of chocolaty goodness and put this stuff into practice in your own way. I hope that if anything, you now reach for charcoal as a preferred medium in your art. You know its flexibility, its beauty, its logy goodness, and that it's far more than a primitive tool in your studio. I've loved sharing with you in this charcoal drawing bootcamp, and I hope you'll post your work in the project section for all to see. We lift each other up and sharing, so please share an update your project when you're making more magic. If you want to know when my next class is coming out or when I release updates to older classes and do membership giveaways, get on that follow button and you'll be first to know. Also, if you add a darn good time or learn something that made you go. I would love, love, love you to give this class a positive review and share what you found most helpful. This helps others find the classes that are right for them and hack. It makes us all feel super. Thank you. Thank you for being my student and I appreciate you so very much, especially in these difficult times we've all endured. If you want to connect with me more, do pop over to my art Instagram account @jendixonarts, which is also my Twitter and Facebook handle too, and if the social media world disappeared tomorrow, you can find me at jendixon.com sending you a big love from my little corner of Cornwall. I'll see you next time. 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