Create Expressive and Atmospheric Charcoal Portraits

1. Introduction: Hi, I'm Sarah Stokes, and I'm a published artist living in the UK. I've had gallery shows in the UK and in New York with collectors around the world. I'm represented by De Montford Fine Art and have license prints in numerous outlets, including Wayfair and Next. I've always enjoyed drawing ever since I was a small child. I love the atmosphere that charcoal can create, the drama of strong tonal values that can be found in monochrome. With charcoal, you can see a realistic and emotional portrait from the distance, but closer inspection will reveal abstract elements. For me, the eyes are the main focal point of my art. They bring a piece to life and convey the emotion of the work. In this course, you'll learn how to create a charcoal portrait with atmosphere and mood. As a final project, you will be using a monochromatic photograph of a model to create a beautiful, strong charcoal piece. In this course, I will present the main tools and equipment that you will need. I will teach you to think ahead of your darks and lights before applying your charcoal, and I will show you how to use those tools to achieve the effects that you want in those pieces. After that, we will look at the importance of training your eyes to see tonal values. And to achieve that, we will create a tonal value tool that will help you distinguish different tones. Then I will teach you the gridding technique by drawing an ally. Seeing the image in a grid will help you draw proportions in a more accurate way. After that, we will choose a photograph that conveys moon. The next step will be to make the photograph charcoal friendly. And finally, you'll learn to apply the charcoal. We'll start with the darkest areas and work our way into the lighter ones. We will then move on to blending, reapplying, and re establishing the lights. You'll learn to create details, render hair, eyelashes, eyebrows, and look for the hidden light gems in the portrait. By the end of this course, you'll be able to transform a photograph into a powerful work of art that will convey mood and atmosphere. So get on board, and I will guide you through the dark, mysterious and powerful world of charcoal portraiture. 2. Exploring Materials and Equipment: In this lesson, we're going to be applying charcoal to our gridded drawing. We're going to be looking at the dark, the mid, and the light tones, so you end up with a beautifully rendered eye. I'm going to take the photograph and we're going to look at the big, big shapes. I'm looking here at this huge mass of dark. In fact, there's a lot of dark on this photograph. And then I'm looking at this side of the eye, which is quite gray, and this side that's a little bit lighter. Now, generally speaking, I will work from dark to light. That's quite unusual. A lot of charcoal portrait artists will work from light to dark. And that's because quite often they're drawing from life. I suppose if you're drawing from life, you can't really put your darks on first in case you make a mistake. But we've got a gridded drawing, so we can be quite confident that most of our dark marks are going to be in the right place. But do bear in mind that if we're going to be putting in some lighter spaces is not to be using any of those heavy darks in those areas. I'm going to use the dark pencil that I've already sharpened. So that's the six B dark charcoal pencil. And I'm going to establish the darkest darks first. I'm going to use this reference photograph, and I'm just going to quickly scribble in the darkest darks. This stage that I will probably start changing a few bits that aren't quite in the right place. I'm roughly happy with it, but there's a couple of issues that need resolving, particularly say around the teardrop area. I'm just quickly penciling in this. Now, you'll see me squinting a lot while I'm working. Now I mentioned this before, but it's so I'm looking at the bigger shapes to establish tonal values. Just getting these darks down quite quickly. And you can see that this is a really big black shape that's happening here. I am literally drawing what I see see this is all one big, dark shape. This bit here is quite tricky to do. That's because there's quite a curve under the eye, and it's really tricky to get it accurate. So again, I'm going to turn my page around the other way to help me on this bit. It looks quite grainy at this stage because I haven't rubbed any of it in yet. You've got all the paper coming through, which doesn't look good, but we'll fix it in a It's really, really dark in this section of her eyebrow. I can afford to go quite heavy with a pencil here. And I can see that the pupil is really dark and around the iris. Any areas that need to be really light, like the glints in the pupil of the eye, I've left that a larger white space than I need to because I know when I blend in in a minute, then the dust is going to go everywhere. So I've left a bigger than needed space because it'll be too difficult to lift it all up otherwise. And that's nearly enough darks. I'm not bothered with shape. I know there's lots of little spaces inside her pupil. I know there's lots of little flicky hairs around her eyebrows. We can just leave that for the time being. Now, because I can see that as part of this section that's really dark, this arch of her eyebrow, I'm just going to apply the tiniest bit of that really dark charcoal block. I'm gonna pop a little bit here and I'm going to pop a little bit on the pupil. Not too bothered about shape. I can fix that in a minute. What I'm doing now is I'm using my blender just to start blending all of this in. Just to get rid of the white of the paper. At this point, this is where you need to really use the right hand side of your brain because the left hand side will be telling you that the whites of the eyes are white, and we can see quite clearly that they're not quite gray in this photograph. I'm just going to use this finger to start smudging that white out. And that might feel a bit weird to do it when you first do it. You think, it's going too dark. But we can blend and lift off what we need to. I'm just going to do a little bit of blending. And while I've got this bit of charcoal on my finger, I'm also going to start dragging it down the nose as well and just the bottom of the cheeks. But to do that, I'm just going to spin it background to my way. I'm just getting rid of the excess. Now, we've got a rough shape here. But I can see that some areas need lifting, some need blending. So what I'm going to do is use this mono eraser to start blending and lifting and pulling out some of those lights again. I'm also gonna have to blow some of this charcoal out of the way. But Now, looking at this eye at the moment, it looks really, really staary like it's staring right out of you, the one that I've drawn. And that's because my tonal values are wrong at the moment. If I compare the two together, you can see under her eye on the photograph, it's really, really dark, whereas I haven't gone dark enough yet, and that's why it's looking like wide eyed like that, and we don't want that. Again, darken it in the corner, shrink it down. I'm going to fine tune the pupil. Leaving just a little bit of light for the glint in the eye. By doing this, I can work out that really tricky bit where the tear duct is. Sometimes if you do the easy bits first, then it helps you get the difficult bits done. And I can see that there's still some lights that I'm going to need to pull out in a minute. And you'll find this with charcoal that it's a constant case of lifting and applying, lifting and applying because it takes a while for your eyes to see all those tonal values because as I explained before, what's surrounding the color will affect how you perceived it. So there's always this push and pull with charcoal as you start to see things emerge. I just want to spread some of this charcoal out a little bit, but my things are a bit too dirty. So I'm just gonna rub the excess on here, and that should probably be enough just to rub it into different directions. In fact, I'm going over the grid lines beyond the initial eye, just to give it some context. There's something I need to fix around the eye in a minute that I'll look at in a moment. Oh I'm happy with the top shape. I'm not so happy with a bit under here. Again, I'm going to spin it back round and work out what's wrong with it. This is a triangle, and this is not a triangle. It's just a strange shape. I need to shrink that down. And I need to make that a slightly different shape as well. I need to pull off some of the darks. I'm just going to re establish some of the light underneath. And now I'm going to establish some dark background the iris. And then I'm just going to dress the tear duct area, which is around about here and goes there. There's a little dot there. And now I just want to tidy up some of these areas around here. I'm just going to use my big rubber now to do this. At the same time, it'll rub off the grid ma. If you find that when you're rubbing charcoal onto paper, you end up with blobby marks that you don't want. What's useful to do is to leave some of the rubber marks on there, and I'll show you why in a minute. Gonna get rid of the rest of the grid. Because with a bit of a dirty finger and rubbings, then what we can do is make it smooth and it's gonna turn it around the other way to show you. I'm just going to rub it in, and gently, it will kind of blend it in to a much nicer tone. I'm just gonna add a little bit of light on her brow. And there's a nice little bit of light that just comes in that section there. At this stage, this is the only time that you'd probably want to put some detail in. And all I'm going to do is just put some little brow sections in. I'm going to use this charcoal pencil. It's quite nice and sharp. I'm just going to literally just flick it like this, just to get some brow shapes in. And it's really the only bit of detail that we really need to put in and darken some of these darks, as well. Really dark there. When you look at this photograph really closely, you'll see there's some tiny little lashes just on the bottom, as well. You wouldn't notice when you first look at the photo. But the more you look at it, the more you'll see. It doesn't have to be exact. Because eyelashes aren't exact. They go all over the place. Take a little bit of light. There's always tends to be a little bit of light just above the brow like that. I'm using my big rubber just to reveal a little bit of. And then I'm using the flat of the rubber like that to get some big strokes. And then, again, other dirty finger and a rub just to blend that back in. And I think we're nearly there just a little bit of dark here. Now you know the basic techniques. Next, we'll move on to how to create an atmospheric portrait and where to get your reference photos from. 3. Materials: Doing this lesson, you're going to get to use all of the tools and understand how they work together by applying them, blending them, and removing them. And at the end of it, you're going to be able to use them to draw a little water drop. So first, what we're going to do is we're going to apply all these different types of charcoal onto paper. And to do this, I've prepared a piece of paper with five strips, and I've drawn them out with a pencil and a ruler. Each strip is about 27, 28 centimeters long and about 2 centimeters wide. I've also left plenty of space between the strips just in case I want to take notes. Just to finish our preparation, I'm going to apply some masking tape to these last two sections. I'm just checking roughly for size, which looks about right. I'm just applying it to the one side of one of our bands. I'm gonna fold it over so it doesn't stick to the table. That's going to be one band complete. And I'm just gonna mask this next band. I'm quite careful not to press too hard. Otherwise, it's gonna rip the paper when we come to lift it afterwards. First of all, we're going to apply our charcoal stick. This is the willow, but you could use vine. And this is quite a large stick that I'm going to use because we've got a large area to fill. At the moment, this stick's got quite a few sharp edges, so I'm just going to blunt a little bit of it off over on this paper here. And I'm now going to fill up this line with charcoal. And I fill the whole of the lineup. Doesn't need to be perfect. For our second stroke, we're going to use a soft charcoal pencil. But first of all, I want to show you how to sharpen one of these pencils. For months and months, I used to try with a regular sharpener, and they kept breaking off until somebody showed me how to do it. But even so it can still be tricky. I'm going to use a craft knife. And what I'm going to do is I'm going to slice pieces of the wood. I'm going to slice away. Until you reveal more and more of the charcoal. When you get to this point, it's best now to start using some sandpaper to sharpen it to a point. I'm just checking what kind of point I've got. That's not a bad point. It's very easy to get lazy and to start using tools that are blunt, but it's really important, especially if you're doing precision work to make sure that your pencil's really sharp. So what I'm going to do now is to color this box in with this dark charcoal pencil. Now, I know it can go darker than that, so I'm gonna go over with a second layer. And even a third. For our third column, we're going to use the compressed charcoal block, and we're going to do exactly the same. You'll hear that it's quite scratchy. It really grips the paper. It also creates quite a lot of dust. These different marks I've made don't look too different, but you'll get to see in a bit how erasers and blenders will make them look different. For our fourth section, we're going to do half and half. For the first half of the box, we're going to colour it in using charcoal block, and for the second half, we're going to use our softer willow. And now on to our willow. But with the willow, I'm not gonna take it all the way down. Just to about here. Finally, we're going to do our last strip using the charcoal powder. As I said, this isn't something I use a lot, but I think it's really useful to show you how it can work. Go apply it with a brush because it's really, really dusty. There's a bit on my brush and a tap off the excess. I'm just going to brush it on. Now that we've got our five different strips, I'm going to show you how we can make them smooth and blend them using a variety of tools. The first tool that I use mostly is my finger. And I'm going to apply these tools to this strip on the left hand side. All I'm going to do is just rub the willow charcoal. And you can see how easily it blends and how light it can come. I'm just pushing it away from the maintrip and you can see how light it gets, as well. That's just with my finger, and I use my finger ever such a lot when I'm drawing. Secondly, I'm going to use the stump. Now, the stumps come in different sizes. I'm going to use this medium sized stump. I'm gonna roll it on its side, and you can see how it'll blend this willow charcoal. It's blending it smooth. But also, as it picks up the charcoal, you can draw with it. I'm pulling out some lines here. This is particularly useful if you want to do something very subtle, maybe some shadows under the eye or the start of eyelashes. As well as the point, you can also use the excess charcoal on its side as well. And a little bit goes a long way. Thirdly, we're going to use tissue. I don't use this as much, but I know plenty of artists that do. And so this is just standard household kitchen roll. Just fold it, so, and just rub it. You can see how that's really, really smoothed it out, and it's lifted quite a lot off as well. Finally, we're going to use this old oil painting brush. This is brilliant for getting really, really smooth skin tones. Now, generally speaking, the skin tone wouldn't be this dark. I'm going to lighten it first with my finger, and then I'm going to use the brush. Now, you see here, there's lots of white bits of paper showing. So I'd use this brush just to blend it in further. I'm just scraping it on its side. Now that you've seen how the various tools work, the blending tools, I just want to very quickly get these last four strips blended, and for this, I'm going to use my finger. I want to get rid of all of the white. I'm just gonna clean my finger a bit. Now I'm going to do exactly the same on the compressed charcoal block, and this gets really dirty. By blending it, hopefully you can see that this is beginning to look quite a bit darker than the pencil. On our fourth strip, we had part charcoal block and part willow. And that's because I want to do a graduated line going from dark to light. And this is going to be helpful because we'll be using this to make a tone or tool a little bit later. I'm pressing really hard. I'm going to clean my finger and carry on pressing. Because I want this to get quite light, I'm cleaning my finger, and I'm gonna lighten. And I'm gonna lighten until it's almost just pure paper. Now I'm just gonna tidy it up. The reason I use a charcoal block up here and not down here is because it would be really difficult to get that light with the dark compressed charcoal. You'll only really get that with the willow or with the vine charcoal. And finally, on the powdered charcoal, I'm just going to use my finger to blend it again. You'll see how easily it comes off. It blends really nicely. 4. How to Use Your Materials: Now you've seen how each of the different types of charcoal has been blended, and we're going to move on to abstracting them using erasers and acetone. What I'm going to do is I'm going to get rid of this masking tape to reveal the shapes underneath. Now we've removed the masking tape and we can see the nice sharp edges that it's left. But what I'm going to do is to label each of these bands just to remind us what made each of those bands. The first one was Wow. The second one was the charcoal pencil. The next one was the charcoal stick. And then we had the blend of the two. And finally, a powder. Next, we're going to use a variety of different erasers to start abstracting and lifting some of the charcoal. And at this point, you'll see the difference between the different types of charcoal. Starting off, we're going to use just a standard eraser. Most types will do, it's just a big eraser. Sometimes you might use the flat end. For instance, if I'm abstracting hair, sometimes you might use the sharper end, and there's nothing stopping you from slicing it with a knife to get the shapes that you want. Starting with the willow, I'm just going to rub this through, and you can see that you can almost get back to the paper with willow with a charcoal pencil. It's a bit more difficult, but you can still lift it quite a lot, but you have to press harder. With a charcoal compressed block, it's a bit more difficult. We can lift a lot of it off, but you still end up staining the paper. And then finally, we're going to use it on the powder. And you can see how it's erased it as much as the willow. The next eraser is one that's used a lot by artists. I don't use it an awful lot, but it's called a putty razor, and it looks a bit like Blu Tack. You can manipulate it into the shapes that you want. You can manipulate it into a point if you wanted to take a bit of charcoal out of the corner of the eye, for instance. It works best on willow and powder and vine, and I'll show you. You can see how it's lifting it quite easily and over here on the powder. However, it really struggles on the charcoal pencil and the charcoal stick. It's not so effective on these two. Next, I want to show you my favorite eraser called a tombo eraser. I use these a lot. They lift tiny, tiny areas. They're so useful. They have a refill inside. You just pop it inside and it's ready to go. And it cuts and slices through most of the charcoals, like this. I use it a lot on its side. And on the charcoal block. And on the powder. And you'll see me using this ever such a lot when we come to do the portrait. I've also got a wider version of this. I don't use it so much with portraits, but I do use it more in animal and wildlife pictures, and it gives you a thicker strip. Quite so delicate as the other one. This is great for pulling out very small details like the light in an eye. And as usual, it works better on the willow and on the powder than it does on the compressed charcoal stick or the six B pencil. And I'll just show you what I mean. Press it down. And it will reveal some of the light. And again, on the powder, it will reveal some of the light. But when we try it on these two, it's not so. I think it's a good time now to talk a little bit about acetone, because it appears on so many forums. People have tried lots of ways of dissolving charcoal why using water, alcohol. But really, acetone is the only thing that's going to dissolve it. But it's not just a straightforward case of just spraying it willy nillly over everything. As you can see with the example I've just done, it really hasn't affected this section at all, but it has affected this section here where you can see it started to lift and it started to cause really nice drops. In Unit five, I'll be going into it in a bit more depth where I'll show you that with layering and shaving bits of charcoal and using the acetone, you can build up even more abstract patterns. So hopefully this exercise has shown you how versatile all the different charcoals are and how they have very different properties from each other. You can see how the willow and the powder has lifted really easily compared to the charcoal pencil and also the charcoal block. And because of this, it's really important to think ahead when you're drawing. If you know there's going to be an area of your drawing that you're going to need to leave quite light, then don't go in with charcoal sticks and charcoal pencils because you're really going to struggle to lift them to the extent that you want. I want to show you how we're going to use these tools to create three D effects by drawing a water drop. First of all, we're going to use a willow charcoal stick. They come in a cylindrical shape, which can make them quite hard to shade with. So what I'm going to do is break it in half, so I want it smaller. And I want this side to be smooth. So I've got some spare paper, and I'm just going to rub it on that paper to give me a nice flat edge. And that's the kind of smoothness I'm looking for. So on this paper, I'm just going to apply some of the charcoal. And I quite like the fact that the white shows through. It looks a bit like maybe concrete or something like that. Now with my blender, I'm going to blend some of this together to make a circle. I got to smooth it in. Now, you remember, with willow charcoal, we can lift it quite easily. So I'm going to use the little monomer razor to do this. But I'm only going to lift the one side. And now I want to apply a shadow to that darker side. So I'm going to use my soft pencil to do that. And I'm going a little bit thinner here. I'm applying my pencil all the way round but a thicker line on this side. And I want to get myself a bit of a drop shadow there. To do that, I'm going to use the blending stump. This one here. I'm going to blend it outwards to pretend that there's a shadow underneath that water drop. I'm gonna use my finger now to smudge some of that charcoal into the water drop. And I'm going to darken that side a little bit. This will give us the illusion of a three D sphere. I'm gonna use my finger again darken this line. Lend a bit more. You'll notice I'm squinting. I squint a lot when I draw and it's not because I'm shortsighted, although I am. It's so I can see tonal values. Much easier. I can see bigger shapes. I'm just going to lift this little bit of area here, I'm going to thin this line here a little bit. We're nearly finished. What I want to do is to apply a little bit of gel pen just to this top section here, just to make it really circular. A little line. And that's the water drop. And I think it's important to keep the background quite rough and rugged like this and to have blended the middle section in because that way, it looks like a little water drop on top of something like a concrete pavement. And it really shows you how versatile just these few simple tools are to create something with both shape and form. You've heard me refer to tonal values a lot in this lesson, but I haven't really explained much about them. In the next lesson, I'm going to be talking about how important they are to your piece and how to train your eyes to see tonal values. 5. How to Train Your Eyes to See Tonal Values: In this lesson, we're going to be looking at what tonal values are, why they're so important, and I'll be showing you ways of learning how to see tonal values. The first thing to talk about is what is a tonal value. Tone is how dark or how light something is. And it's as important to get that right as it is to get a good underdrawing. An artist once told me that a piece of artwork will either stand or fall by virtue of its tonal values. And I think they're right. The eye, generally speaking, will be drawn to sharp definitions between light and dark. And if a piece of artwork is all the same kind of shade, the same tonal value, it can look bland and boring, and there's no focus for the eye to go to. Also, if tonal values are wrong, they can alter the proportions of a drawing. So if you think about somebody's face or drawing somebody's face, if you get the tonal values wrong on the temple or the cheek region, it can completely alter the shape of a face. If the temples or the cheeks or the cheek bones are shaded too dark, then a face can look sunken and sallow. If they're too light, then a face can look really, really wide, much wider than it should be. As a general rule of thumb, students tend to go too light and too cautious. And I'm always encouraging my students to go darker and darker. So be bold with the charcoal. Getting the right tonal value isn't as easy as it first appears. That's because tonal value can be affected, as we see it, by the tonal values that surround it. Here in front of me is an example of a diagram created by Edward H Adelson. And in the diagram, you can see that boxes A and B look like completely different shades of gray. But actually, they're not because if we look at the second diagram that he did, the band of gray shows that A and B are exactly the same tonal value. But with all the boxes around it, it's confused our brains. So initially, we perceive one to be lighter than the other. Now we're going to look at how tonal values affect portraiture. We're gonna have a look at a photograph of a woman's face. On this photograph, you can see there's lots of different tonal values. We have some very obvious darks in the eyebrows around the hairline and on the top. And we've got some really light lights on the top of the forehead, the cheek, and the Adam's apple, the teeth. And then there are some darker mid tones like the lips. But there's also some subtle light to mid tones, and these are the ones that can be really difficult to distinguish. I'm going to show you exactly what I mean. With this photograph, earlier on, we cut and pasted section of the lady's nose. And I'm going to show you by moving that section of the nose how suddenly those shades seem to appear darker. If we go on to the section of the nose here. We're going to grab this section here and we're going to move it up the face. So you can see how dark the nose appears now when we compare it to the lightness on her forehead. And that's where it can be really confusing because actually, when the nose is back in its normal place, it looks quite light. But actually, when we move it to a different section of the head, it actually shows that it's a lot darker than we first thought, and this is how it can be so confusing. I'm going to show you another example with a section of the cheek. If we just grab the cheek there. And we move it across. Now, at the moment, it looks just like a general light to mid tone, but we're just going to move the cheek across. And you can actually see how dark that cheek is compared to the rest of the cheek behind it. Something that just looked quite lightish, is actually quite dark, particularly as it gets towards the ear section on the photograph. So that's really just a very quick example as to how difficult it is to assess all the different subtle tonal values in a face. I'm going to show you ways of working out those tonal values. 6. Creating a Tonal Value Tool: In this lesson, I'm going to help you make a tonal value tool, and that will help you to establish your darks, your mid tones, and your lights in your drawing. First of all, you remember that we started drawing strips using different types of charcoal. I talked about keeping hold of this one in particular, and it's this one that's going to become a tonal value tool. I want to slice this particular section away from everything else. I'm going to use the knife that I used earlier to shave the pencil with. And I'm gonna cut it out. It might take a couple of scores. It might cut straight away, hopefully. And then what I'm going to do is just remove the two pieces that we don't need. So this leaves us with a section that we can cut a really long hole in, and I'll show you what we'll do with that in a moment. Next thing I'm going to do is grab a ruler, which is going to help me to cut a thin line out of the middle. I'm just going to score this quite hard. I'm going to do it twice to make sure it cuts all the way through. And I'm going to do another line nearby. Place a cut here. They're going to place a cut on the other end and remove this middle section that we don't need. And that's a tonal value tool, and I'm going to show you how to use it. Next, I'm going to grab my photograph, and I'm going to place the tonal tool just on top of it. A common misconception is that the teeth are white, and the eyes or the part of the eyes are white, as well. But quite often that isn't the case, and I'm going to show you that using this tonal value tool. If we look at what are called the whites of the eyes, this section here and this across here, it's true to say that certain parts of the sections are quite white. In fact, using our tonal value tool, we can see, although the tonal value tool is a different shade of black and gray to the photograph, we can still see that it's quite light on the eye, and it's quite light on the tonal value tool, the same for a forehead. It's quite light here in the middle of the forehead, quite light on the tonal value tool. However, when we look at the so called whites of the eye on this eye, certainly on the inside eye, we can see if we place the value tonaut all over it, it's not at all white. In fact, we're going to be looking at really this kind of mid gray, and you wouldn't really expect that with an eye. If we look at the outside corner of this eye, we can see that the so called white of the eye is almost as dark as the pupil itself. If I just show you this by putting the band across, you can see that the pupil, the iris, and the white of the eye are indistinguishable. They're just one big shape. And something that new students do quite often is they will still draw that little triangle there, white, when actually the photograph is telling them it shouldn't be. It all needs to be really, really dark shape. Finally, if we look at the teeth, we can see that, yes, part of the teeth is quite light and quite bright. It relates to our tonal value tool. Here we are. We can see that that section of the teeth quite light, like this section of the tonal value tool. But if we look at these two teeth to either side, they kind of go more to a mid range. So you'd be looking at something like this kind of value when you're doing your charcoal. In summary, what I'm saying is that when you're looking at things like eyes and like teeth, you might find that parts of the eye in the teeth, these lighter values, but more often than not, there will be mid values and even dark values. I understand that this is quite a tricky concept, especially when we're talking in abstracts such as tonal values and photographs, but it will all start to make sense on the next lesson when we actually draw an eye, and you'll see how dark we go with those tonal values. No 7. Gridding and Drawing an Eye: So in this lesson, I'm going to show you how to apply a grid to a photograph, how to then apply it onto paper, and then how to grid the eye onto the paper, ready to shade with charcoal. We're going to be using the grid method for this next lesson, but I think it's important to mention that a grid will only help us so far. As soon as we start to apply charcoal onto the grid, we will lose a lot of our underdrawing and a lot of the grid. It is still important to learn some key drawing skills, and that's what I'm going to teach you now. A lot of what I'm going to teach you is based on the research done by Betty Edwards, who wrote a lot of books in the 70s and 80s. Betty explains that as children, we draw a lot, and we all draw in a pretty similar way. And I'm going to use an eye as an example. Most of us when we were children, would probably draw an eye something like this. We'd draw an iris and pupil and we'd put it all into some eyelids like that. We'd probably do some nice curly eyelashes that all look the same length, and we'd probably do some thunder like that, as well. And we may even put a nose on something like that, and we might put some eyebrows on. And when we're adults, unless we've had any further art training, there's a really good chance that a lot of adults will still draw a face similar to this. Eyes and noses in a very, very symbolic way. And that's because the left hand side of the brain tends to dominate our thinking. And what the left hand side of the brain does, it makes everything into symbols. It's meant to make life easier for us. It will say, that's an I, that's a nose. If you suddenly want to draw a chair without artistic training, you will draw a chair with a seat the back and four legs that are exactly the same length because the left hand side of your brain is telling you, that's a chair, and all the legs have to be the same length. It's not interested in perspective or shade or value or tone. It's interested in labeling things, apparently, to make life easier for us. Now, whilst this is great, if we are doing our accounts or something, it's not particularly helpful if we're trying to accurately portray something. To accurately portray something, we need to use the right hand side of our brain. Now, the right hand side of our brain is completely different in how it perceives things, is interested in tone, so how dark something is, the shapes of things, things that can't even be named, is interested in the abstract. When you're trying to draw something accurately, we have to think of ways of shutting down the left hand side of the brain, the one that wants to see things as symbols. Instead, we want to activate the right hand side of the brain. We have to do things that just shut off the left hand side of the brain. And I'm going to show you tricks to do that. Some of these tips include things like turning your picture upside down to draw. If you turn your picture upside down to draw, then your brain or your left hand side of your brain can no longer label things as mouths and noses and eyes, and it gets fed up, it gives up, and it lets the right hand side take over and see shapes. Another thing you can do is to look for the negative space in things. If I was to draw my hand, these are the positive shapes, but the negative spaces are the things in between. And you'll notice that I can't even label the spaces in between. So again, if you look for the negative spaces, it uses the right hand side of the brain, and by drawing the negative, you will get the positive spaces right. But all this will make sense in a minute when I grid up. This photograph, I've already pre gridded, and I've pre gridded that in Procreate. And later on when we go to do our main portrait, I'll show you how to grid up in Procreate. If you haven't got Procreate or some kind of software to grid up a photograph, then I'd recommend using a ruler and a craft knife and just scoring really thin lines through your photograph. Each of these boxes are 2 centimeters across. And what I'm going to do is to draw these straight onto the paper. I'm going to copy these lines here. Even the corners to make life easier. On bigger pictures, I will quite often take them down to stop them from moving. And now I can remove this photograph and just put it on the side so I don't need it anymore. Now what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna use the ruler to join up all these dots. I'm making sure that I'm not pressing pencil too hard because I don't want to create grooves in the paper. And that's our grid drawn. What we're going to do now is we're going to actually start gridding up the eye onto the paper. It's really important to be comfortable where you do it. I'm right hand sided, so I'm going to have the photograph to my left hand side. I study this photograph. What I'm looking for are the intersection points and halfway points. It's pointless, for instance, me starting something in the middle of this box, so it's going to be really difficult to gauge where that is. So I'm thinking, Okay, well, I can see this cross hair here. Where's that going to be? And what can I put in that? I'm looking at this line here, thinking, well, that's about halfway. It's just below halfway. I'm just working out where things are on the grid. The other thing that's going through my head is I'm not looking at detail at this stage. I'm looking at the bigger shape. I'm looking at this shape that goes all the way around here. I don't want to start getting involved in the middle. I always look for the easiest stuff to do first. If it means that I've got to go here there and everywhere, then I will. I don't need to finish one section first. I'll just do the bits that I find easiest. Look for the large shapes first and deal with the smaller ones afterwards because sometimes when you get the big shapes down, it makes the smaller shapes easier to do. I'm going to just mark off that section there, and then I can see that her eyebrow comes up here. Now this section here is a little bit difficult to gauge. I think it's roughly about halfway maybe here, but this bit here is much easier to gauge because I can see it's just to the left of that line, which is about here. And then I can see the shadow that comes down here. I'm forgetting the fact it's an eye. I'm just looking at the general shape, it comes down here. This is an important point. It's about halfway from there to there. So I'd say it's about there. And then we can see it kind of slopes down, and then that helps us get that kind of shape down there. This is kind of quite a straight line, we'll do that straight line. And we don't need to worry about all this stuff going on here. That kind of stuff is quite confusing at the moment, but we can figure that out afterwards. And that's roughly the outer shape. I'm just going to tweak this a little bit, actually, I can see that falls down a little bit lower. This is a good case of negative space, actually, because I can't really name this area, but this area of midtone I can see needs to be there. If I get that bit right, then this section here will be right. The mid tone needs to be there. And then that's it. I'm happy with that shape. Now, the eyeball in particular is quite difficult to draw because it's spherical. And so at this stage, it's a good idea to turn your paper around, and that's what I'm going to do next. I've turned the paper around, and I've also turned the photo reference around, and I'm still keeping it on the left hand side. And that way, it will enable me just to see the shapes, and it will stop me forgetting that this is an eye. And I'm also looking for easy shapes to do. Circles are quite difficult, but I'm looking for triangles because they seem to be a lot easier to draw. This is also a really good example of negative space. The whites of the eyes, I really kind of class as negative space because I'm trying to draw the iris itself. But if we look on the right hand side, we have almost like a triangle here. That's quite a useful thing to fix on too. I'm going to draw Some of that iris. But I can see that the iris and this area here, which is apparently the whites of the eye is almost one big black shape, so we may as well draw what we see. And that's very important just to draw what we see. This bit is difficult, but I can see this line here that's going to help me out. I'm going to draw this line here. And then I know where that eyeball needs to come down to, and it needs to come down to roughly that section there. And now I'm looking at this negative space here, this kind of triangle shape. Because it's upside down, I think it helps as well. I'm seeing some subtle changes between dark and light. I always think that when you're working in charcoal and black and white, it's almost like going into a dark room that you don't see everything all at once. But the more you look at the photograph or even real life, the more that different things will appear. We start to see all those various shades of gray and black coming in. I just want to get that eye right. We know that that's all gonna be dark there. Seems a bit odd for an eye, but that's what it's telling us. And that is pretty much as much as you need. I might just put this little bit of lighting to remind me when I come to charcoal that I don't want it there. I'm just going to remove a little bit of this pencil with the mono eraser that shouldn't be there. This is just a rough drawing because we're going to be putting charcoal all over this in a bit and we can fix it properly. I can see that some light cuts into this area. Gonna adjust that section there. Just checking my shape. If you're a little bit concerned that something isn't quite right, then what you can do is fold over your photograph, place it right next to your drawing, and just double check, just like this so you could fold this right over. Take it up to your photograph. And then just check. Is this in the right place? Does the eye drop down to the right section? It's just a double check to check that everything's roughly in the right place. Once you've done that, you have a drawing. You can turn it the right way round now. Off your eye, ready to put charcoal on in the next section. 8. Applying Charcoal to the Drawing: In this lesson, we're going to be applying charcoal to our gridded drawing. We're going to be looking at the dark, the mid, and the light tones, so you end up with a beautifully rendered eye. I'm going to take the photograph and we're going to look at the big, big shapes. I'm looking here at this huge mass of dark. In fact, there's a lot of dark on this photograph. And then I'm looking at this side of the eye, which is quite gray, and this side that's a little bit lighter. Now, generally speaking, I will work from dark to light. That's quite unusual. A lot of charcoal portrait artists will work from light to dark. And that's because quite often they're drawing from life. I suppose if you're drawing from life, you can't really put your darks on first in case you make a mistake. But we've got a gridded drawing, so we can be quite confident that most of our dark marks are going to be in the right place. But do bear in mind that if we're going to be putting in some lighter spaces is not to be using any of those heavy darks in those areas. I'm going to use the dark pencil that I've already sharpened. So that's the six B dark charcoal pencil. And I'm going to establish the darkest darks first. I'm going to use this reference photograph, and I'm just going to quickly scribble in the darkest darks. This stage that I will probably start changing a few bits that aren't quite in the right place. I'm roughly happy with it, but there's a couple of issues that need resolving, particularly say around the teardrop area. I'm just quickly penciling in this. Now, you'll see me squinting a lot while I'm working. Now I mentioned this before, but it's so I'm looking at the bigger shapes to establish tonal values. Just getting these darks down quite quickly. And you can see that this is a really big black shape that's happening here. I am literally drawing what I see see this is all one big, dark shape. This bit here is quite tricky to do. That's because there's quite a curve under the eye, and it's really tricky to get it accurate. So again, I'm going to turn my page around the other way to help me on this bit. It looks quite grainy at this stage because I haven't rubbed any of it in yet. You've got all the paper coming through, which doesn't look good, but we'll fix it in a It's really, really dark in this section of her eyebrow. I can afford to go quite heavy with a pencil here. And I can see that the pupil is really dark and around the iris. Any areas that need to be really light, like the glints in the pupil of the eye, I've left that a larger white space than I need to because I know when I blend in in a minute, then the dust is going to go everywhere. So I've left a bigger than needed space because it'll be too difficult to lift it all up otherwise. And that's nearly enough darks. I'm not bothered with shape. I know there's lots of little spaces inside her pupil. I know there's lots of little flicky hairs around her eyebrows. We can just leave that for the time being. Now, because I can see that as part of this section that's really dark, this arch of her eyebrow, I'm just going to apply the tiniest bit of that really dark charcoal block. I'm gonna pop a little bit here and I'm going to pop a little bit on the pupil. Not too bothered about shape. I can fix that in a minute. What I'm doing now is I'm using my blender just to start blending all of this in. Just to get rid of the white of the paper. At this point, this is where you need to really use the right hand side of your brain because the left hand side will be telling you that the whites of the eyes are white, and we can see quite clearly that they're not quite gray in this photograph. I'm just going to use this finger to start smudging that white out. And that might feel a bit weird to do it when you first do it. You think, it's going too dark. But we can blend and lift off what we need to. I'm just going to do a little bit of blending. And while I've got this bit of charcoal on my finger, I'm also going to start dragging it down the nose as well and just the bottom of the cheeks. But to do that, I'm just going to spin it background to my way. I'm just getting rid of the excess. Now, we've got a rough shape here. But I can see that some areas need lifting, some need blending. So what I'm going to do is use this mono eraser to start blending and lifting and pulling out some of those lights again. I'm also gonna have to blow some of this charcoal out of the way. But Now, looking at this eye at the moment, it looks really, really staary like it's staring right out of you, the one that I've drawn. And that's because my tonal values are wrong at the moment. If I compare the two together, you can see under her eye on the photograph, it's really, really dark, whereas I haven't gone dark enough yet, and that's why it's looking like wide eyed like that, and we don't want that. Again, darken it in the corner, shrink it down. I'm going to fine tune the pupil. Leaving just a little bit of light for the glint in the eye. By doing this, I can work out that really tricky bit where the tear duct is. Sometimes if you do the easy bits first, then it helps you get the difficult bits done. And I can see that there's still some lights that I'm going to need to pull out in a minute. And you'll find this with charcoal that it's a constant case of lifting and applying, lifting and applying because it takes a while for your eyes to see all those tonal values because as I explained before, what's surrounding the color will affect how you perceived it. So there's always this push and pull with charcoal as you start to see things emerge. I just want to spread some of this charcoal out a little bit, but my things are a bit too dirty. So I'm just gonna rub the excess on here, and that should probably be enough just to rub it into different directions. In fact, I'm going over the grid lines beyond the initial eye, just to give it some context. There's something I need to fix around the eye in a minute that I'll look at in a moment. Oh I'm happy with the top shape. I'm not so happy with a bit under here. Again, I'm going to spin it back round and work out what's wrong with it. This is a triangle, and this is not a triangle. It's just a strange shape. I need to shrink that down. And I need to make that a slightly different shape as well. I need to pull off some of the darks. I'm just going to re establish some of the light underneath. And now I'm going to establish some dark background the iris. And then I'm just going to dress the tear duct area, which is around about here and goes there. There's a little dot there. And now I just want to tidy up some of these areas around here. I'm just going to use my big rubber now to do this. At the same time, it'll rub off the grid ma. If you find that when you're rubbing charcoal onto paper, you end up with blobby marks that you don't want. What's useful to do is to leave some of the rubber marks on there, and I'll show you why in a minute. Gonna get rid of the rest of the grid. Because with a bit of a dirty finger and rubbings, then what we can do is make it smooth and it's gonna turn it around the other way to show you. I'm just going to rub it in, and gently, it will kind of blend it in to a much nicer tone. I'm just gonna add a little bit of light on her brow. And there's a nice little bit of light that just comes in that section there. At this stage, this is the only time that you'd probably want to put some detail in. And all I'm going to do is just put some little brow sections in. I'm going to use this charcoal pencil. It's quite nice and sharp. I'm just going to literally just flick it like this, just to get some brow shapes in. And it's really the only bit of detail that we really need to put in and darken some of these darks, as well. Really dark there. When you look at this photograph really closely, you'll see there's some tiny little lashes just on the bottom, as well. You wouldn't notice when you first look at the photo. But the more you look at it, the more you'll see. It doesn't have to be exact. Because eyelashes aren't exact. They go all over the place. Take a little bit of light. There's always tends to be a little bit of light just above the brow like that. I'm using my big rubber just to reveal a little bit of. And then I'm using the flat of the rubber like that to get some big strokes. And then, again, other dirty finger and a rub just to blend that back in. And I think we're nearly there just a little bit of dark here. Now you know the basic techniques. Next, we'll move on to how to create an atmospheric portrait and where to get your reference photos from. 9. The Essence of an Atmospheric PortraitThe Essence of an Atmospheric Portrait: In this lesson, we're going to look at what photograph makes for a good atmospheric portrait and where to get them from. What makes a photograph good for creating an atmospheric portrait? We need to be looking for some type of mood in the portrait. It could be a photograph of somebody looking sad or somebody looking really powerful. It needs to be thought provoking. So we're not looking for the average Smiley photograph. We don't need a lot of detail in the photograph. In fact, detail can be a bit of a distraction. Overwhelmingly, it needs to be the feel and the mood of the photograph. I tend to look for photographs that have got really, really strong tonal contrast, dark darks, light lights, and some mid tones. And there needs to be something there that will catch my eye. I've got two photographs here to show you. This one, for instance, catches my eye because we've got a really nice highlight just on the arch of the brow and on the cheekbone, and the rest is quite dark. So immediately, I'm drawn into this section. On this photograph over here, I'm drawn to the nose section and the forehead and the total mood of it, as well. I love the darks and the lights. And remember that the eye is always drawn to these areas of dark and light contrast. So immediately, I'm drawn right into the middle of this woman's face. That's why I'd consider these two photographs really on the strength of the tonal values in them. Another reason I might consider a photograph is because of the power that's displayed in the model's face. And I'm going to show you an example of that. On this one, I really, really like the model's gaze. It's very direct and it's very powerful, and it draws you right in. So this would be a really good photograph to use as the basis of a charcoal portrait. And don't worry if the whole of the face isn't on the photograph. I'm going to show you an example. On this photograph, we haven't even got the whole of a face. In fact, the model's eyes are closed and a lot of it is covered with hair, but it still conveys a really strong sense of movement and emotion. And hair is a great leading tool in terms of composition, and it's something that I'm going to be using a lot on our final project. When looking at a photograph, there might be things that aren't quite right for your portrait, and it's really good to address some of these issues because those issues are still going to be there when you come to draw it. It could be that maybe there's a hand in the way or hair that's out of sight that you'll want to bring into your final portrait. And you may decide that you're going to mock something up before you start on your real piece of work. And I'm going to show you an example of that. This photograph, it's really, really strong photograph, and in fact, it's going to be the one that we use with our final project. But from an artistic point of view, as a viewer, I just tend to look up and down, and I don't look around. When I come to do the final portrait, then I will want to lead the viewer's eye around the portrait. And so for that reason, I would want to introduce elements of hair, for instance. You can either do a mock up in real life or digitally. And this is a digital mockup. You can see here we have the same face, and all I've done is introduced some hair using Procreate, just to see if the image would look better with some hair in terms of portraiture. And I've decided, yes, when we come to draw this later on, then we will introduce some elements of hair into the final piece. Where do we get hold of beautiful references such as these? It may be that we can take them ourselves, but if we're not able to, then I'm going to give you a couple of ideas of where you can obtain them from. I'm just going to move these out of the way so I can show you. When it comes to finding the right photographs, we need to make sure that they're good quality and that they haven't got any copyright restrictions. And I find one of the best sites for this to be Unsplash. The site Unsplash is www.unsplash.com. And we're going to go into this site now, and I'm going to show you how I use it. I'm already on the site, and there is a search button. In the search button, I would be putting things like female portraits or model woman, and that's what we're going to do right now. So we're going to go into the search engine. And we'll put woman model, Enter. Here you'll see lots and lots of different images coming up. Some are in color, some are in black and white. Now, you could automatically go for the black and white ones, or you could decide that color one might be interesting and I'll desaturate it at a later stage. When you see a photograph that really takes your eye, then you can click onto it, and it will reveal the name of the photographer. Then if you press the photographer's name, it will take you onto their page, which will show you the rest of their portfolio. And this can be really fascinating. It will give you a glimpse as to whether this photographer matches the kind of style that you're after. Once you find an image that you're interested in, say, for instance, this one, we would press it, and it allows us to download the image just by pressing this arrow here. Now we can either view or download it straight onto our hard drive. And as you do so, it will ask you to give credit to the photographer whenever you use it or post it, say on social media. This particular photographer is one of my favorites, and all of his details are in the resources section of this unit. Now, one of the other ways that you can obtain a photograph is to contact the photographer and hopefully the model directly to obtain permission that way. This is a much better way to obtain a photo reference because it would be far more unique. I'm going to show you three examples of times when I've done just that. We're going to come out of this image and take you on to some other images. In this particular case, I saw this image on the Internet of Cillian Murphy, and I just really, really loved the image. But I knew there might be copyright issues, and it was part of a magazine fashion shoot. So I found out who the photographer was, Vasilis Caris, and I contacted him directly and asked for permission to draw it. And luckily he agreed. I ended up drawing this in charcoal. And just below, we have the final image. And we've made some alterations to the original photograph. For instance, on the original photograph, it was a fashion shoot. So there were some shiny kind of trousers showing that I didn't particularly want showing in the final portrait. I cropped it slightly differently. On the final portrait, I really wanted the emphasis to be on the tatty armchair and on the face. If I did this portrait again, I would probably crop it differently, because actually, I'm not so keen on the fact that I've left his hand over on this side. I would probably crop it like this, so it's the face and the chair showing. I'm going to show you another example. In this case, I came across this beautiful photograph on Instagram by Nirav Patel. It's absolutely stunning. It's really a motive, and I thought that would make for a really, really nice portrait. Again, I contacted both Nirav and Lauren, the model, who I think is in New York, and asked for permission. They gave it and were really complimentary, actually, about the final piece. I created a piece just concentrated on the face. As you can see, in Nirav's photograph, we have a lot more hair, and we also have a hand. But in my particular case, it was the face I was interested in, and it was that that I wanted to draw the viewer into. It was very nice because I ended up sending this image over to both Lauren and Nirav, and they were both really happy with it. I'm now going to show you the third and final example of contacting a photographer directly. In this final case, this is a photograph of somebody called Anazia I met Anna two or three years ago. We had a show in New York, and Anna was the manager of the gallery. And she also happens to be a model. We got on very well. I also noticed that she got an Instagram page, but obviously all the modeling work. And I asked if I could use one of those images. And I also checked with the photographer as well, and they were both gracious enough to say, yes. And so using this image, I created a charcoal piece. Again, you'll notice that I've taken the handout, and I've just concentrated on the face. I've allowed a little bit of white over on this section because I want to direct the viewer. From the face, back to this area of tonal contrast here and then back into the face. Notice also that I've used a lot of hair to lead the viewer into the piece. In summary, if you can get a unique photograph by speaking to the photographer and the model, that's definitely the best way to go. So now you know where to get a photograph from. In the next lesson, we're going to choose a photograph. I'm going to show you how to make it charcoal friendly. 10. Chose a Photograph and Make It Charcoal Friendly: In this lesson, we're going to discuss ways to make a photograph charcoal friendly, and we're going to be using Procreate. But you can also use Photoshop or even your phone, so you don't have to use expensive software. I've already imported this photograph into Procreate. And this is the one that we're going to be using for our final project. I love this photograph because of the strong tonal values and the sense of power that this woman is conveying. Now, in all honesty, I don't need to do an awful lot to this photograph to make it charcoal friendly because it's such a brilliant photograph. But there are going to be times where you might need to do things to it, particularly, for instance, if it's in color. And I'm going to show you some ways that you might want to tweak or amend a photograph. First of all, if, for instance, a photograph was in color, you would want to desaturate it. It'll be a lot easier for you to see tonal values if the color has been removed in the first place. If this was a color photograph, I would be going into this section here. I'd be going into the section that says hue, saturation, and brightness. And down below, you've got some options here where you can adjust all of those just by moving the bars up and down. And, of course, it's not going to make any difference at all to this photograph because it's already desaturated. But one that is particularly useful is this brightness bar. And this will either brighten or darken your image, like so. But again, it's a pretty good image anyway, so I would leave it as it was. One of the other things that I would do is I would apply a grid to the photograph. Now, you can either do this afterwards when you've printed your photograph off with a Stanley knife and ruler, but this way is a lot easier because it saves you having to do that. I would go into this toolbar here. I would go onto Canvas, drawing guide, and automatically, it's applied to grid. This grid might not be the kind of grid you want. Squares might be too big, and you might think, Well, I want smaller squares because it's going to help me grid up in the final process. Here, you can edit the grid, and you can make boxes either really small or really large. And I would settle for something probably about that size. And then when I'm happy with that, I will press done. And you can see now that it's pre gridded. But the problem is, you think, well, as soon as that gets printed, that grid isn't going to stay on because it'll just be a photograph without a grid. So what I tend to do at this stage is I will do a snapshot of the screen, like so. I will press this button here and the one at the top. Now, that photograph will be stored in my photo album on this iPad. And from there, I can print it off on my printer using glossy photo paper, and then it's all ready to draw from. In the next lesson, I'll take you through the next step, which is gridding up the face and starting to draw it. 11. Gridding Up the Face: So in this lesson, you'll get to grid up the photograph onto the paper using the method that I taught you earlier. So here you'll notice that I've already pre gridded the paper. But just as a reminder, when you come to grid up the paper, make sure that you don't press too hard with your pencil because you don't want grooves in the paper. And also, you want to be able to rub out the grid marks once you've finished your portrait. You'll also notice that the sizes of these boxes here in this grid are exactly the same as the ones on the photograph. And they're a centimeter wide. Now I'm going to start drawing the face onto the paper, using exactly the same techniques as we used when we drew the eye. I'm going to be looking at the larger shapes first. I'm not going to be going for the difficult shapes. Hopefully, they'll all fall into place. And I'm going to be looking at midway sections and points of intersections that make it much easier for me to draw. And so with that, we'll get started. I'm going to use a four B pencil because it's nice and soft and it won't indent the paper too much. I tend to work with the photograph really near to the paper. Makes it much, much easier. You need a starting point. What you can do is you can count in the number of boxes on the photograph and also on the paper. I would like to start at the top of the forehead. I'm going to count across three, four, five, one, two, three, four, five. I know the forehead is a roundabout here. And once I've got that point ready, I can carry on. So now I'm going to start drawing the larger shape. I'm just looking at easier shapes at the moment, so I can see here that there is a triangle, which is here. And that allows me to join almost like dot to dot, I can join these two sections together. This doesn't have to be really accurate at this stage. It's just to make sure that everything ends up in the right place. Quite often, I've tried to wing it by not bothering to grid up or draw up my gridding first, and then I've done a beautifully rendered eye, and then another one and found out they're in completely the wrong place. So it's a really good idea just to get those basic shapes down at this stage. I'm just looking at the big shapes. And I can see there's a nice triangle shape here that's easy to draw. Then we're getting the chin in. And I'm drawing not necessarily the chin, but the negative shape. I'm looking at this black, dark shape to help me draw the chin. I'm probably not gonna bother with it here because it's not a particularly interesting section of the face that I want to draw attention to. You can see with this hand, I tend to follow the picture around because it helps me not forget where I am while I'm doing my drawing. It just helps me to concentrate. This is very useful. It's an intersection here, and I know that it goes just there. So now we have the basic outline of the face. That's a big, big shape. The next big shape that I can see is the neck and this big shadow going on. I'm looking for the side of the neck, and I can see that that's about here. And her jumper comes down to about this section, but I probably won't bother drawing that in. I'm just looking at this shadow, drawing that roughly in and the Adam's apple. And I'm quite happy with that shape, but I'm just going to do a quick double check to check everything's in the right place. It looks about right. Once I've done the overall big shape, I'm going to look for some of the easier shapes to draw. I'm gonna be looking for intersecting points where I can suddenly drop things in. Looking at this photograph, I can see that we've got the bottom of the lips that start at a halfway point, so we can start dropping that in. This here represents this section here. I'm just roughly drawing it in. I will tighten this up when it gets to the charcoal point. This lip area is huge. It takes up a whole box here and a half box here and a half box here, which you wouldn't expect. This would be quite a difficult photograph to draw without a grid because to make life even more difficult, it's slightly foreshortened in that the model space is looking up at the camera like this, so everything's a little bit more distorted than it normally would be. This is why the grid is really helpful. The other shape that I'm looking at at the moment is this really nice dark line. It's almost in parallel to this horizontal grid here, but not quite. So we can drop that in. It starts here, it goes down to here. I'm looking at this triangle shape here. That's a negative space, really. I'm trying to draw the lips, but I'm using the negative space that we spoke about to help me draw the lips. That triangle goes here. You see how that makes a triangle with the rest of the grid. And that ensures that is the right angle for the lips to come down. When you draw and you draw in the way that I was explaining using the right hand side of the brain, it's almost like your brain has to make a mental shift and start looking for the things that you can't name. And this will really help you draw. So you don't necessarily look at the lips. You're looking at the shapes outside of the lips to help you draw. That's roughly the shape of the outside of the mouth. I'm not going to worry too much at this stage about putting the teeth in. I'll figure that out in a minute. I'm going for the easy shapes first. The next thing I want to tackle is the nose and the nostrils. A nice shape to see. They're nice and dark. We're going to locate where the nostrils need to be on our grid. The top of the nostril is about halfway up this grid around about here. There's a useful intersection point here, which gives us the top of the nose. And you can see that I will flit about the nose, not in any logical order. It's just the easy bits that I can see first. And I can see this line is an easy one to gauge next to the grid. So that's going to be the next one that I draw. And I'm not pressing hard because I don't want to commit too much to this at this stage, an idea of where things need to be. I'm reasonably happy with the nose. So now I'm going to make my way up the face to drop the Is in. And again, I'm looking for easy points of reference. And I can see that the easiest point of reference for me at this stage is probably the corner of the eye down here, which seems to fall around about here. To and I'm going to draw the opposite side. Eyes are quite difficult to do to get the sphere and the shape right, so I'm just going to lightly sketch it in at this stage, but I'll probably end up changing it afterwards. I'm looking at this block of black referring to a previous lesson when I was saying about getting the whites of the eyes. We've got a really dark shape here where we can hardly see the whites of the eyes. We can have a go at just drawing that section in. Even at this stage, it's quite useful to squint because it'll help you see those tonal values. I'm having a look at the eyebrows now. They come about halfway through this box here. I'm looking at this little triangle shape, which will give me a bit of a landing pad for the rest of the eyebrow. Oh. Mm I'm going to turn the image the other way around now, to help. Just to double check. And that's about as much information as I want to put on this grid. As you can see, we now have our finished grid. I've used some of the tips and tricks that I outlined earlier to achieve it. I quite often look for triangles in negative spaces. I find they're easy to draw. I was looking for intersections. And also, when I came to do parts of the face, I turned the paper upside down to see some of those trickier shapes. It looks very odd at this stage, particularly this eye. But actually, that's because this shape here is almost in total darkness, so this will be rendered pretty much in black, and it will all start to take shape. With the next section when we apply the charcoal, and that's when we will start tweaking it even further and fine tuning it. In the next lesson, we will start applying charcoal to the gridded drawing, and I'll run through 12 golden rules to help you apply the charcoal. 12. First Layers and Golden Rules: This lesson, we're going to start applying our first few layers of charcoal. And then I'm also going to go through 12 golden rules to help you apply it. First of all, I'm just having a quick look at the gridded image that I've drawn and the photograph. And this really clearly demonstrates the importance of shading. You can see that this cheek looks a lot wider than the cheek on the photograph. And although the outlines in the right place, the reason that this looks a lot wider is because this is shaded, and this just shows you the importance of how shading can make the face shape completely change. You'll also notice, as mentioned before, that this eye looks really odd. But when we start applying black to the eye, as in the photograph, it will all start to take shape. Initially, I'm going to start with my darks. This is because I've got the pre gridded drawing, so I can apply the darks with confidence. If I was drawing from light life even, then I would start with my lightest values first so I can keep adjusting. But the darkest areas that I can see in this photograph are the eyebrows, the eyes, the nostrils, of the nose, and just inside the upper lip. Also around the edge of the head, as well. I'm going to start with the eyes so that I can get to them easily without stretching across. I'm going to turn the paper the other way round. Because I want to get precision with my darks, I'm going to use the six B soft pencil that I've sharpened to a fine point. And as I said before, try not to get lazy. If you find that the point is blunted, make sure that you sharpen it. I'm going to start with the eyes first of all. You'll notice in the eye, there is this tiny spot of light. It would be nice if we can keep that light. It might end up getting obliterated with powder. And if it does, then I can fix it later with either a gel pen or white charcoal or even an eraser. But for now, I'm going to make that little dot of white a bit larger than it needs to be to account for the amount of charcoal dust that we'll be applying through the process. Now, I'm carefully applying the black charcoal to the previously gridded drawing. But this time I'm concentrating just a bit more. When I'm confident with the outline of the shape, I'm going to shade it in using the black charcoal. And as you can see, the whole of that eye is really just a black shape. If you're in doubt as to whether you've got everything in the right place, remember, you can fold these photographs over and compare and contrast to check that everything's in line. I'll show you how. By placing the photograph right next to the gridded image, you can just double check that something like the eyelashes are in roughly the right place. I can see here they're about where they need to be. I think on the face, it's particularly important to get these details right. Otherwise, something will just look off if it's not right. I'm quite happy with the darks on that side. I'm just going to move on to the darks on this side. And to make it easier, I'm going to fold the photograph in half so I don't get distracted by this side. Interestingly, you'll find that when surgeons are operating, they also will have a very small area just to work on. And when I was reading the Betty Edwards book, not so long ago, she refers to a surgeon friend of hers. And when he's operating, because he's so much in the zone and looking at shapes when he's working and operating and he's using the right hand side of his brain, he will actually forget the name of the instruments that he's calling out the nurse for. So he'll say, bring me the ing Gimi jig, because actually, when you're in the zone and you're drawing, you quite often forget your sense of language and time, as well. Here I'm just going to apply the darks to this right hand eye. I'm squinting just to see those tonal values. I'm looking at that little triangle of what would be the whites of the eye. I've left it here. I've left it very bright. But later, I'll end up smudging that over to make it a mid tone. You'll also notice that I've left the white of the eye much bigger than the one on the photograph to account for the charcoal dust that will end up going over it. This bit of the eye is quite difficult to do, so we'll sort it out later. But while I've got this upside down, I might as well do the eyebrow because it's really dark. At this stage, I'm not bothered about the individual eyelashes on the photograph. I'm just interested in shape and tonal values. It's very easy at this stage to start getting into detail, but it's best not to. And I might as well do the other side as well while it's upside down. I'm deliberately going a little bit lighter with my touch here because I know later on I'm gonna want to lift some of those eyebrows out. While I've got this upside down, I might as well establish a little bit of the hairline just to give the face a little bit of form, but not too much. And you can see here down the side of the face. It's quite dark, so I might as well just shade a little bit of that in. Those are the darks that I want to do at the top of the face. I want to do the nostrils, but I know if I do them this way around, I'm going to end up smudging the black that I've already put down, so I'm gonna turn it the other way around. Now, these nostrils are a really tricky shape, so take your time on them. I We've done the eyebrows, the eyes, the nostrils. The next darkest section is just inside the mouth. And again, take your time on this, get your measurements right. The easiest measurements to see on this particular photograph are under the lip and this section here just under the teeth. So we'll draw those first because they're the easiest bits to do. This point is quite important. So we'll just place a dot where we want this endpoint to be. And I think it's about here. The same on this side. It's about halfway along this grid. I know we've already drawn it, but we need to be more accurate now. It doesn't go up in a straight line. I curves in and then comes out. This is where you really need to look closely. Remember that I mentioned that looking at black and white and the midtones is a bit like walking into a darkened room. Well, this is the case. Suddenly, when you look at this photograph really closely, you'll see that it's not just the front two teeth that are revealed. There are the two teeth to the side as well. They're very dark gray, but they are just there. And this one here straddles both sides of that gridline. You just need to make sure that shows in your drawing. Don't press too hard here because the teeth are quite light, and you may need to tweak things a bit later. So just lightly put the upper lip on. So now we've established the darks of the eyebrows, the eyes, the nostrils, and the mouth. And the next big section of dark is under the chin. And this is a really interesting shape. It's actually what I think makes it a really powerful portrait is the shape of the chin, to be honest. So we want to make sure this is right. I'm just going to outline it first, then it curves up straight line and then background. I'm not gonna bother about the darks around here so much just yet because we're probably gonna pop some hair on there and some bits and pieces. Although I really love this photograph, I want a little bit more to happen on the outside to draw the viewer outside of the face, as well as into it. But for now, we'll just shade this section under the chin dark. Because we're covering quite a big area that's gonna be really our darkest dark, we might as well use the big charcoal block and save using our pencil. I'm just gonna blow some of the dust away just to see what we're left with. It will reveal the paper underneath and whether I need to put any more dogs. And I'm pretty happy that we've got all the darks in the right place. Now I'm going to be working on the midtones. So I need to be a bit more cautious because I might want to lift some of the darks and mid tones off to reveal some of the light of the paper. So I'm going to be using willow sticks and blending stumps and perhaps my fingers. Starting with the blending stump, I'm just going to dip into a little bit of this charcoal here and start establishing some of the mid tones. The mid tones that I'm looking at are around the eyes, here, around the nose, and actually these darker midtnes around the lips. When it comes to the lips, I shall probably just spread out some of the dark that's already there. But we'll start with the eyes, first of all, because they're the easiest thing to see. I'm just blowing off the excess and just gently applying it. Not too heavy in case I need to lift it. It's amazing how far a little bit of charcoal dust will go on one of these stumps. I've noticed that something isn't quite right here, so I'm gonna fix it straight away. I feel that these eyelashes have come too far down and need to go cross. I'm gonna get the black charcoal pencil and just put them in the right direction. As a double check, I'm just going to put my photograph right next to it just to check that it's in the right section. I think it's a bit high up. I'm just going to erase it to bring it down. I'm going to use the mono eraser because it's a precision tool. Now, it's only a tiny detail, but it's something like that that if you don't fix, it's just going to look wrong. Something will just look off when you finish the portrait. I'm gonna carry on now with the midtones. I'm not so worried about texture or shape. I just want to get the tone right at the moment, so I'll fix the texture later. And remember, you can use these stumps on the tips and also on the edges. I'm quite happy with the tonal values on that eye. I'm going to just have a look underneath the eye and the side of the nose. I can see there's a dark shadow here, just under the eye, and this will be ideal to use. We're coming to the lip area. The reason I'm not doing the left hand side of the face is because I'm going to end up smudging it, so I'm going to turn to the lip area at this stage. And what I'm going to do is drag those darks out to get me these darker mid tones. This is a really important bit of light at the top of the lip, we'll make the final portrait appear more three D if we leave that bright. 13. Applying Charcoal: Um I'm tending to go out in the direction of the lips, so I don't have to fix it later. And then I'm gonna do the same for the bottom lip. I'm pressing harder when I want to go darker. You can see how the lips are beginning to take shape. Now we've got at least two, well, actually three tonal values in there, dark, mid and light. I'm just trying to gauge this shape here. And again, it looks like a triangle that's pointing downwards. I can see this big toe shape like a triangle here. It's a bit lighter than the lips, so I'm going to flip over to the cleaner side of the stump to get this kind of triangle shape. And you can see here how that black line extends down here below the grid mark. I'm reasonably happy with the lips now, so I'm going to turn my attention to this other right, and I'm gonna spin the paper the other way round. This stage, I'm happy that I've got some tonal values down on the eyes and the nose and the mouth. And I just want to get more around the hairline just to get a bit more shape and form around the face. So I'm going to turn it round to do that. For this, I'm going to use a mixture of willow sticks and compressed charcoal. This willow stick is a little bit big at the moment, so I'm just going to break it in half. And it's also a little bit too round. So I'm going to just rub it on a spare bit of the paper just to flatten it out a little bit. And all I'm going to do are just some rough marks just to remind me where I'm going to lace some hair later on. I know that on this side of the cheek, it's quite dark and we want to narrow it right in. I'm going to use a mixture of willow, and then with my fingers, I'm going to blend some of the darks in. But I'm going to put the willow down first. Just roughly. This part of the chin is quite light, so I'm deliberately going to not put too much willow in that section. Just under the lip is light and just here is light. And I'm going to make this even smaller. And it's at this point that you start to lose your grid. So what you have to do is rely on the shapes within the face to inform where you're going to put other bits and pieces. So effectively, they become your grid system from now on. I'm going to just pop a little bit more dark here and then start blending into the face. And we should start to see the face slim out a little bit. I'm squinting a lot more now because I want to see those large tonal values. So just using a finger, I'm gonna start blending into the fight. You'll notice on the photograph that this is quite light. This is quite light, both the cheeks, actually, and the chin. I'm going to adapt it a little bit because I want the viewer to pretty much go up the face, into the eyes and back out. Don't want them to be over distracted by the lightness on the cheeks and on the head or on the forehead. My tonal value is going to be a little bit darker in this instance. Not an awful lot, but just a little bit. I want to keep this section just under the nose, quite light, so I'm not going to put my finger just there at the moment. Now what I'm looking at are these tonal values down the side here and I'm going to use my finger to start blending these in. I want to get rid of all the white bits that are under here, so I'm going to press quite hard. And before my grid disappears completely, I'm going to use what's left of it just to tell me where to put some mid tones. I'm just gonna draw sides of the neck in just so I don't go over. I'm just gonna drop a little bit of hair in a bit more. It won't look much like hair at this stage. Just dropping in some shades. If we look at where we are with the portrait at the moment, the thing that stands out for me is the eyes look off. The one on the left is drooping down compared to one on the right. But actually, because I assume the model is perhaps tilting ahead, that is the case in the photograph, as well. Once we get our tonal values completely right and we add things like eyelashes and do the final double checks, this will sort itself out. Don't lose faith if yours looks similar and one eye looks lower than the other eye. So next what I want to do is just go through 12 golden rules or tips that will hopefully help you when you create your portrait. The first one is, and this is how I do it, not everybody does it is start with your darks first. As we did with this one, we started off with eyes, the nostrils, and the mouth using precision tools, and then bigger tools for bigger areas. Draw the larger shapes first. Again, squint your eyes. It will help you see the larger shapes. Don't get bogged down in detail at this stage. That comes right at the very end. If you get bogged down in detail and then you find you've got something wrong, then you've just wasted all of that time. With charcoal or with the process of doing a portrait, you will find that you are constantly darkening and lightning, re evaluating tonal values. As I said, it's like going into a darkened room. And you've got that complication that tones look different next to the tones they're sat next to. So you will constantly be darkening and lightning, so don't feel bad about this. The next point is to go darker than you probably feel you should. That way, everything will have a punch to it, and it will be a really powerful piece. The next tip is to draw what you actually see, not what you think you see. So try and think of things in shapes such as triangles, oblongs. Try not to be put off by the fact it's an eye or a nostril. And as you know, we turn the paper upside down and we look at negative space to help us do this. My next tip is to make every stroke count and not get sloppy with your strokes. I see it time and time again with students, particularly when they're rendering hair, they go into some type of trance like state where they're just enjoying the movement without actually looking at what they're doing. And nature isn't regimented. So actually, we don't have perfect hair, generally speaking, in nice long stripes. And it's visually quite boring for a viewer to look at an image like that. So try and think about everything that you're doing and try and make it a little bit random so that it's interesting. Look for those hidden gems in the shadows. You'll remember me talking about the teeth, the fact that it was when you looked at them for long enough. There were some mid tones in there. But you'll also find some really interesting lights on the tips of noses and also on the chins. So look for those tiny bits of detail. Sometimes, at the bottom of the chin, you'll get a bit of reflected light, and this can really enhance a portrait. Go for strong tonal values. Try not to put them everywhere and just concentrate on a couple of focal points because that will lead the viewer's eye to that point. But whenever you need to, just double check for mistakes. So you can do that either by folding the photograph over as I did, holding your portrait up to a mirror or taking a snapshot with your phone. It's amazing that when you hold the portrait to a mirror, or you take a photograph with a phone, that any mistakes will jump out at you straightaway. Wherever possible, try and think ahead to the end portrait. This is because there are going to be sections of the piece that you might want to lighten with strands of hair or highlights on the cheeks. Don't go too dark into areas that you're going to need to lighten at a later stage. Keep in mind what the focal point of your portrait is. It's easy to get carried away with doing abstraction and details elsewhere in the portrait, but make sure they lead back into your main focal point. And one of the best bits of advice I can give you is that if it's not come together, as you want it to, is just to leave the portrait and sleep on it and come back to it another day. Try not to bin it or get annoyed with it. It is a difficult process. It's not as easy as just copying a portrait off a photograph. We're going to be using abstraction tools, and we're going to be looking at composition. So not every piece might be as successful as you'd want it to be. But every time that something goes wrong, you're learning. So just bear that in mind. I'm leaving all of these 12 golden rules as a PDF file in resources. Now we finish this stage. In the next lesson, we're going to be lending in the tones, adding some darks and re establishing the lights. 14. Blending and Reestablishing Lights and Darks: So in this lesson, we're going to continue blending, re establishing our darks and our lights until we get the correct tonal values. Then towards the end, when we're happy with our tonal values, we'll start smoothing the surface of the skin with the brush. What I'm doing now is I'm just looking at the photograph and I'm looking at the portrait and just working out the next stages that I'm going to work with. What I want to do is achieve a little bit of tone everywhere and get rid of some of the grid marks underneath the face that are still showing. I'm just going to use my finger to do this. I'm going to press down quite hard, and this will also have the effect of smoothing out some of the charcoal. I'm not looking for complete accuracy here, roughly things in the right place because I can pull the charcoal off if it's wrong. I find using a finger a really good and direct method, somehow it just really seems to help to get the shapes quickly. If I'm doing small edges, then I'll use the side of my little finger because if I was to go in with this finger here, I'll end up smudging where I don't want to smudge. I'm using the side of my finger here. Every now and then, your hands are going to get quite dirty. So it's quite useful to have some tissue or some wet wipes near you. The other thing to have close to hand is either a spare sheet of paper or a piece of kitchen towel, just so you can lay it over sections that you've finished with and so you don't end up messing up your work. And I'm just going to put a piece right now next to me on the table. I'm just going to continue blending with my fingers. I'm going probably a little darker than I need to because I know I can lift some of it off. I can see down this side, the value isn't going to be dark enough by me just rubbing my finger, so I'm going to apply a little bit more charcoal with a pencil. And again, on this side, I can see that you just need to be dark and around the edge of the chin or the jaw line. M This is having the effect of slimming her face down to the accurate shape. Now I've moved all the charcoal around. I can see that some of these mid tones are a bit too light. So I'm going to use this blending tool. And I'm thinking that as I start to blend, it will probably get it dark enough for me. But if not, I will dip into some of this charcoal down here to use it. We'll try just with the blending tool first. M I'm going to start working on the eyes, and it's, as you know, a lot easier to work on the eyes upside down because they're at the top of the paper, and it's also easier to see shape. So I'm going to spin everything around to make it easier. This is an example of where to use parts of the face to be your guide. The grid's gone now. I'm trying to judge where to put this line. I'm looking at this triangle shape between the nose and this line here. And then I know the space that I need to leave between the two. As I'm darkening all the mid towns, I can see that some of the dark towns aren't dark enough. So at the same time, I'll fix these. For the smaller sections, I'm just going to use the charcoal pencil, which I've re sharpened to a point. I can also see that the shape of this eye isn't quite right. I'll show you what I mean. It's only a tiny detail, but it's important. This shape goes up like this, whereas my shape goes too straight, so I'm going to use my eraser and rub a little bit of the eye out. And it's only a tiny adjustment, but it's little things like that that will make a big difference. So you'll notice I'm using two or three tools at the same time because you're constantly chopping and changing and making decisions. And I'm reasonably happy with that eye NOW, so I'm going to look at this eye now and just check the tonal values are correct. To make life easier, I'm going to fold this photograph and have it right next to it, so I can just concentrate on that one section. Here, I can see that this shape here is completely wrong. Some of this should be eyebrow and some of it should be lighter. So I'm going to fix this now. I'm reasonably happy with the eyes. I now want to look at the lips because I can see that in comparison, they're quite light and they need to be darkened a lot more. That's what I'm gonna do next. 15. How to Adjust Your Lights and Darks: I've just noticed that the nostrils or the nose are a little bit too light. So again, I'm just going to reapply the darks. And if I want to go really dark, which I do, I'm going to use a little bit of charcoal block and just literally just.it in the areas where I want it to go dark. Now I can blend it with some precision. You can see as I start smudging the dark charcoals out, how the darks get lighter and why you've got to just keep layering it up. Because as you smudge it out, it's all lifting. I'm reasonably happy with the dark tones and the mid tones, but, of course, I've lost a lot of my light tones. So now with a big rubber, I'm going to just quickly pull out some of the lighter tones. I'm talking about the lighter tones on the cheeks, a little bit on the forehead, and just on the chin as well. I'm just going to use a large rubber like this and not be really accurate with it, nice big strokes just to get some of the face back. If you find that you get some charcoal on the end of your rubber like that, then just give it a quick clean like that on your paper. And again, squint, and then you'll see the lights easier. Earlier on, I was referring to the little hidden gems in the shadows, and there's a couple of really nice ones here, and they're down the side of the face. So here we have a really nice light down there. And there's one here just at the top of the eyebrow. I'm going to put them in for now, but I might change my mind a bit later, but we'll try them. Uncomfortable with this dark mass of black here. So I'm looking very closely at the photograph. It's just some hints of even lighter bits of dark. I could see slightly lighter under there, so I'm just going to lift a little bit of this very dark charcoal off at this area so it's not too solid. Now, you can see at this stage, by lifting the lights, just even with a rubber, suddenly, we've got a face that's beginning to look a lot more three D and a lot more interesting. I'm going to clean my hands and just give it a bit more of a smudge all over. I want this forehead a little bit darker than the photograph. Again, I don't want to draw too much attention to it. This tool is quite useful at this stage. It's larger than the mono eraser, but it's smaller than the bigger eraser. So it's a good halfway tool. I've just seen this little mark here that I just want to get rid of. So I'm just going to lift that out. I'm just going to establish some of the lights back again while I've got it in my hand. There's some nice little touches in this photograph that I want to accentuate. A shadow here, I think maybe from some eyelashes, which look quite nice as they come down, and there's one on this side. I'm going to use this stump just to blend that line down there in that line down there. Here, I've gone darker than you'd probably think, but I know by the time I've blended it, it's going to end up lighter. So generally, I'm happy with those skin tones, the darks, the mids, the lights. So I'm going to use an old brush just to blend them in and make them a bit smoother. If I notice a mistake, I'll fix it straight away. I just want to reestablish a bit of light on this side of her chin. I'm pretty happy with this so far. In this lesson, we've established the darks, the midtones, and the lights, and they're roughly in the right place. In the next lesson, we'll be adding the finishing touches, things like eyelashes, eyebrows, and the hair. 16. How to Render Hair and Abstract Elements: So in this lesson, we're going to do all of the finishing touches. We're going to make sure that all our tonal values are right, that the symmetry is right, and add abstract elements and hair, for instance, as well. Although these might seem fairly minor things to do, in many ways, they are the most important because it will be what makes the portrait finally work. I'm going to start, first of all, I'm doing a little bit more work on the hair in the background because I don't want to leave it right to the very end. I want them almost to merge into one with the face, so they're not all different elements. First of all, I'm going to apply the lightest of the charcoals. Which is the willow. I know that I'm going to be able to lift this if I need to. I'm not concentrating too much. I'm just putting down shapes at the moment. I'm thinking of putting a little bit of dark towards the outer edges. I'm doing that because I want to create a sharp tonal value difference between the two sections here. I'll talk about that more a little bit later in composition. But for now, I'm just going to apply a little bit of dark. Then with my fingers, I'm just going to smudge it in. It's going to look a bit bland initially, but we're going to be able to pull it out a little bit later with some rubbers. By establishing some of these darker areas, again, it will help me get the tones right in the face. In a heel, while I've got my finger dirty, I might as well just very roughly just finish off the neck area. It's not an area that I'm particularly interested in, so I'm not going to render this particularly accurately. I'm just going to roughly do. And you can see now by getting some of the background and the hair done, it's almost like her face is emerging from the background. A Now, what I'm going to do is just pull out some lights in the hair just to see the effects that I'm going to get. And to do this, I'm going to use a large eraser. It's the same one that we use to pull the lights out of the face. And I'm not even going to concentrate that much. Don't want to be doing every mark exactly the same. And looking at the effects that we can get. Yes. There might be some shapes that you like and some that you don't the lovely thing about charcoal is if the shapes that you don't like, you just rub them back out again. Okay. With this charcoal stick, I'm also using it on its edge just to create some really straight lines as well, and dark effects. Yes Now what I want to do is to go back into the face and start really fine tuning that. I'm gonna clean my hands first because they're filthy. This is the stage where you're really likely to start smudging your work with your hand. I'm going to use this piece of kitchen towel just to protect certain sections. I'm going to start at the base and start working my way up the piece. I'm going to be quite critical in myself and just tweaking it all the way through. So I've worked up the picture just checking that the values are pretty much right, that the symmetry is accurate to the photograph. I've added a couple of lashes along the line, but I'm just going to show you how I add the lashes by adding a few more and a few extra to the eyebrows. A 17. Final Observations on How to Render Hair : What I use is the charcoal pencil, and I'm very, very likely just do little little wisps of hair. If I don't want to touch my picture, then what I'll do is I'll rest using my little finger on the drawing like this. They're not too regular. They're quite scratchy, but that's how I want them to be. And on the other eye, just a few more. I think it would be nice as well, just to add a few more rough hairs to the eyebrows here. And the movement that I do when I'm doing the lashes is something like this that will cover both lashes and eyebrows. So just very, very light. I'm going darker at the beginning and then trailing off. Don't want really harsh lashes or eyebrows like that. We want them nice and fine like that. Then you can always smudge them in and lift them off if you need to. I'll just add some texture. There's just an area that I just want to fix quickly, and I'm going to use the larger of the stick erasers. So now what I want to do is to concentrate just on some of the abstract elements, the hair coming into the face and a little bit more on the background using erasers and the charcoal sticks. And what I want to do is draw our attention into the face. So I'm really just going to sweep this eraser straight into the face from the hair itself. I'm going to just come in with really fine sharp movement like this. It doesn't even matter if you cut through the eye. That's fine. You might decide to get rid of some of these afterwards. If you do decide to get rid of them, just with a bit of a dirty finger, blend them out. Like so. This is the softer one of the Charcoal erasers. I don't want to use the block at this stage because I know I'm not gonna be able to lift it so much. I don't really want to make those final decisions just yet. I'm just trying to bring piece together. I want the background to be interesting but not that busy that it draws the attention away from the face. And I'm going to break this block up into a smaller piece, so I've got some small chunks over here, but I'm gonna do it over here because it's quite dusty. I just want a couple of dark pieces really dark. This area here is just looking a little bit boring. It's up to you what you use. I'm going to just do a few squiggles with this thin charcoal pencil. And just experiment. Some marks that you make you'll like, some won't work. And then back in with Robert just to see the effects that you're gonna get. And then you just need to kind of look back at it and just think, what's working? What isn't working. At the moment, the face is working for me, but this is all just a bit too busy around the edges, and the strands aren't thick enough for me. So I'm gonna blur it back and lift it back out. I want to keep some dark around the face, though. That looks better. It's less busy. I use the side of the pencil and just see what kind of stroke it gives me. So at this stage, we're almost there with our completed portrait. I've tried to reserve the lights on the chin, a little bit on the teeth, not too much on the tip of the nose and on the brows and the top of the lids, just to draw the viewer to those parts. I've also introduced a few elements, a few abstract elements, and a little bit of hair. But in the next lesson, I really want to develop that theme and show how hair can be a really good compositional tool. 18. The Importance of Composition in Drawing: This lesson, we're going to be looking at composition, and I'm going to be giving you some useful tips and tools to improve it. When we're working with an atmospheric portrait, it's not as straightforward as just copying from a photograph. That's because we want to bring mood and atmosphere into a piece, and also to lead the viewer around the picture. By its very nature, we want to bring abstract elements into this piece. We want to encourage the viewer to explore and look around the drawing. Donal values are pretty much right in the face, but it's just lacking something. It's just pretty average at the moment. If the viewer looks at the portrait, they tend to look up and down, and there's nothing really to encourage them to look outside of the actual piece itself. If you look at the hair, for instance, it's all a bit bland, a bit nothinky at the moment. And it's those elements that I really want to work on and I really want to talk about. Before we do this, I want to explain a little bit about how our brains work when we're actually looking at a piece of art. To do this, I'm going to take you through a little exercise. I'm just going to move this piece out of the way so I can show The artist Stan Miller explains this very well. So let me show you what I mean. If I draw a dot on this page, the chances are that your eye will automatically be drawn to the dot, and it won't really want to look anywhere else. Keep looking at this dot because the eye is drawn to the strongest tonal values. If I draw another dot over here, the chances are your eye will move from the bigger dot to the little dot and then maybe back again to the big dot. If I draw a tiny one down here, maybe make this a bit bigger. Again, if you were to look at this for the first time, you'll probably go from here to here to here and back to here. Now, the eye is also drawn to areas of similar texture. So for instance, if I do this kind of shape here, here and here, the viewers eyes will go from here to here to here. But overwhelmingly, the eyes will always go to the strongest tonal values. So this will supersede anything. Now, these are all fairly abstract shapes, and it gets a little bit more complicated when we're putting in easily recognizable shapes, and I'll show you an example. If, for instance, I was to draw this kind of shape, immediately, your eye will go to this because this is our left hand side of our brain working. If you remember, I was talking about how the left hand side likes to see symbols, likes to reduce everything to symbols. And if I draw smaller face like this, it will go to this one, and in fact, it will probably create a narrative, happy face, mother and child, et cetera. And if I do this one, it will rotate around the picture. This is very much left side thinking, and this is right hand brain thinking. And to create a successful piece, you want to incorporate both elements to keep both sides of the brain happy and interested. I personally really enjoy looking at pieces of art where it looks quite realistic, but closer inspection reveals abstract elements and hidden gems that the artist has put in. I like to have a painting that leaves me inquisitive and figuring things out and keeps me captured in the moment. An artist that brings in these elements to his composition is the 17th century Dutch painter me. And I love his work, and I'm going to show you a couple of examples right now. This particular piece is absolutely fantastic because it satisfies immediately both the left and the right hand side of the brain. And I'm going to show you what I mean. The eye is immediately drawn to this area of sharp tonal contrast with the dark and the light here. And of course, that's what the right hand side of the brain loves. It loves tonal values, abstracts and shapes. But it's also where the story happens, where the faces are. So the left hand side is happy, as well. We're immediately drawn to this section of the painting. Then you can see that these areas of tonal contrast here bring you out of the painting over to the abstract area and back into story again. So you have this movement around the painting. Again, in this example, the area of highest tonal contrast is this section here, where the face hits the light. The viewer immediately looks at the face, over to the light here, down to the light on the map, and then down to this chink of light down here. The way that Vmere has worked composition, it moves you around the piece, and when you're done with that, you might explore other areas in the piece of slightly different tonal values such as the globe up here. I really, really think these are just excellent examples of good composition. So what I'd like to do next is to incorporate some of these compositional elements into our piece to make it far more interesting. With this piece at the moment, there's no incentive really for the viewer to move outside of the face. If you remember, when we looked at the ame example, he had these really high contrast areas of dark and light that brought the viewer out of the piece and then back in. There are also abstract elements I could bring into this as well that will make this side a little bit more interesting. At the moment, the viewer looks up the face and back down, and I want to guide them out there and back in, and then back out there. That's telling me logically I need some slightly darker areas here and some leadings back into the face, and that's where I'll put some extra strands of hair. First of all, I'm just going to put some darker areas in here. So I'm going to take the charcoal block, and I'm just going to put a little bit of dark in here. I darken the area here as well. You can see how it's created this area of sharper tonal contrast. So hopefully the view will go up and out to here, but I want to bring them back into the face as well. So I'm going to create some strands of hair to lead the viewer back in. There's also a little bit of dark I want to put here as well. These are all quite abstract. It's not necessarily hair or background. It's just areas of dark and light. For the hair, I'm just going to use an eraser, and I've got two erasers that I'm going to use mostly. I've got this standard block eraser, and I've got this one over here. This is a little bit thicker than the tombo one I used on the previous occasion. Some of these flicks might work and some might not, so we can easily rub them out if they just don't look right. I'm going to bring them out from the hair. And I'm doing a cutting motion. I'm using the edge of that quite harsh to bring it in. Just deciding which ones I want to keep. And then at the same time, I'm gonna rub this eras down here to create a more interesting edge down here. And it's beginning to look a bit more interesting now. I don't want this solid black, because if you remember in the previous occasion, if it's solid black, our eyes are only going to go to that area, so it needs to be quite textured. And then I think all it needs are a few black lines down here just to draw it background. Not too busy because otherwise it's going to be a distraction. Some of these I'm going to get rid of some I'll keep. I just want to create a nice flow into the piece. And with that, I'm reasonably happy. Now the viewer looks up at the face. They look to this area of tonal contrast, and they're encouraged background into the face using the strands of hair. Now we've done that, I just want to give you a few more pointers that will help you with the decisions you make about composition. First and foremost, remember that strong tonal values seem to override mostly everything else. So keep these right to the front of your image where you want the interest to be. If there are areas of the painting that you don't want viewers to look at as much, you kind of want them to go into the background. Then make those tonal values far more subtle. Blur the edges, blur the background. So, for instance, here, the hair will pretty much blur into nothingness because I don't want the viewer to look at those areas. I want the focus to be on here and over here and back into here. Another pointer is don't underestimate the power of white and of negative space. If I was to suddenly put a big block of white here to rub this area out, suddenly, the eye will get distracted, or the viewer will get distracted and we look down here. So make sure if there are too many whites around the place, it's just to blur them out. You don't want the whites of the eyes, for instance, to be too stark. Otherwise, people will just stare at them. Same with the teeth, make sure that everything's in its right place and of the right tonal value. The other piece of advice that I'd give is to be really honest with yourself when you're looking at your piece. Is there an area that looks too busy that's too distracting? Because if it's distracting to you, the chances are it'll be distracting to the viewer. So if you see something that just doesn't look right, try and fix it straightaway. You'll remember when I was doing the drawing, sometimes I'd jump about and just fix something straightaway, like the eye that wasn't quite right. Otherwise, I know it's going to annoy me through the process. There's also another compositional tool that a lot of artists use, and that's called the rule of two thirds. And you can use your tablet or your phone to help you achieve this. A really important tip is that if you're not happy with your work, then don't destroy it. It really is better to sleep on it and see it the next day with a pair of fresh eyes. Luckily, charcoal is very forgiving. You can apply it and you can lift it. The main thing is not fix it with fixative until you're happy with it. And now that I'm happy with this piece, I'm going to fix it, and I'll show you how to fix it and how to scan your work in the next lesson. 19. Fixing and Scanning Your Work: So in this lesson, I'm going to show you how to prepare your piece for social media and how to fix and to scan it. So once you've created a piece of work that you're really happy about, then of course, you want to show it to the world. So it's really important to show it in its best light. All too often we take quick snapshots of our work and post it, and it really doesn't reflect the good quality piece of art that you've created. You can use a camera phone or your iPad, smart tablet, but these can be limited in capability, and charcoal is notoriously difficult to capture. So actually, the best way to capture the image is by using a professional scanner. Professional scanners are really quite expensive. I use Nepsen Workforce DS 5,000 A three scanner, but that's because I'm using it all of the time. I managed to find mine off eBay, so I just paid a fraction of the retail price. However, it might be that you have a local printer in your area who will scan the work for you and then just send you the image over or download it on a card, and this is a brilliant way of doing it. Once you're happy with your scan, then you need to make it ready for social media if you're going to post it on social media. Up until now, I've been talking about composition in terms of a piece that's going to be hanging in a frame. And if you remember, I've been talking about the darks and the lights, so I've been concentrating on guiding the viewer out of the face and then back in. But when you come to post it on something like Facebook or Instagram, then they have different formats, and that's going to mean that you might need to change your composition yet again. So when uploading to social media, you need to be aware of your file size. They don't like really, really big file sizes. And this is a point to bear in mind actually at the scanning stage. If all you're going to do is post your work on social media, you can get away with a low resolution scan. If, however, you're going to be licensing your work or running off really good quality prints, then it's really important to get it scanned at something like say 600 DPI. Back to Instagram and other social media sites. They will have different formats for the size of image that you're going to be posting on your page. And for instance, if you're looking at a portray mode on Instagram, you're looking at a five to four ratio, and that might not quite fit with the drawing that you've done. So be prepared to have to change your composition yet again. So it could be, for instance, that we can't post the whole of this image. We can't get that bit of white in there. So it may be that you're only able to put, say, that section of the image in. So it may be that you just have to further tweak it until you're happy with a new composition by bringing it in like that, for instance. It could be that you're looking for new lights in your composition and new darks. It may be that you only post, say, just the eyes or perhaps even half a face. And these can be just as strong as posting a full face on social media. The other nice thing about social media is how it connects you with other artists and photographers around the world. And if you have used photographers work, it's really good to privately message them, give them a preview of your work, and they will quite often share your work too on their page. And it's really nice to make that link, and you can gather followers and share followers that way. When you're completely happy with your work, then that's the time that you really want to fix it before it goes into a frame. I use Windsor and Newton, charcoal, fixative, but there's plenty of others on the market. The one I use is a permanent fixative. And I spray it at a distance of about a couple of foot, and I do three very, very fine misty layers. It's important to not get wet and sticky, so just be patient. It's also important to work either in a really well ventilated space or ideally outside as long as it's not too windy. Now we're at the end of the project. In the next lesson, I'm going to show you some tips about how you can explore charcoal further and take it to the next level. 20. Let's Experiment: In this lesson, we're going to explore different materials and different techniques to take your artwork to the next level. Charcoal is really versatile, and what I love doing is mixing it up a little way using watercolor, charcoal, and oil all on the same page. But something that's key to remember is to use the right type of paper or board to do so. And this is an example of the type of paper that I've used to create this piece. It's about the smoothest type of oil paper that I can find. So it's great for oil. It's smooth enough for charcoal, and it's got the right surface as well for watercolor. And I'm just going to talk a little bit about this piece as to how I've mixed it up. With this piece, I started with the charcoal section first and used exactly the same techniques as we've been talking about. But I just want to take a couple of minutes to talk to you about composition because those same rules apply here, even though we have color. You'll notice there are elements here that satisfy both the left hand side and the right hand side of the brain. We have objects that the left hand side loves. We have a face, we have birds. There's a narrative, but there's also abstract elements in here. We have splashes that don't really mean anything. We have texture with the oil paint. And this keeps both sides of the brain happy. You'll notice how I've used the elements to move the viewer around the face. We have splashes over here. We have the eyes, and then we move over to further splashes, and then strong tonal values as well that draw us around the piece. You'll also notice that I've blurred the edges because these aren't of any importance. We don't want to draw the eyes to these sections. And although this isn't course, on color, just to mention that I've used complimentary colors, so they don't distract either. And you can see these little birds are in watercolor, and I actually have another course running on Domestica in watercolor, featuring birds. So now I want to show you the work of some other artists that really inspired me. And to do that, I'm going to show you on the iPad. There's a number of artists that have inspired me, and one of them in particular is Casey Bow and he's been doing charcoal for years and years. His work is absolutely incredible. I think it's fair to say that he brought acetone to the forefront. He's been experimenting and using it for years and years. It's not quite as easy as it looks, but I'll be showing you how to use it. But for now, I just want to show you this piece that incorporates the use of acetone in his work. And you can see here how he's used it in these tiny little splatters, all the way around. This particular portrait. And not only has he splashed it, but he's also used acetone just to get these brilliant drips. And it's just enough to keep the right hand side of the brain happy without detracting from the main image, which is of this woman. It's just a really beautifully composed piece using acetone. The second artist I want to talk about is Kate Sombrano. I haven't used tone paper, but I think I really do want to start using it soon. This is beautiful. She's used tone paper. You can buy paper charcoal paper that's different colors, or you can tone it yourself using soft charcoal sticks to create a dark background or a darker background. So as well as toned paper, Kate uses white charcoal, as well. And again, white charcoal isn't something I've used at this stage, but I really love how it brings contrast to the darks and the lights. And you can see the beautiful composition as your eye just wanders around this picture, first on the darks and then the light. And you can see how she's brought these diagonals into the background as well. Just a little bit of abstract but not too distracting. The next artist I want to show you is the work of Stephanie Roo. This is just absolutely beautiful. It's charcoal. I think the paper is toned. There's white charcoal, black charcoal, but also gold leaf. And again, it's just enough to draw your eye in without taking away from the expression of the woman. You'll also notice that she hasn't rendered really any of the clothes because the clothes aren't of particular importance. It's beautiful sense of balance between the face, the arms, and the gold leaf. You'll also notice there's really hardly any detail in the hair, the odd wisps. I love the fact that she's used a lost and found line as well. If this had been a really harsh charcoal line, it would have competed for attention with everything else. So it's just a beautiful composition and a really nice way of mixing both charcoal and gold leaf. This is the work of an artist called Robert Kelly. He is fantastic in that he uses acetone creatively. He's big and bold with his movements. And he doesn't feel the need to have to draw or render a whole face. And I think that's really confident to do that. When you look at this piece, you're immediately drawn into the eyes, over to here, and then over to the wash, and then back into the eyes. And he's retained his lights just on the tip of the nose and just under the eyes and a little bit on the forehead. You can see how he has beautifully rendered the hair with just the simplest of strokes. Again, just a beautiful composition using charcoal and acetone. Another thing that I really would love you to explore is to use the techniques that you've learned on this course to depict animals. They are an absolute passion of mine, and I'm going to show you a couple of examples. For much of my working life, I draw and I paint animals. And this is an example of a lion. The particular photograph was taken by a photographer in the UK called David Yarrow, who very kindly let me use his image. The focal point on here is the lion's face, but you can see how I've used acetone drips in the background just to create some abstraction. And I haven't been particularly tidy on purpose with the lines around the feet because, again, I want to create points of abstraction so that it doesn't look photorealistic. I think it's important that you bring something new to a charcoal piece. Otherwise, you might as well just print a photograph off. It needs to bring movement to a piece. Another example is this stallion. Some of it is accurately rendered, but you'll notice that there's some charcoal movement in the back. I've exaggerated some of the lines beyond the natural lines, and in fact, there isn't much of a foot happening at all down here because I wanted to convey a real sense of power. But like I explained earlier, don't underestimate the p of negative space. I think in this piece, the light is as important as the dark because it really just hones your vision in to the areas that I want you to see. Looking at this piece, I want you to focus on the face, outside, and then back in again. The important thing that I want to do on this course is to make sure that all of the methods that I've spoken to you about, they're transferable skills. So it doesn't matter whether you are rendering the man of a horse or a lion. Or you're rendering the hair on a woman. They are very, very similar techniques, as long as you think of everything as shape, tone, and value. As a final idea, why not take your own photographs? There can be nothing better than using your own reference photos for your work. That way, you get to choose your model. You get to use how he or she is actually posed ready for your portrait. And you don't have to ask permission, either. People are normally really, really happy to pose for you and very, very flattered. And now I'm going to show you how to work with Acetone and the exciting effects it can create. First of all, I'm going to move the iPad out of the way. So you don't need many materials to create acetone effects. Here I've got some acetone in a spritzer, but you could use one of those bottles that you might spray on your vegetables in the garden center. I got a standard soft brush and a tub of charcoal powder. It doesn't seem to work as well with compressed charcoal, but you could use a willow stick and just use the shavings by rubbing it against a piece of sandpaper to create some powder if you can't get ahold of a tub like this. So I'm now going to open the top up and sprinkle a little bit of powder on the paper. This is like talcum powder, and it goes everywhere, so you have to be quite cautious with it. To apply it or to sprinkle it, use a brush. Tap the excess off. Pop it on the paper. If we just left it really loose like this, as soon as we apply the acetone, it's just going to blow it all away. But if we rub it too hard into the paper, it's not going to have an effect. So it's somewhere in between. I'm dabbing it on the paper, but leaving some of it loose and some of it pressed a bit more into the paper. Something like this. There's light, light bits, and there's dark bits. I'm just going to put the lid back on this. This is my bottle with acetone in it, and I'm just going to sprit from a distance. You can see that there's lots of little spots where the acetone has started to move and dissolve the charcoal away. This doesn't work with water or anything else. You've got to use acetone. But by the same token, you can use a brush. It almost makes it into, like, a liquid charcoal, so you can create interesting effects by brushing it out. And I think we saw some of these kind of effects with Robert Kelly's work and with Casey Bow. So as well as the little spots, and as well as these, brush marks, we can also make it drip. So I'm just going to pull the paper here. And you can see how it's dripping as if it was watercolor. So I think it's important to say that whilst these effects are really good fun, it's no substitute for good composition, and it really should just be just one tool in your whole armory of tools that you're going to use for texture and abstraction. A couple of other points to note is acetone is really, really flammable, so treat it with caution, and the powder, as you can see, goes absolutely everywhere. So if you're using it for a long time, then you really should use a mask in a well ventilated area. The other point is, if, for instance, you are putting these effects around a face, it's very important on your portrait to cover the facial features, maybe with a piece of tissue or napkin, very lightly with a little bit of tape, and then apply these effects around the edge. Otherwise, inadvertently, you might get some of this powder on your very carefully rendered portrait, and it could spoil it. And we don't want that. We're almost at the end of this course, but don't go yet. In the next lesson, I'm going to run through all of the steps that we've taken to get to our final project. 21. Final Thoughts: This lesson, I'm going to run through all the steps that will get you to your final project. I started by telling you a little bit about myself and how I came to be a full time artist. I also shared with you some of the artists that have inspired me throughout my charcoal practice. Then I presented some of the tools and equipment that you will need to create your final project. Remember that you need to think ahead about your darks and your lights before applying charcoal. Willow and vine are much easier to lift off the page than compressed charcoal sticks. Then I showed you how to use these tools to get the effects that you wanted with your charcoal piece. After that, we looked at the importance of training your eyes to see tonal values. Keep in mind that tonal values are affected by the tones that surround them. To help you achieve accurate tonal values, we created a tonal value tool. Then I taught you the gridding technique to help you draw an accurate eye. Seeing the image in a grid will help you draw proportions in an accurate way. Remember to use the right hand side and the left hand side of the brain when drawing. To activate the right hand side of our brain, we looked at negative space, and we also turned our drawing upside down. Once you'd become familiar with all of these techniques, we then set about beginning our final project by looking for photo references. You can either go to a creative commons picture bank or you can approach a photographer direct and ask for permission. The important thing is that the photograph conveys a mood that it's thought provoking. The next step is to make the photograph charcoal friendly. You can then use a range of software to desaturate the photograph, alter the contrast, alter the brightness, and apply a grid. After that, we transferred the image from the photograph onto the paper using the gridded technique that we learned before. The last step is to apply the charcoal. Start with the darkest areas and work your way into the lighter ones. Then move on to blending, reapplying the darks and re establishing the lights. Once you see your portrait come to life, create the details, render the hair, the eyelashes, the eyebrows, and look for those hidden gems of light in the photograph. At this stage, you'll see that it's a lot easier to incorporate some abstract elements. You can merge the background into parts of the portrait to keep the focus where you want it to be. And finally, remember that composition is an ongoing process. You can work on it right to the very end by creating abstract areas and contrasting sections. All of this is designed to encourage the viewer to move their eyes around the piece. Thank you for joining me on this journey. I would love to see what you come up with. Keep experimenting. Charcoal is really versatile, and you can always come up with ways of mixing it with other elements. Try combining it with oil, watercolor or gold leaf. I really look forward to seeing you there.