Discover Hidden Stories in Your Mark Making

1. Discover Hidden Stories: [No Speech] 2. Welcome to Class: Hi, and welcome to this mini class. I just wanted to dive a little bit deeper into one of the exercises that I gave you in my Charcoal class. I just wanted to show you what is possible if you take a little bit more time than we did in class to develop the image that you're seeing. This class isn't really about teaching you how to draw, but rather how to stimulate your own creativity by an intuitive exercise. If you need a little bit more guidance on how to draw with your charcoal, I recommend you watch my larger class on how to loosen up with charcoal with seven different exercises. And it's really fun class, and then you can go back to this one and go nuts and make some weird stuff. If you've taken some of my other classes on Skillshare, you'll know that's what I'm all about to get out of our head and onto the paper, have some fun and just see what shows up. So if you're into that, let's get started. 3. Let's Discover a Hidden Story: I'm going to get two pieces of charcoal. I'm using two hands. This is Willow charco by the way. I'm closing my eyes. I'm going to put them on paper, and I'm going to just do random I'm going to do some lines as well. Why not? And if it helps put on some music and react to the music, and then stop. So this is a nice start of something. You can work abstract. You can enhance certain parts, with some contrast. You can find some figures in there. I can see something really explicit. Don't think I will draw that one. So let's just observe what can I find here? I can see a leg right here. I'm going to make it a bit more funny than what I'm seeing, I hope. Let's see. There. I can see a hand here. I can see some kind of leg here. That's a weird hand. Okay. So this would be some kind of face shoulder. Oops. There not sure about this hand right here. Going to. There. Got rid of my lines, which is unfortunate, but I will. And if you if you're like me, you got rid of your lines and you're bummed out about it. Make some new ones, you know? Let's see. I'm going to first kind of draw what I see. And then I'm just going to do the same thing, you know, If you're stuck, close your eyes and just I know right now I want some more things at the bottom. Okay. And maybe this doesn't need to become something, but it's just, you know. Something going on. Okay. Let's get my eraser. Now, this is hideous, so I'm going to smudge it. It maybe here as well.'s going to smudge a negative space. That way you can really focus on your figure or whatever it is. Now, I'm going to get myself a kneaded eraser, I think. Yes. I love this going to warm it up. Works better that way. Okay, so I'm going to put in some highlights very lightly. Your shading doesn't need to be correct or anything. Don't worry about that. See, you don't need to know what the hell you're making. You need to respond to whatever you did before. And think to yourself, how can I make this more interesting or more fun? This needs to be a little bit higher, I think. See, I keep making small decisions until I kind of like what's happening where it makes me laugh or something. My chunky. This is blacker than the willow charcoal. You can also use compressed charcoal, which this kind of is. This is an art chunky. It's from the set of colored charcoal. It's really nice to up the contrast and get some texture as well. Oh, I can see face right here. That's weird right. Like a draw or something. It's fine. It's becoming so weird. It's like she's reaching for the monster underneath the bed or something. I like that. I'm just going to suggest a pause or whatever. It's a sad little monster. Maybe because she's not impressed, I don't know. Weird little feet. 4. Your Turn!: And that's it. I hope you feel inspired and you will try it. For your class project, just do the exercise and see where it leads you. You know? It doesn't matter what your subject of interest is, follow your own style and have some fun and maybe post it to the classroom because you know I want to give you some love, and I would like to see what you will do with it. Happy creating.