Drawing Landscapes With Charcoal: Texture & Distance

1. Introduction: Hi, I'm Emily. I'm an artist and a drawing teacher from New Zealand, and today I want to share some skills for using one of my favorite mediums, charcoal. Charcoal is messy. It's moody and sometimes it's hard to control. If you've never used charcoal before or you're not quite sure how to use it, this class is a good place to start. We'll begin by testing some different types of charcoal Now, don't worry if you've only got one type of charcoal, you can just use that through the whole class if you like. Charcoal is a great medium for working quickly. And I'm going to take you through three quick landscape sketches so you can see the effects of different types of charcoal. And to practice creating a sense of distance, then we're going to spend more time on a final charcoal drawing. You'll learn techniques for using willow charcoal and charcoal pencils. And then at the end, I'll also show you how to use fixative spray so you can protect your charcoal drawings. We'll be covering landscape related techniques like creating distance and creating textures, which are also applicable to drawing with pencils. So this is a good class to take if you're interested in getting better at landscape drawing in general. Just a warning, if you're using willow, charcoal or charcoal powder, it's going to get messy. It's easy to clean off your hands or of hard surfaces, but it's best not to be wearing anything white when you take this lesson. Let's get started. 2. Materials: I'm going to start with a demo of some of the different charcoal materials you can use. If you have some of these, then you can go ahead and get them out and we will see what we can do with them. So, I've got a couple of charcoal pencils. I've got one that is medium says two medium, and then one that says H B hard. Sometimes they're graded the same as regular pencils with HB and two B and six, and things like that. Sometimes they'll just say medium, hard or soft. We've also got some willow charcoal. This is right. Keep all my different charcoals. Willow charcoal comes in a stick form, has some hair, it's usually a bit longer than this. That is actual willow sticks that have been processed and burnt essentially. Then I've I've got a different willow charcoal by nitram, which is really nice to use. Probably won't use it today just because it's actually quite a different tonal value to regular charcoal. But the nice thing about it is you can sharpen it when you use it, it doesn't really crumble. So you might be able to see the sharp tip on that there, so you can get a really nice sharp mark with it and it doesn't break. But yeah, it's a bit warmer tones than the other charcoal. I don't tend to use it in combination. We've also got some compressed charcoal. You won't be using this. It's essentially the same as what's in the pencils. It's charcoal with a binder and some charcoal powder. And I've got a brush as well. Whatever you've got, even if it's just pencils, go grab those. I've got a putty eraser, and I tend to keep a separate eraser for charcoal just because they get really dirty. This, by the way, is a very old used piece of leather chamois, or chamois. And it's really nice for getting smooth textures with your charcoal when you're erasing. I won't do any on this paper because like I said, it's very well used. But it's also nice because it is used. I can actually just use that if I want to get a nice soft background for something, it was yellow, if you can believe it when I first bought it, that's something if you want to go on with charcoal drawing and do a lot of it that you might want to get. It works a lot better than like a tissue or even than these blending stumps are. That's also what? I've got a blending stump and somewhere around here I've got a tissue as well. 3. Charcoal Experimentation: Let's have a bit of a practice of these marks. The willow charcoal is very soft, it is very easy to wipe away. Now, this has its benefits, advantages, and its disadvantages. The advantages are you can get really nice soft blends like that. But the disadvantages are, obviously, if you want something really dark, you've either got to fix it at the end or you've got to be really careful with it, because anything that touches it is going to pull it off the page. I should say too, that if you're working with a willow charcoal, you're going to get really messy. I covered in charcoal, but it has a really nice soft quality to it, not just in the physical nature of it that it's going to rub away. But just the look of it as well. It doesn't have a hard edge. You can get some nice blends with it just by shading. It's got a cool tone to it, It's gray, but it's almost like almost a green or bluey gray to me, if really, really think about it. And I like that you can't get really strong, deep blacks that looks black. But when I compare that to a charcoal pencil, especially a softer one, this is the medium one that's black. That there is still like a very dark gray or just a soft black. The charcoal pencils are much darker. You can use them lightly, but it's more difficult. They're much harder to get rid of the willow. I can basically just pick it up off the page with my finger. With this here, it'll smudge but it's not going to come up off the page. You're still always going to have a mark. It's good in some ways and bad in some ways, you can erase it. But it's also had, if I try my hardest to get rid of all of this, there's still a mark there. Whereas the willow charcoal, there'll still be a bit in the grain of the paper, but not really so much a mark. You don't really see the long marks of the strokes there, the different pencils here. Like I said, I've got an HB. This is like a regular pencil, but it feels a bit more chalky and you can go darker. It's got that strong contrast to it, but same as with the harder pencils, graphite pencils, the charcoal pencil, the more easily you're going to see those marks. If you're wanting to shade, you've got to be a little bit more careful about keeping your shading nice and even close together. You can get a really sharp marker use on its point. The two B pencil is much darker. This is a medium charcoal pencil. It's much grainier, Harder to get a sharp line, I'd have to keep sharpening it and sharpening it on some sandpaper. This is a good thing to use, especially for these soft pencils, because they can be quite difficult to sharpen with a pencil sharpener or even a knife. They can break really easily if you can get some sort of point on it. And then you can use sandpaper to get a nice, nice, strong point on it. Sharp point. It's not really sharp because as soon as I start making a line, it starts chipping away. The charcoal is getting left on the paper, so it gets soft very easily. Again, very hard to get rid of that line, that hard line, once you've got it down there. So, pays to use this one quite lightly. To start with, you can use blending stumps on any of these, and like my erasers, I try to keep a separate one for charcoals. Has still got some charcoal on it, but you get quite a nice effect with the charcoal pencils if you use a blending stump over top. Now the paper I'm using is just regular sketchbook paper. You can get better smoother results with like a Bristol paper. But I think the trick, I think one of the problems I see people having anyway, they can't get smooth values, is the rubbing too much. They've got some charcoal there and they're really just trying to spread it out and rub it everywhere. Then you're going to get something that's really messy. Same as with graphite pencil. You need to layer up the charcoal first if you don't have any charcoal down there. This is very scratchy at the moment. This one. This is the HB, there it goes. But better if you don't have any charcoal in that place, then you're not going to get an even coating. You've got to have the charcoal down using light pressure with your pencil and using light pressure with your blending stump as well. It takes a bit of patience. It's just a gradual thing, you might think of charcoal, I can just smudge it really easily. Be much quicker and easier than graphite pencil, but it's really the same process. Now, if you were really keen on getting super smooth blends, then that is where you get some charcoal powder. Now I say get some charcoal powder, I'd actually recommend just making your own charcoal powder. That's this is again, sometimes it's a slightly different tone to what you're actually using. It might feel warmer or cooler. You'd apply that with a brush. And this is just an old paint brush. I don't actually use powdered charcoal very often. If I did, it would be probably over top of some of these other marks and things if I just wanted to tone the contrast back a little bit. But you can brush it on depending on the coverage you'd want. You can experiment with different brushes as well, but I just quite like that. This one is a little bit splayed. It is a little bit like a makeup brush. And you can use makeup brushes as well. I can do small circles with that. If you wanted to make your own charcoal, you can simply use that piece of sandpaper, whatever charcoal you're using. So you're using willow charcoal. You'd sand it off on here, and then you very gently tip it into a container like any powdered product. It's not good to be breathing this stuff, so you got to be careful with it. If you did buy a jar like this, it's going to last you a lifetime. Barely a third or even a quarter of the way through this. It's still going. There is one other way you can make powdered charcoal, and that's with something like this. I find this one is actually a little bit too coarse. It gives you charcoal. It's a bit too lumpy. This is by De. Went. I do use it sometimes still. You can just grate whatever product you want into this little container. Not so great with willow charcoal as a previous break, but you need to move it over the surface. This end up with all your charcoal in there. But like I said, sometimes it's a bit coarse. So this is really the best way, sending your charcoal on a piece of sandpaper and then collecting the scrapings you don't need much like a little bit, goes a really long way when you're brushing it on, what else have we got? You can use any of the other things that we normally use for blending cotton buds and then tissue as well. 4. Optional: About Nitram Charcoal & Compressed Charcoal: I'll just show you the compressed charcoal and the nitram charcoal, just if you're interested. So the compressed charcoal comes in similar sort of grades as the pencils. It comes in medium and soft, and extra soft, quite like the extra soft one. This doesn't feel like it's extra soft though. I think this one is extra soft. And it's, like I said, basically the same thing as what's in the pencil. You can see how dark that is, maybe even slightly darker than the pencil. These are quite good quality ones. They are Faber Castel, and you get very messy. But you can get a holder for them. I'm not sure where mine is. I don't use the holder very often, but it just claws onto that there. You don't get dirty fingers. Then the night tram charcoal. You might be able to see the difference in the tone. I'm not sure I do a lot of it there. It's more browny than this one here. Like I said, it's not great to be combining them. But these are, I forget what they're called, the petite sticks and they're very soft. You're not going to have any problems with them breaking, that's why I bought them, basically. And then you also get the hardest sticks. He has one here. These ones come in rounds and then these ones come in different grades. They're both willow charcoal. They're both soft, but the soft one is a lot softer. If I take an eraser and rub some of that out, can you see how brown that is? It's quite brown. That's something I didn't expect when I bought them. It's fine if you're doing a whole drawing, and it's actually quite nice if you're doing a drawing on like a warm paper to have that tone, but they're not great for combining with other charcoals. 5. Drawing Nature Textures: We're going to be sketching some landscapes. And what I thought I'd do first is just go over some of the patterns that might be useful for when we're drawing the landscapes. We're going to treat them as quite loose sketches. When you're drawing landscapes, it's very much about illusion. How can you create the illusion of a pattern, of a surface texture like grass or bark, things like that? If you're doing a full landscape, you can't do every individual blade of grass. So we've got to come up with some patterns that we can use to represent those textures. We'll also go over drawing a couple of trees as well. We'll use a mixture of willow charcoal and charcoal pencil. So the first thing you might be drawing is maybe some sky. I'm just going to get a fatter piece of willow charcoal here. They come in different thicknesses. It's a thin one and here's a thicker one. The thicker ones are nice. Want to make sure I don't touch my face with charcoal. Fingers have black smudges all over my face. The thicker ones are nice because you can use them on the side and that's really good for putting down a very light layer. If you have a long piece of willow charcoal, you can break it up into smaller pieces. If we're doing a sky, then we might leave a little bit white for some clouds. Then just put a little bit of this around for the rest of the sky. Maybe a little bit darker underneath the cloud. Then you can use your finger if you want to or you could use a bit of tissue. The tissue is going to pick up a lot of the willow charcoal, so it starts to disappear. If you use too much smudging, you see I'm losing it now already. But you get a bit of a softer, softer effect. You see that cloud in there. And then maybe I could just layer it up a little bit more. We're using willow charcoal. You could do this with charcoal pencil. You could draw a cloud as well. But the willow charcoal is just really quick. That might be one way that you create a sky. You can also bring your party eraser into that if you want to bring out some whiter parts. You can create clouds with patterns with that eraser just by moving it around a little bit. I'm just exaggerating here and doing a few more clouds. But you get erratic or use a erratic mark, you'll get something that looks natural looking. Like I said, if you wanted to, you could have a go at doing that with the charcoal pencil would just be the same thing, you leave your white area. I'll just do this one very quickly. And then maybe using a blending stump. Not great if you're doing a huge sky because you don't want to be having to blend the whole page. If you're doing a full page in most of its sky, it's going to take a really long time to get that nice smooth effect with the blending stump. Could alternatively use the charcoal powder, and I'm not going to use that in these classes or in these lessons just because I think most people probably won't have the charcoal powder. And it gets really messy as well, But you could brush that out and then get your eraser and bring out some clouds. That way you get some nice sort of effects. There's some clouds if we're doing water, you can get a really nice water effect just by dragging your willow charcoal across the page. That might be all you do for the water. Bring out a bit of the texture of the paper, or maybe put a few horizontal lines in there as well to create some ripples. No smudging. It's nice to combine some areas of smudging, maybe in the sky, and then have other areas that are sharper, so you get really nice contrast. These are just sketching tricks, I guess, if you're sketching a quick landscape. Obviously, if you were doing something and you want it to be hyperrealistic, then you wouldn't do it this way. You'd spend a lot of time, just like you would with a pencil drawing, same process, light layers first and then building up your values and then adding your textures afterwards. But we're going to sketch quite quickly for this one. Let's have a go at some trees. So I'm going to use charcoal pencil for this one. Let's see, we'll do some chunk. When we're thinking about shapes, it's good to put down the main shapes that you can see. It's a very idealistic looking tree, but maybe it's got three branches with big bunches of leaves and things on them. And each one of those sections of the tree needs to be treated as a three dimensional form of its own. So it's going to have a light, a middle, and then a dark. And I was using a side to side texture, but you could be using little dots or scribbles. So we want light, middle, and dark. And that's going to give us the illusion of form in those different parts of the tree. That's more What kind of tree would that be here? It would be a but cow tree or something like that. One of those trees that branches out and it has a lot of leaves on it. But we could also do, pine trees might use to be pencil here, this is the medium. It's a lot softer, a lot darker. For the pine trees, we can just draw straight line for the center and then we can start to flick out at different angles. Do a couple for each one. These are shortcuts for drawing trees and sky. It's a good warm up and it's also a good way to quickly put in like a symbol in place of what you see. We often talk about not wanting to draw symbols when we're, we are drawing, we want to draw, we actually see, but you can't draw a whole tree in complete detail. We've got to come up with these tricks or these shortcuts or I don't know what else you'd call them. Maybe like code ways to get down the basis of a tree. And then you could edit it. You could look at the tree again and there might be branches coming further out this way or something like that. That's pine tree. You could do another one where the branches are maybe coming up a little bit more. Obviously they're going to get smaller as they get towards the top. We're going to make sure we bring some in the center here too. We're going out to each side, but then there's going to be some coming towards us. And those ones are going to be, they're just going to look like long, wide shapes rather than long shapes because we can only see the length of them. When I hold this pencil pencil here, we know a branch or a pencil is long. But as soon as we're looking at it from the end of its length, you can't see any of that. You can't see any of that length there. You can only see the end of it. So we can see the width of the tree branch. I'm using a lot of scribbles and scribbling technique is really useful with charcoal for building up texture. You might want to have a practice of just doing something where you're scribbling erratically. And I think about it as being a little bit like drawing concrete. If you think about the texture of concrete, you can have these little scribbles that I'm moving my pencil in the same direction, but they're not all the same. Some might be, it might be wider textures like that can be nice for bark, they can be good, maybe for rocks as well. Just get used to that movement. If you're very controlled when you draw, this might feel strange. You can even hold your pencil a little bit further back and that might give you a more natural mark because you got less control scattering those marks about all over the place. It's like if you put a piece of paper on concrete and then you brushed over top, that's the mark you might get. We'll just do a couple more rocks or cliffs. We had some cliffs, then I'd use an HB pencil or a hard pencil because you can get some sharper marks and that's what we want for rocks, you might have some jaggedy lines going through these cliffs or rocks. Then you might have just some textures. I'm just playing around here, but again, almost like just a scribble, I'm doing more linear scribbles and then you could have willow charcoal underneath or over top of that as well to take away some of the white the building in some crevises here. This is the top of a cliff face. You could do the same with like a single rock. You might have the top of the rock. This is a very square rock, but even if you did a round rock, you'd have a top to it as well. You might have some jaggedy textures on it. The harder pencil is going to give you a harder mark which suits the nature of things like rocks. Anything that we draw in a landscape or anything we draw at all, generally speaking, it'll be darker down the bottom. There'll be some shadow cast somewhere. We can think about that with things like rocks as well. And make sure that they are darker down the bottom than they are at the top. The last thing that you could practice is grouping together a line of trees. We're not always going to be drawing single trees like this. Sometimes in the distance they might look like just a long, dark shape and maybe you can use a round mark or a round scribble for that. Again, like the rock, it's going to be darker down the bottom, generally speaking, than it is at the top. It's just another little trick for creating some depth and some volume in those trees rather than them just being like a gray slug. We've got this darker part down the bottom now. It's more of a three D gray slug. Have a play with each one of those elements, sea trees and rocks. You might be able to come up with some different patterns that you can use. In a moment, we're going to go ahead and have a go at doing some quick sketches, and we'll put some of these techniques to use. 6. Quick Sketch: Willow Charcoal: We're going to do some quick sketches now and the emphasis is on quick. We're going to use the charcoal to put down some values and practice some of those textures that we did previously. Just be mindful of that and don't get caught up in trying to make it look perfect. We want to create a quick ill, or capture a quick illusion of the landscape and we've got some different ones to try. We'll using separate media and also combining media. But if you only have one type of charcoal, it's fine. You just use that for the whole thing. I've divided my page up into two landscape and one portrait orientation. We will start with this landscape up here. This one. I'm going to use only willow charcoal. We're going to start just by putting in a horizon line very lightly. I'm using it like a pencil. Using the tip of the charcoal. Then I'm going to put in the main shapes. We've got this cliff side, not worrying about the trees for now, but getting the general shape. We've got that cave in there as well. A little too big there. The size of my rectangle is a little bit bigger than the rectangle of that picture. Stretch it out a little bit too far, but it doesn't matter too much. I was just trying to get these general elements and then I'm going to just put in the tide line, the sea, then this other line here. Then I'm going to put in island in the back. There's actually a rainbow in the sky too. It's hard to do in black and white for the sky. I'm going to use my willow charcoal on its side. We could put some clouds in there if you want to maybe leave a few bits white. I might leave a white cloud over here. Everywhere else I am shading in with that Willow charcoal. Using charcoal is a little bit using water color. You've got to think a little bit about the lights in the darks before you start because you can go lighter if you need to, but it's quite hard to go light. You still will leave some of the charcoal in the grain of the paper, anywhere you want. White. You've got to think about that beforehand and leave it white, give us a little bit of smudge. I'm not worried if there's a bit of texture, what paper you have is going to determine the texture you have. But also, like I said, the only way to get a really smooth texture is to use a powder to apply it as a powder. If that's something that you're concerned with, you have to get over it for this particular lesson. But it might be worth investing in some powder or just having a go at sending some powder and seeing how that works for you. You might really like that effect if you're after the smooth look. I'm just going to add a little bit more to these clouds with an eraser. And maybe darken up just under those clouds a bit. I've got to be mindful that we are doing this quick and I don't want to get carried away either. Okay, there's my clouds now, the water, I'm going to use that texture coming across. Just put a light layer across there. And maybe in the foreground here where you can see some ripples and things. I can put those in not so much of the back because we can't see detail in that far in the distance. There's this white white part here. To make that stand out, I'm going to have to build up some charcoal. Will go a little bit darker. Anyway, in this area, this part of the sand, we want to feel smooth, so I'm going to smudge that a bit and blend it out. You see the different sorts of effects that we're getting here, and I want to be able to leave that area white. So I'm going to go in with some quite sharp texture marks on the other side of that white area. I'm doing sharp texture marks because it's an area that's close to us. Anywhere that's close to us, we can afford to put a bit of texture anywhere that's far away. We want to leave plain and low texture. And then maybe a little bit of a jagged line underneath that wave as well. It's quite dark under here. This one's all with willow charcoal. Let's get something on those cliffs. Same way we did the sky. But this time I'm going to grab, it's really just a ground layer or base layer. Start putting in that open cave there. Now you do have to be mindful of what your hand is doing. I'm working the way a right handed person would, but I have to be careful that I'm not putting my hand onto that charcoal and smudging it. Same way if you're going back over here and working on something over here. We haven't done that Headland yet. You've got to be mindful of where your hand is going. Let's put that Headland in there now so that you don't end up smudging yours. If you're right handed, it's maybe a little bit dark because things in the distance are usually a little bit lighter. Generally speaking, we'll leave that to last just so that we don't have a whole lot of charcoal all over the place. I'm just going to try and come up with some marks that feel like that cliff face, those darker parts coming up. I'm holding my pencil on its side, but piece charcoal. But I'm also using it with quite a bit of pressure to get some of these lines coming up here too. If you haven't used charcoal before, it might be a little bit like using a completely new tool, like what it's like if you start to use a palette knife for the first time. It feels a bit strange to figure out what marks you can leave and how you create those marks. Now I'm using that concrete method where I'm doing a few scribbles, but I'm pushing quite hard, and this is to give me an idea of shrubbery or trees or something coming down here, down here. Then we're going to use the tip of the pencil, tip of the charcoal to bring out some of these trees. We didn't really practice ones like these, but again, a little bit like the concrete method, but I'm just trying to leave a few gaps. You can see the light coming through them. There's one that comes up from here. This one has a few clumps where we could treat individually. I remember you want to have a bit of value, a bit of light and dark for each clump, Maybe here as well. A little bit of dark in there just to show that they are separate sections of the tree. There's a little bit in here, but we can leave out anything we want. I might just leave that part out. Then we've got light levels coming through here of tree leaves, shrubbery, a bit of white space coming through so that you get that sense of the light coming through the leaves again, putting in some darker parts somewhere. We just about finish this one said we're going to keep it quick. I'm going to try and stick to what I said. Then we're just going to put in some really dark shadow on air, especially on that right hand side and underneath then we can lessen up the pressure. Maybe even just smudge it across there. And you can keep layering it up until you get what you want. Then we just need a little bit of sand in here. Maybe a few of footprints. I don't really want white, because we want the white of the wave to stand out in the white of the clouds. This part here. It needs a bit of texture on it too. Something like that. And we've got a nice little landscape. We're going to do another one down here. And this one is going to be just charcoal pencil. I'm going to use two pencils hard and my medium pencil. 7. Quick Sketch: Charcoal Pencils: We've got another escape here, but have a look at that sky, very dramatic sky. We could do a good job with willow charcoal, but I really want to see what the differences in style when we use a pencil, the feeling or the energy that you get from the drawing. I'm going to use my hard charcoal pencil, just very, very lightly though, and start to put in these main elements. The general shape of the, the cliff there and then the bottom of the cliff. If you don't get these exactly the right shape, hey, it doesn't matter, no one's going to know the sandy part or the stony part of the beach. Then we want to show or identify where the white wave is going to go. Just very lightly and with a broken line, I don't want any outline to it. It's really just an indicator for me, so I know where to keep white. Maybe another one coming in here then for these clouds, maybe putting a bit of a general shape there as well. The advantage of willow charcoal is you can rub everything out very easily. I could just rub this out with my hand if I wanted to, but because we're not using willow charcoal, we're going to be careful with those lines. And we've got to think about the pressure that we're using. We've got to think about what we're putting down and where we're putting it down. I'm just going to use side to side motion, start to shade this in, but it is a quick drawing using quite broad marks, catching that weird part of the pencil. This hard one's got, I don't know, something stuck in it. It feels like it's like just getting a bit caught on an edge or something. Might have a few scratches in here. It's okay. All of this is going to be gray just like a regular graphite pencil. If you hold it on its side, you're going to get a thicker mark to cover more ground. Darker there and then lighter here, that could be it. But I'm going to go ahead and just build this up a little bit darker and use a blending stump. But you could use a tissue tissue just like the willow charcoal. It tends to pick up a lot rather than smearing it around. And I'll want to smear it around to keep it on the page. Using a blending stump with small round movements down here. I'm going to use those long strokes again, If you feel like you're running out of charcoal, you're smudging but nothing's really happening or it's getting messy. You got to come back in with some more charcoal. There needs to be something down there for you to move around. Just darken up just a little bit, not too much. You don't want it to be black, but I want it to be the heaviest part of those clouds. You can see the shape that is like the bottom plane of the clouds. Same up here as well. That'll make them feel heavy. You can get that shape. Well, this one's taking longer than I wanted it too. So let's quickly move on. Just a quick sketch. Soften off that edge for the water. It's really quite dark. I'm going to use a horizontal mark, trying to get that flat plane of the sea moving across but a scribble in here because it's getting messy with that white water leaving a few gaps to show through. If we want this to go even darker, then that's when you could bring in your medium pencil or a soft pencil, maybe a bit of smudge of that back back to a hard pencil. Bring in some of these details. I guess really what we're doing here is we're just sketching the same way we would with a normal pencil. But we've got the added bonus of being able to smudge it a lot more and quickly get high contrast. Put a line there to show that wave, it's quite dark behind this part of the wave here too. Just about lost my wave. Keep an eye on where that white part is that you want to leave long marks coming through here to show that the wave is drawing back. What have we got here? The white water here too. Just a little bit of a mark in there. Quite white up here. Again, some long marks to show the was pulling back. I'm not going to worry about these little ones in here too much. Let's do the cliffs And then we can quickly add in sand gravel. This is where we want to use sharpness of this pencil to put in some crevasses and things. And I'm almost like contour drawing. I'm just following my way along the cliffs and using my pencil in quite an erratic way to follow the shapes that I see. But if I get some interesting marks, well, that's good too looking at those different shapes, coming down the cliff face there. Just looking for the main crevasses that I can see. We might want to shade all of this in so that it's not white. This time I'm going up following the direction of the cliffs. But you could change the direction. You might get some interesting facets happening. If you change the direction of your shading up here, I think grass or shrubbery again, how do you get a different texture? Well, I could do it a little bit more sideways. I can use my pencil on its side more as well. So I get a softer mark in some general shading at the back there. Then I'm just going to reinforce some of those darker areas or crevices. Remember I said down the bottom, there's usually a shadow and we can see quite a dark line along there. Just putting that in will make a difference to your form. As we come in a landscape or the foreground in this area here is closer than this area, we can expect to see more detail. We can put that to use in our drawing by adding more detail, the foreground areas, that's going to help with the illusion of distance. Okay, I'm not going to do much more with that. Then somehow we've got to get these very dark stones in the air and gravel and things. I'm going to use that same principle of it being detailed in the foreground using some scribbles, quite erratic, then they're going to get a little bit smaller, go back, and then I'm going to have to use my dark pencil. Let's move to this one. This is the two B, I want all of this to feel black. I could actually shade it all in black by pushing quite hard. But at the very least, as we darker than everything else, moving in the same direction as I feel like the waves are moving out. We're going to bring some of this in here too, maybe be a little bit more detailed. The stones at front are going to be bigger. As we move back, they're going to get smaller. Remember it's a quick sketch. We just want a simple ill, when I lean back a little bit, you get a sense of distance and you get a sense of what these different elements feel like. What's the texture of them? Just needs to be maybe a little bit more dark. Here, closest to us is going to have more contrast, more texture. It's quite dark at the back there too, but I don't want any texture in that. We got one more to do, then we're going to have to go at a more final, a drawing. We can spend a bit more time. I won't be rushing you through it. 8. Quick Sketch: Mixed Charcoal: I think it's a good idea to practice drawing really quickly and to learn how to interpret something when you don't have a lot of time. And also to learn how to be expressive with these marks. How can we use these marks to create the illusion? If you're taking your time and spending 2 hours on a landscape, sometimes you lose some of that energy that you would get if you were drawing quickly. Now, this one is probably the most complex one we've done yet. I'm not going to do it quite that big, just keep it small so that it doesn't take all day. This one I'm going to use a combination of willow, charcoal, and charcoal pencil. You can do the same. Or if you've only got one or the other, then you just have to go with whatever you've got. I'm going to put in what would be my horizon line, which is in the center. You can see that line of trees. There is a bit more on an angle. I'm just using willow charcoal. Now on the other side of the river is on a bit of an angle too. Then we can bring this section of trees very lightly with a broken line, putting that in these tall trees on the right. Then we've also got some on the left here, so a little bit lighter. Then we've got a little bit of a hillside. Then we've got this Rocky Cliff. Rocky Mountain that comes up, looking at the shape of it, something like that. There's another little one back there. And then we've got these clouds. We've also got the reflection. So we've got a lot happening, but we're still going to work really quickly. And we can use the willow charcoal quite effectively to be able to put in some value. Very quickly, I'm going to leave the white of the clouds, just mark those out. And then using the side of my willow charcoal, put in that blue sky. If you really like the texture, you could just leave it quite textured like that. You could come in with a tissue and lose some of that and maybe push a little bit of bit into the clouds as well. It's a little bit grayer down here. I'm just using what's on the tissue to put a little bit down closer to the mountains. We can tidy that up a bit by bringing some whiter whites. Not everywhere, but just where you see the brightest parts of the cloud. Perfect shapes, don't matter so much. Let's get an idea of those clouds in there. Let's put a little bit more down and we'll slowly work our way forward so that we're layering on top of that background. Put this in here and now this is quite light. Use my finger to smudge it. If you're losing definition, you might just have to carefully go in over the edge. As things are further away, they are lighter, less detail. This is a good example of that. Look at the difference between this and this and this in the photograph. The difference in the values. I'm going to put a bit on this one too. What we could do is go through and put in all of the values with the willow charcoal first, and then use the pencil for the detail. That would be one way of working. It looks like we're going to be working that way just taking it as it comes. Here's the next layer. I guess what you run the risk with, with willow charcoal is that everything just ends up looking the same because it's very tempting to smudge and it's fun to smudge, then you might just end up with gray. I think we'll probably stop there and move to the pencil and we're going to get that same feeling of sort of rock, sharp rocky cliffs that we did in the last one following my way along. I'm not trying to make an outline, I don't really want to make a dark outline around the top I have, but I'm also aware that I'm going to be shading some of these parts in. It's going to go much darker, so it's not going to appear as a dark outline at the end. But just be aware of that, that you're putting a hard edge on everything. Coming down here and keeping it a bit lighter. Looking at some of the crevices, there's one that comes down here. Whatever you see, you can put in using some sharp marks, putting some texture on there as well. It is quite dark down the side, so I could actually afford to shade and all of that with my pencil. Just check for your lights in your darks in that cliff side. We don't want any really bright lights where there shouldn't be or any dark darks where there shouldn't be. So there is a bit of light here in the photographs. I'm just going to leave that part showing. Definitely a bit darker down here and a bit darker up here then that will be about it, that one shapes a little bit strange. Looks a bit like a chimney or something, but it's going to come together when we put everything else in as well, it's in the distance. Okay? This one here, this is trees. A lot of pine trees. I'm just going to use like an upward or upward scribble mark to give an idea of those, create a pattern. Let's put a little bit more detail on that one. Getting the correct values. Now I think I might have gone a bit dark with that or maybe this one can go darker with my other pencil, but I've got lightest hair and then getting darker and then getting darker. And then when we get to these trees, we're going to go really, really dark. I'm just going to put in a layer just so that I can get rid of any white because I don't actually want any white showing through there. We can do the same on this side as well. And let's move from this side to the side here. I'm just going to put in what would be trunks for maybe, let's say 123 trees. 123 to come up a little bit higher than that. And then there's a few in here as well that then we're going to use our pine tree mark moving outwards on each side. Look at the way the branches angle so that angle upwards. We're same for the one behind it. Then there's the small ones. There's one here that stands on its own a little bit. I'm going to speed this up a little bit. The video, I'm going to just speed up my drawing because I don't want to spend ages on this. You can make these denser just by shading over top of them like that. If there's too much white in there, I could come back with my other pencil, my hard pencil. Maybe just put some nice clean points on these too. There is some white in there. I don't really want maybe gone a bit dark with these ones, a little bit lighter down the bottom. I can just smudge them a bit with that putty eraser. That will also get rid of some of the white coming over to the side here. Now I could go through and draw each one of those individual trees, but all I'm going to do is just be aware that they are coming up in size, smaller at the back, and then they're getting bigger and I'm just going to make up where they are. You could look and think, okay, there's a couple there and then there's a bit of gap. Then there's this main one here, and then there's two quite close to the edge of the frame. And then just fill in the gaps, especially with these ones at the front, we can add some detail the direction the branch is going. There's a bit of white space up there that we can leave or a bit of light showing through those branches. But as we come lower down down here, there's no light showing through. That's where we're going to beef it up a little bit. I'll just do the tops of them first so that I can get that a little bit of detail in there. Detail. And these ones at the back, they could almost just be like just scribble lines. As we come closer, you start to see more of the detail. These ones here will be the most detailed ones. Remember, you go side to side and then you want some coming across the front as well. Then all of this I'm just going to put in on mass so that we can get onto those ripples and things also reflections in the foreground. That's worked fairly well. If you feel like this is too dense then Putty eraser, just bringing out a few light areas but you get that nice smudge as well, which is really effective to just create a bit of difference in the textures that you've got. There some soft and hard areas, subtle changes in values which you have in amongst those dark trees. Let's go ahead with the HB pencil and just put in a little more detail here. I'm just going to put on the shore line that's a little bit lighter than the trees. Then on this side it's probably the few areas of white that we've got a very light, this white light part that comes along here. There's some dark just above it heading into those trees. Then I can put in the reflection, I'm just following the direction that the reflection is cast across the river. Then I'm going to switch back to my willow charcoal in here. You can see that it's got a smooth feeling to it. There's really ripples, maybe a few right in the foreground. I can just do the whole thing East. We'll use our eraser to bring out the lighter areas, the good smudge when you're smudging, you don't want to be pushing really hard into the paper. If you need more to smudge, then you put more charcoal on. If you're pushing into the paper, you're actually showing up the texture of the paper. You're also sometimes messing around with the actual structure and the fibers of the paper and you'll get weird marks. I'm going to go in now and put in the lighter part. You can see the reflection of the hillside or the mountain top there. And I'm not getting rid of all of the charcoal here, but that's okay. Because I can see in the reflection there, there's some bits of gray in the clouds and stuff as well. I can use any eraser too, so I could bring this one in if I really want to get detailed in any areas and bring out some cleaner whites. We're just working quick, so I'll stick with this one. Then I'm going to bring my hard pencil because I can use that more lightly. And I'm just going to put in a little bit of detail here in this reflection of the mountain cutting out that shape a little bit more, even if it's just some up and down lines. Then you can see the trees coming up on this side as well. The reflection of the trees the same on this side here. This should line up with what they're reflecting. This would have been a really nice one to use the powder on in the brush just to get those really smooth areas. You can see some trees coming through here too. A little bit of mass there. Then I just need to get the contrast a little bit closer. So it's very dark in here. Dark but soft. A bit of a smudge will be good. That's going to bring out the shore line. We are just about finished with this push back. That white a little bit, comes right over to here. But then there's a few like cuts through that reflection there. I think it's just where there's some lighter trees on the shore. This is a fun one to play around with if you want to do a bit more on it later with these reflections. 9. Analysing Our Drawings: Take a look at the drawings that you've got. You'll be able to see a difference, especially between the willow charcoal drawing and the charcoal pencil drawing, just in the feeling that the material gives you. You have a lot softer grays with the willow charcoal and you have some sharper marks with the charcoal pencil. Then we can combine those to create something that has a bit of both softer for the reflections, harder marks, darker marks for things like the trees. I'm saying that this one needs to be maybe a little bit darker in here. You can also see how we can use the grays and the values to create a sense of distance. They are usually lighter in the background. This is never going to be as dark as this. Even when we were not close, There might be some caves and things, but it's never going to be as dark as this here, because this is closest to us, this is further away. You just think about anytime you've looked at a mountain range in the distance, it'll appear maybe like grayish blue. You won't be able to see the texture and you won't be able to see any contrast. Whereas things that are up close to us, we see a lot more contrast in detail. Contrast being the black and the white. If this felt a little bit fast for you, don't worry. We are going to move on and do a drawing that's a little bit longer, not a whole lot longer. We're still going to be working in quite a sketching manner, but I think it's important to try these things sometimes and you might be surprised by what you've come up with. If you feel like something is lacking, then I just go through and think about those values. Think about do you have the things in the foreground darker than the things in the background? And also think about texture. Do you have more pattern and texture in the foreground than you do in the background? Sometimes just really simple things like adding a little bit of black somewhere can make a big difference. If you're working in a sketch book, you can see how mind started to get smudgy. I was just cleaning it up a little bit. I am going to show you how to use fixative at the end. In the meantime, if you're worried about it getting on any other parts of your book, you just put a piece of copy paper or something on top of that. It'll smudge a bit onto the copy paper, but it just means it won't get all over your other work, just like that. 10. Project: Charcoal Landscape Background: This is the image that we're going to be drawing for our final drawing. It's still going to be a sketch. We're not going to spend hours and hours on it, but you can always choose to spend a bit more time on it if you want to. If we think about some of the rules we've been talking about, the landscapes, when we're doing those quicker ones, the levels in the distance are lighter than the levels in the foreground, At least in terms of this area. We've got that level and then this other level of trees, you can see a bit of it there. And then we've got these trees right in the foreground. We've got lightest and then we've got darkest here. Then we've also got this really close area, the foreground here, which has a lot of texture in it, and we're going to use a pattern for that. Again, we're not going to try and draw every blade of grass, but we want this area to feel like it is much closer than this area here. The way that we can do that, they're about the same value, but the way we can do that is by having a lot more texture in this foreground area. We'll use a combination of willow charcoal and charcoal pencil. Decide how big you want your drawing to be. I'm not going to do full size page, just maybe a bit too much charcoal for my liking In this particular sketchbook, I'm going to do mine about that big there. It's maybe like half of the sketchbook, half the size of the sketchbook page I'd normally use. We'll bring this up a little bit bigger. Let's think about the levels that we've got going on there. We've got the foreground area. Can use willow charcoal just to very lightly with a broken line. Draw that in, then we've got that area in the far distance, it's almost like the page is divided into thirds, maybe the sky area is a little bit bigger. Then we've got some trees coming into the foreground. One, I'm doing this very lightly, probably going to end up rubbing some of our out with my hand by mistake. That's okay. 34. Then we've got one, probably the main one there, the thickest one, and the two that are quite close together. It's a very quick layout of our drawing. I got to think about what I want to leave. White. I'm going to leave all of the sky white. And that's going to show through some of these dark areas of the branches. I can start putting in the background layer. Now there is one layer that I haven't put in yet and that is, you can see these pine trees that are in the distance, but they're not way, way at the back. I'm going to put those over top of this layer here. All of this can be gray because there's no light shining through. You could use willow charcoal. It could use pencil as well. I think I'm just going to use willow charcoal, but I'm going to use it now a little bit more on its end rather than on its side. I'm getting a darker mark by putting some pressure on the tip of the charcoal. What that means is, when I smudge it, I'm I'm going to get something slightly lighter, but it's going to be denser than when I was using it on the side. That's nice, it's soft, which suits that background layer. Anything that gets a bit messy, you can just use your eraser to clean it up a little bit. Things in the background can be blurry as well because we don't see them as clearly as things in the foreground. Still a little bit more out here. When I'm smudging with this tissue or your finger, I'm pushing hard. I'm very lightly smudging over the top there. It looks messy, but we're going to have a lot of detailed stuff over the top. Yeah. Literally our background. Let's come in with a HB pencil or a hard charcoal pencil, and I'm going to put in some of those distant trees. I'm using the HB pencil because it's a little bit lighter. One of them comes alongside this tree trunk. That's a tree trunk that's more in the foreground, but then I can see behind it there's a tree sticking out. It's coming into the light area of the sky. You see, I'm working with my hand down a little bit further so that I'm not smudging all that charcoal. And it's just something you have to learn to deal with. You can be as detailed as you want with these, but I'm just creating a pattern for that tree. She should be a bit wider than that. I think as it comes out to the other side, I think I've made it a little bit too far away, but it's okay too far away from the tree chunk. And then I'm going to put another one in here. The direction of those branches are coming at an upward angle, but we don't want them to just look like lines like this. We need to give them a little bit of irregularity or start bringing in some of those ones at the front. Scribbles are always good. I'm putting in these main ones just because those are the ones that I want to be more in focus. The other ones, the ones that are a little bit further back here, I can just do those with some mass shapes. A bit more detail there. Something dark down here. Then I'm going to put in bunch of trees that comes through and over to this one here. Now it doesn't matter if you have a different number of trees in there. I'm drawing them as a mass shape, looking at the oval outline of them and then shading them in. We can go over with the medium charcoal pencil to make these darker. Okay, so I've got those in, that's like a placeholder really now. I can make sure I've got these long trees in the right place working outwards, I can come back with my willow charcoal. Willow charcoal is always safe just because you can rub out the lines that you don't need. We had this one coming in front of that tree and the other one, we've got one that comes a little bit more into the foreground. Building it up slowly. Going to do just a little bit more work on what would be behind here. I'm going to use a, a scribble pattern, but I'm also thinking they are the same sort of pine trees. I put a few upright lines. The way I approach this is very much about creating ill, especially this area here. There's just not much you can do unless you're working with a grid and you are wanting to spend hours and hours on it. You've got to use a pattern. There's nothing else to grab hold of except maybe the dark shape in there, dark shape, and then some pattern, that concrete pattern in between these ones, you can definitely see some individual trees, 123. I'm going to switch to my medium pencil, but I'm not going to use it too hard because I don't want it to be completely black yet. Can add the black. And later down the bottom of them, they're quite clumpy, you can't really see a lot of detail. And then as they come up to the top, you can start to see the branches. There's a few through here. All I'm doing is just looking for light and dark through this part. 11. Project: Adding The Main Trees: We're going to get some of the foreground in and then we can go back and think, do these need to have more detail on them? Do they look a little bit sparse? In which case we can add in more trees in between them. But we might find that once we get these other ones in, they fade into the background, which is what we want them to do. Let's start over this slide here using the hard pencil to start with, just because it's going to give me a nice sharp edge, can get rid of any willow. If there's too much there, then I can come in with the medium pencil. If I want to build it up darker, all I'm going to do is look for the main branches. Something coming up here, come up. I know it looks like there's just so much going on. There's another branch there coming down again. It's a little bit like contour drawing. I'm moving my eye trunk, when I see a branch sticking out, I'm going out and across. And then I can even start coming into the other trunk. I can see them crossing each other, make a crisscross pattern at the top there. And then I can put in some texture over top, anywhere I can see clumps of pine needles. I can put those in. There's another one here with a few clumps on it. Sorry, you didn't see much of that. I'll do it again for the next one, but I know there is another big tree behind here. I'm ignoring that. Just because it's detail behind detail, it's very hard to distinguish exactly what's happening. I'm coming up this side and again looking for branches, putting them in, and then adding some light and dark scribble. We're starting to get something that looks like a pine tree. Now, if I come over this side here and again work my way up. As I run my eye up the photograph and I see something, I'm going to put it in. Already done some of the ones on that side. Let's come over to the side here. Running my eye up, there's a branch that comes down through here and it's actually got a little bit of light reflecting off it. So that could be nice to bring in a precision eraser. If you've got one, then I come up a bit more. I can see another one following its general shape. So being willing to put in just a little bit of erratic movement to get something that looks natural. This one's got some clumps of pine needles, we really need to get away from looking at these as individual needles or individual leaves. It's very much the same as when you're drawing fur. When you're drawing hair, we need to remove ourselves from that and we need to try and see just the shapes that we're seeing. I'm going to run out of room at the edge of my rectangle here. It's okay. So there's quite a dark shape joined to this branch. I'm trying to see that as a shape and then I'm just adding some texture in that shape. There are some scattered textures in here too. Branches that are a little bit further back, a little clumps on that one, and then we're getting over to this big or wider trunk. Can you see these ones come down into the grass here? This one seems to be behind the grass. It is the harder pencil first to put it in, then I can use the darker pencil. Darker bits softer. And sometimes you don't want that soft marks where the hard one is quite nice on the edge. Then we've got this one here which has some light coming across it. It's dark down the bottom, also starting behind the grass. The fades out a bit where there's some light coming across. I think maybe it's like a flare the camera and then be dark at the top again. Let's have a look and see what's happening with branches on this one. There's not a lot till we get further up and it shares some branches between this trunk and this trunk. The tree doesn't actually share branches, but in the image it does, putting in the branches first, following them with my eye, adding in whatever shapes I can see, even just some scribbles sometimes if it's appropriate, especially back here. There's not a lot happening and it's a bit paler, it's a bit lighter. I can afford to just put a few scribbles in there. You might think when you're drawing it and your face is really up close and you're looking, you might think it looks like nothing. But you can see from what's on the screen, it starts to take on the appearance of what you want it to from a distance. All artworks are viewed from a distance. Most of them, I think that's the way we need to be looking at our artwork as well from a distance. Now there's something very dark in here. It's just going to give an edge to my page. Definitely need to sharpen my pencil shortly. I'm actually going to just color most of that in a light gray and then put in the dark at the top, which could be a tree sticking out. I think it is just going to sharpen my pencil a little bit. Now, these soft ones tend to break very easily. I usually just sharpen them, not all the way, or if I want to sharpen it further, I won't jam this into the pencil sharpener just because that's how you break them. Sometimes they're already broken on the inside. I'm putting it in, then pulling it back a little bit and using the blade of the pencil sharpener to sharpen it. But especially if they've been dropped, they will be broken on the inside, very hard to sharpen because the lead just keeps falling out of them. There's not really much you can do about that, but you can use the sandpaper. If you've got some lead sticking out, then you can use sandpaper to sharpen it. 12. Project: The Foreground: Moving along, I might go on and do the foreground area. And then I'll speed up doing these ones so you can do them in your own time. The process is going to be just the same as these ones here. There's some bigger darker shapes around here in this area where there's just a little bit of light showing through. That's really all you need to be aware of that one. The foreground. We're going to go back to our willow charcoal. We want to keep all this area light. If it's like mine, you'll have some smudges in there, which is nice because we want it to look soft. I'm leaving this light area and then shade and everything else, even just this texture that I'm getting from the willow charcoal is really nice and that might be all you want to do, especially if you're getting tired and you want to break, you know? I mean, that kind of looks like like grass, right? Smatch mine out a little bit. And then I'm going to use my hard pencil and bring in some of these shadows. And the reason I'm using the hard one is just because I have more control. But I'm going to use it quite lightly. I want control because I want to have them move across the top of that plane, that lighter part. And then they angle slightly differently as they come down, they start to straighten up a little bit more. It just shows the curve of the landscape there. You could use a blending stump here if you want them nice and soft. Definitely need to go a little bit darker, but don't have to go as dark as they are in the photo. They're not the same darkness all the way through, just because there's some clumps and things start to put those clumps in as well. This one here, you can't see much of the shadow until it gets over that hump, and then it's quite strong, comes out and gets bigger as it comes closer to us. All these rules about things being smaller in the distance and bigger in the foreground. Lighter in the distance and darker and sharper in the foreground. They apply to everything. Even these shadows, be careful, you're not over blending. You definitely need some dark in there still. Just like pencil, you might need to come back in with your charcoal and do a little bit more over at the top. Then this one here comes out and you can't really see a lot of it. That's given the some form and given the whole thing some depth. Now that we've got these shadows coming forward, we just need to make sure that this front plane of the grassy area is a little bit clearer. And what I mean by the front front plane is you see this section here is more like a slope. Whereas the section above it, that lighter area, is more like the flat land. That's what we want to show, the difference between the top and the side of that area of landscape. We could bring a little bit of darker in here. Actually, I'm going to go back to, I'm going to stick with the hard charcoal pencil. Because we're in the foreground, we can afford to have more detail. The willow charcoal might just be a little bit soft. I'm putting in this darker part here because that shows the ridge. All of this here is quite gray. I get the feeling the grass is going that way a little bit. I'm moving my pencil that way. We've got some clumps quickly rendered with scribbly shapes. Up this dark part here, we could create a little bit more definition. You can choose where the eye goes to. It's going to go to anywhere with texture, It's going to go to anywhere with contrast. Put some contrasts in here and be a bit more careful with the marks, it's going to create more detail. I'm looking at the shapes that I can see there. Each one's got a light top and then a darker bottom part to it. But in saying that it's not white, it's like a light gray. Okay, just about there, you put a few grassy marks in here. Moving up into the light areas, very light. Touch with my pencil. I want to draw the whole strand of grass because it's so light at the top. The grasses are almost white in the photograph, but I can show the bottom of them. That's where there's going to be some more shadow, the same over here. But I mean, I can choose to keep this loose because I might not want to draw people to the edge of the page. If we want to show the parts in a bit more detail, we could bring some dark coming down from our dark area that will create the negative spaces between the grass. Hopefully you can see that a bit better there. It's got to join up to a dark space, but then you can just, with very light pressure, flip down a little bit, create some of those gaps in between the grasses. And then I just got to join up the dark again and try and keep them flicking in different directions so that it looks natural. Maybe a little bit flicking up from underneath here. I'm looking at values, it's a little bit darker around this trunk and there's no white really except for that one long ridge. It's a darker part comes along here that I've missed as well. Maybe that's given you enough to go on with. I'm going to do a little bit more in the foreground here with these clumps now, we don't want them to look uniform. Even these ones here are looking a little bit too uniform for my liking. You could give them a bit of a blur if you want to, but just be aware that because it's in the foreground, we don't want it to be too blurry. But that might just soften things off a little bit or just be aware that we don't need to do every one of them. If you try to join them all up as they are in the photo, you might end up with something that looks strange. Unless you're drawing each one exactly as it is in the photo. We're taking more of a pattern approach. What's the pattern? You've got dark shapes, light shapes, and the dark shapes. The light shapes and the shapes. Sometimes they join up a little bit. It's almost like a pattern like this, but a little bit more irregular than that. And you've got dark, dark, dark, dark a little bit. Don't do that. That might showing you that might help you see the patterns a bit more clearly in the photo. I'm not even worrying if they don't match up too much. But these shadows could be markers. They could be useful for finding those clumps that you want to put in there. Definitely don't need to do over everything As soon as we get, as soon as we get in. Some of them, it fills in the rest of the space with those same marks. Each one of these clumps I think is like a mound of grass. You could play around with that, to have a little bit of grass coming out of them. Very wary about telling people to draw the grass, because sometimes it does just end up looking like lots and lots of long strokes and loses the naturalness. Anyway, moving on, I'm going to go ahead and do these. If I think of anything else, then I will tell you after I've done those. But otherwise just carry on on your own. I just thought of something else there. I'm just gonna put in a little bit more. Willow charcoal there, softened off. It's quite soft in that area. 13. Project: Summary: I hope you enjoyed this one. I think it's really fun to use charcoal in this way. If you haven't done that before, you might feel a little bit out of control. You might feel like this isn't working. It doesn't look like a tree. If I look up close, this doesn't look anything like a tree. But hopefully it looks like a tree to you from a distance that foreground and background and we've got this ridge happening. There's lots of things that you can learn from with this particular photograph, which is why I chose it. Even if you've ended up with trees that you don't like, hopefully you've at least got that sense of distance, which is the most important thing in a landscape drawing, I think, or distance and texture. We've got both of those. We've got the very bright foreground, the light hitting here, and then we've got our mid ground. The far distance is lighter than these other dark areas here. Sometimes it could be a bit confusing. I'm saying, well, it should be lighter in the background. But we've got this light foreground here. Well, that's light because it's lit by the sun. It's a bit, it's a different concept than the sense of distance. If you think about things that are shadowy, they usually feel like they're getting lower down and things that are lighter, getting higher up. So there's a whole lot of things going on is what I'm trying to say. But our focus is getting that sense of distance and also the different textures. I'd love to know how you found the drawing and whether you struggled with anything or whether you enjoyed it. There is something about charcoal that I quite like because you can smudge it, but some people really, really hate it. And that's fine. You don't have to ever do charcoal again if you don't want to. But maybe you've discovered a love for it as well and the different things that can do. You can do quite different things to regular pencil. We've got the contrast, we've got the smudginess. It's all a lot of fun. 14. Project: Filling In The Gaps: There's a lot of dark things happening over this side. My strategy for this is to just find the shape and then shade it in with scribble. It's maybe a lazy strategy because we're getting towards the end of the drawing, but it works. I don't want you to be spending hours and hours on this. Getting it perfect. It's just a good one to have a go at some of the textures and getting our lights in our darks, in the right places, and using those different types of charcoal. Hopefully you can take these skills and apply them to something that you really enjoy in terms of a subject, maybe a landscape that is important to you. More interest is filling in some of these darker shapes in here. What I'm looking for now is any areas where there's light showing through, a lot of it is dark at the moment, I still got a little bit too much white space. I'm going through these white spaces and bringing a little bit of scribble into them. Still joining to the dark spaces. Getting a little bit lost. Like this one and this one here are big strong spaces and they actually need to have things coming into them. Just a little bit to show that there's leaves and pine needles and little bits of branches and stuff like that coming in. Maybe a few more branches for structure there. This is a good example of how difficult it is to get rid of the charcoal pencils. I accidentally brought my tree down into that light area with a very dark stroke of that pencil, and I can get rid of it with this, but I lose a little bit of the freshness of that white space. But that's okay. I'm pretty much finished. I've still got this glaringly white space in here. And that just needs to be tied up a little bit with hard charcoal pencil. Have a little bit more control. Then the last thing you might do is to really bring out that light area is to go back into the background. I've got some areas here. These ones might be a little bit tall, actually, now that I look at them. But I can bring in my medium charcoal pencil or a soft charcoal pencil. Really bring in some darks. Be careful not to have a hard line here. Scribble is really useful, but that's going to bring out that light area. When I say make it dark, we don't want it to be as dark as these trees here. That's probably a little bit too dark what I've done because we want to keep that sense of distance. But there's also some areas here where I've got a lot of light and there isn't any light. I can just go through and quickly put in some tree shapes. Then maybe using the patty eraser if they feel a little bit too forced or too obvious that patty eraser is really good for smudging. If you're using the charcoal pencil, see with the willow charcoal, it just pulls it right out. But if we've got charcoal pencil down there, especially the dark charcoal pencil, you get some nice values. If you smudge something and you don't like it, don't try and just keep rubbing it out. It's just not going to work. It's going to bring out the fibers of the pencil. You'll be able to see the texture and everything and look a little bit ugly. The better thing is just to go over and add more definition. These are starting to look like trees now with a light side and a darker side, which is quite nice even though I don't have all the branches and things on them. These ones here could definitely be a little bit, just a little bit darker and denser down the bottom. Bring out that light ridge definitely in here. Because I have nothing in there. I think it's just that this tree should come out a little bit further. But I could also just throw in another tree shape in the back there. No one's going to know a little bit of a smudge. Try not to lose my willow charcoal. If there's anywhere where you can definitely see light hitting a tree on the side of a tree, smudging, It's nice to bring that out. Just go through that background and just have a look at your values, what should be darker. That one's quite light, but there's definitely a dark one in here somewhere. If you've lost detail, that's probably the hardest thing to bring back. Because the more you smudge, the less detail you have. But you might be able to just get rid of some of your value and then use a very dark pencil. That could be a way of bringing back some detail over here. We've got that pattern where there's a little bit of light shining through. But I'm just going to darken it up a little bit. I'm leaving some of the layer underneath to show through that creates the idea that there's light hitting the leaves. Some shrubbery or bush or something back there. I don't think it's a pine tree. Oh, keep seeing more to do now. Just when I thought I was finished. 15. How To Use Fixative Spray: So I'm just going to go and fix these drawings with some fixative. This is fixative here, and I've got a couple of different brands. I'm only going to use one brand. This one is more of a student brand and this one is more of a professional brand. Now, you probably won't have access to the ones that I have access to just because we're in different countries. If you're in a different country to me, if you're in New Zealand or Europe, even then, the Schenker one is really good. It's made in Germany and this one I find one coat will do the track. This one it takes about three coats. I'm not sure why exactly. I just know this one's better. This one is more expensive as well. So this is $50 which is a lot of money for a fixative. The most important thing is that you do this in a well ventilated area. If you're sensitive to these things or you're concerned, then you might also want to wear a mask. I'm going to take mine outside and spray it. Definitely don't spray anywhere close to where you're sleeping or eating or anything like that. So maybe a garage might be okay, but it's flammable as well. So keep that in mind. Make sure you don't have the fixative too close, so if you're spraying really close, you're going to get wet on there. And we don't want that, we don't want puddles or drops or anything like that. We want it to be about 30 centimeters away or a foot away. And we want it to be on a slight angle. Our paper, That's just because if you have a flat, you might end up with too much. If you have it up like this, a lot of the fixative is going to fall down. Before it gets to the drawing, you have it on an angle, you're getting the best of both. It's coming out and then it's falling down. But it's not just like piling on, if that makes sense. You're having an angle. We do one coat, then we do another coat. The first one will go across and do not this close, about this far away. And then the next one will go up and down. Then that's it. If you're using a cheaper one, you might find you have to do that three or four times, letting it dry in between. Right. Let's go do that. I'm going to take it outside. That's the best place to do it. Just brought you outside here. It's quite cold. It's sunny and very bright. It apologies if I'm squinting a little bit. I've put this up against this pole here at about a 45 degree angle. If you're worried about getting fixative on anything that you're leaning this up against the side of your house or something, then I just put a board behind it just to be careful. And then I'm going to give this a really good shake. I'm just going to go across maybe four strokes back and forward, and then up and down. Across, across and down, and then up and down and across. I show you what I mean. I'm going to start outside the page and I'm going to be about a foot away, or maybe 30 centimeters away. If you haven't used the fixture for a while, you might want to just test it on something to make sure you're not getting big droplets. So it should be a really fine mist. I'm going to start from here and go 1234, and then we go up and down, well, down and up 1234. If it's windy, it's not windy today, which is great. But if it's windy, you've got to make sure the fix of the spray is actually getting on to your charcoal drawing. It shouldn't be wet. I mean, a little bit wet, but it shouldn't be puddles or shiny. And when it's had time to dry, then you could just do a touch test, see if anything's coming off. And then if it's still coming off, you might want to do a couple more coats. So again, across and then let it dry, and then maybe one more. Now, this is a sketch book, It doesn't really matter. All it's going to rub off on is the opposite page. So I'm not too worried about it, but if it was say, a commission piece, then you probably want to get a really decent fixative so that you don't have to worry about it and you probably want to frame it as well. When you finish using the fixative, you want to clear the nozzle. And that's because if there's fixative in there, it's going to potentially block it. It'll dry and you'll get the droplets which we don't want, we don't want big fat drops of wet fixative. It'll just leave marks on your drawing. Once you finish, I don't need to shake it, but once you finish, you're going to hold it upside down and you're just going to give it a spray until it changes. Sound That means that's just pushing out air. Then you'll be ready for the next time. Using fixative does come with a warning because what it will do is darken up your values. And in something like this, it doesn't matter. And I actually don't mind it at all because usually when I'm using charcoal, I'm wanting something that's quite dramatic and moody. Anyway, so the darks are going to go darker, the grays are going to go darker and it's going to increase the contrast and the depth. But if you are drawing something like a portrait and you know, really delicate skin tones and fair skin tones, then adding the fixative may make quite a big difference. It's going to bring out any small light marks as well, so even texture of the paper will show up more, the little dots of white in between your marks. It might also change those really light skin tones quite dramatically as well. That's just something to be aware of. Thanks very much for joining me, for coming outside with me doing something a little bit different at the end here. I hope you found it useful, maybe a little bit challenging with those fast sketches as well. It's always good to be challenged if you've got any questions about charcoal or about using fixative, or if there's any subject that you want to see a tutorial on in charcoal, do let me know and I will do my best to bring that to you. Thanks again for watching and I'll see you on the next one.