Exploring Charcoal Textures: For the Intermediate Enthusiast

1. Welcome!: Hello friends, welcome to exploring charcoal textures for the intermediate enthusiasts. My name is Diane. I am an art teacher and an artist, and I've been teaching for about 18 years. I love teaching. I love helping people on their artistic journey. I love taking my own artistic journeys. And today we're going to take one thing together. I hope you're excited. As excited as I am. We are going to be copying this reference photo which you will find downloadable and principal once you've joined the class. And we're going to be creating an enlarged version of it in charcoal. So some of the skills you're going to gain today are scaling, working from a smaller image and enlarging it to really any size you want. But today we're just going to be going a little bit larger. You're going to be doing lots with charcoal. So what you're gonna be value matching, trying to get the values or lightness and darkness is in the reference photo. To match your drawing, you're going to be working with lots of natural textures, bird feathers, the sharpness and hardness of the beak, the shiny little, aye, the motion blur of the wings. This class is not meant for the absolute beginner. You can certainly try it if you'd like. But I highly recommend having some experience with charcoal under your belt before you begin this class. I have two other charcoal classes that are for the absolute beginner that you could try. Or any charcoal experience you have from any school, any teacher, or maybe you're self-taught. Just as long as you have some sort of experience behind you, it will really help you in feeling successful with this class. And it is also not meant for the seasoned professional who probably already has all these skills. So it's somewhere in-between. I hope you enjoy it. Feel free to set. You're seeing light your candle, grab your cup of tea, your glass of water. Have your nice flat surface. You're lighting is good and get ready to have a good time. And let's get drawing. 2. Materials: So we're going to need just a few materials before we get started, which are available at any art store or you may just have a lot of this laying around the house. So we're going to need some paper to draw on nine by 12 is a good minimum size because we're gonna be drawing an eight by ten frame. You'll need a couple of sheets, one to draw your finished picture on, and one for scratch so that you can test materials and do some other stuff which we'll get into later. You're going to need your glossy photo of the reference photo printed out, preferably on photo paper because it helps the values to pop out and make it easier to see textures. You'll also need a black and white, or sorry, they're both black and white. He'll need a photocopy of that picture or you can print out a second copy of it onto just playing copy paper so that we can draw and make marks on top of this sheet. You will need a pencil for drawing with an eraser for erasing the pencil sharpener in case you need to sharpen it, you'll need an eraser pencil. This is often an optional thing, but for this class in particular, I feel like it's required because there's gonna be a lot of really fine precise erasing involved. And this is an eraser in the shape of a pencil, so it's excellent for that exact thing. You will need a charcoal pencil, which is just regular charcoal, but in a pencil form for a skinny little details, you will need blending stump. This is just a really, really tightly rolled up piece of paper that's pointed on either end. This one has been used, which is why part of it is smudgy and black. And we use these for blending the charcoal when our fingers are just a little bit too large and not specific enough, we have that nice point. You will need. We might need a sandpaper pad to sharpen your charcoal on. You can also sharpen pencils on those, but it's a little slower. You may or may not need this, so that's optional. You will need for sure two kinds of charcoal besides the charcoal pencil, we have vine charcoal, which comes in this little plastic sleeves at some art stores, is a very common way it's packaged. And there's just these very thin little sticks. They're very light and willingly and they color very lightly and blend really beautifully. They erase beautifully. So we're gonna do a lot of our initial laying down of values on with that. Then you'll need some compressed charcoal. These are square little sticks. These go on much, much darker and they do arrays, but not quite as easily. So we usually use those. When we're done with the vine charcoal in the picture. You will need some cotton balls, or at least one cotton ball, maybe more. This is for what we call toning the paper. We're just going to rub a very light layer of charcoal on the paper before we begin adding other charcoal, will need a kneaded eraser. So this almost behaves like a piece of really dense playdough. You can just pull it apart, hence the word needed. And you can see there's some dark parts and some light parts, the dark parts of the dirtier ones. So whenever you're about to use it, it's a good practice to stretch it and get a lighter part showing and then you can rub it on the paper to erase larger areas. You will need a ruler for drawing our frame and our grid on the initial picture. And this is optional, but it's nice to have just a damp rag nearby because your hands are gonna get pretty messy. So it's nice to have something to kind of wipe them on. And this is also optional but recommended for the very end of the picture to have workable, fixative. This is something we spray onto your finished charcoal. And I will walk you through how to do that in order to prevent a lot of smudging. And it also allows for you to work back into the picture if you so desire at any point. Lastly, you will need a small piece of scrap paper with a tiny hole cut into it. And that is for identifying how light or dark and area is. And I'll go through that with you when we get to it. But for right now, those are all the materials we need. So we can get to our drawing. 3. Preparation: Alright, so now that we have walked through all the materials you're going to need, let's talk about setting up for success. So first be in an area that you don't mind getting a little dusty charcoal does create a lot of fine black dust. Number to have a large flat surface, a table is ideal, or if you just have a drawing board or something like that, that's fine. Just as long as it's flat and free of bumps and things like that. And the third thing is to make sure you have a frustration, free or frustration less experience. Do not tell yourself when you're drawing that you will fix any mistakes you're making when you get to the charcoal. Because by the time you get to the charcoal, you're going to be following your drawing lines very closely. So take the time you need during the drawing process. Be patient. Take deep breaths. If you're the type of person who likes to get things done quickly and really take the time to get it done right? You're giving yourself a huge gift. That way when you get to the charcoal, you will be all set up for success. If you care, some people could give a flying fig about accuracy. And if you're one of those people, more power to you, you know yourself. So just wanted to give you that little tidbit. Before we get going. With that, we're ready to draw. So let's get started. 4. Drawing 1st Grid & Frame: So for this section you will only need your copy paper reference photo. You're drawing paper, your pencil in your ruler. So first thing we're gonna do is put a grid on the hummingbird photo. So just use your ruler and you'll see that the bottom edge is 7 ". So just line it up against the bottom edge pretty close and then make a mark at exactly halfway at three-and-a-half inches. And then we're going to divide it again in half so that we have for equal boxes. So we'll make a mark at one and three-quarters and five and a quarter. Same thing on the top edge. 3.5, one and three-quarters, five and a quarter. And then we'll turn it and do the same thing on the sides, but the sides are only 6 " wide. So halfway it will be 3 ", half of that will be one-and-a-half, and half of this side will be three-and-a-half excuse me, four-and-a-half. Same thing on the other side. The reason we're doing this is to create a grid so that we can scale this image up. This is a very common way of scaling an image up or down in art is just to make a grid. And you can really do as many boxes as you want. But for such a small picture, four boxes Each way is plenty should be. We connect all the marks. I'm not sure how well this is gonna show up on the film, so I will go over it with a marker so that you can see it when we get into the drawing. Alright, so there we have our grid. And now we're going to draw the frame on the large piece of paper. So start by measuring out 8 " along the bottom edge. Let me see how. That's right. This is 12 ", which means I have an inch on either end, which means I have enough room for the entire width of the ruler to fit on the bottom. So I'm using this to my advantage right now. I'm lining up the ruler on the, on the bottom edge of the paper so that I know that my ruler is straight. And then I'm going to center it. So that 8 " falls right in here. I'm going to make a mark for the eight and a mark for the other. So actually I'll just draw it, draw the edge. I've got a chipped ruler here. Hopefully yours is straight, so I'm going to move mine over a little bit so that I have a straight edge to finish that 8 ". And now I'm gonna go up ten on the other side, starting at the corner and just making sure my ruler is really super parallel to this edge here. So that's 10 ". Draw a line. And then I'll do the same thing on the top, which is now the bottom since I flipped it. Make my rulers to prepare. Oh wait, I can't do that because I have to make sure it's at that corner. So now this is going to be a bit of guesswork. I'm just guessing that my ruler is parallel to the edge of the page because I can't see it. It's hidden under the ruler. But I'm going to line up my 1 " and now I'm gonna do my nine inch and that way I have not, I don't have that chip to worry about. But before I draw, I'm going to see just using my pencil tip and my thumbnail, does this space equal this space? Not quite. I was a little off there, so I'm gonna make a mark. That way. I know that this is going to be parallel to the bottom of the page. And now I can just connect this last slide. This should be exactly 10 ". And just to double-check, it is, okay. Okay. There's our frame. 5. Drawing the Grid on Paper: Alright, now we're going to draw our grid on our drawing paper. So same process we did with the hummingbird photo, except now we have a bigger image. So we're dividing our space, our tenants space in half. So we're going to mark five and two-and-a-half and seven-and-a-half. Same thing on the other side. Five two-and-a-half, seven-and-a-half. And then we're going to rotate and do our eight inch size. We're going to divide the four inch mark two inch and six inch. Again, four to six. So with this grid, it's very important that you draw extremely lightly because we don't want the grid to show through on our final picture. Just barely let the pencil drag across the page just enough for you to be able to see it. Once we're done with the drawing, we're going to erase what's leftover, the grid. You want it to be very easy to erase. And definitely don't press hard enough to leave a dense in your paper because that will definitely show through brilliantly in your final picture. If you happen to make a mistake and press too hard on the grid, don't despair. You can either just do it again right now with a fresh sheet of paper, or you can finish your drawing and then tape it to a fresh sheet of paper, tape it to a window in bright daylight and trace it onto the new sheet of paper. You can do that for any reason. Actually, if you ever make a mistake, you can just retrace it onto a fresh sheet of paper. There we go. We are done with our grid on our paper and we're ready to start the drawing. 6. Measuring for the Body: So now we're going to start with the drawing of Hummingbird onto our paper. So each of these squares on this grid equates to one of the squares on this grid. So you can see this bird is smaller on a smaller frame. Our bird is going to be larger proportional to the frame we have. And I'm going to show you how to do that. So we'll just start by adding the body of the bird. I'm going to draw directly onto this reference so you can see exactly what I'm measuring. You can choose to do that or not. It's up to you. If it's easier, that's fine. But I'm going to draw very dark so that you can see my lines. And I'm just going to draw the first shape, which we're gonna do kind of pointy corners for and then round up, not paying attention to the wings right now. Or the head. Just kind of drawing in the body as that shape has that first shape. I went a little too inside there, so I'm going to go out again. There we go. That's gonna be our first shape. And then we'll add the head and the wings and the tail and all that. So we'll start with the body. And what you do is just pick a point. I'm going to start here on the back of the neck and notice where it is inside this box. So it's a little higher than halfway up and very close to the edge. So I'm going to go say halfway up is here. I'm gonna make a mark there. That's where that corner is gonna be. And then this corner, it looks like it's a little further over than halfway across the box. So something like here. And did I make it high enough or low enough? I can use my pencil is a tool here to see. So I'm using, if you've taken my classes before, you will have seen me use the pencil as a tool to measure. You can use the tip of the pencil and your thumbnail to see how big is spaces. And then compare it to a different space. So I'm comparing it to the top here. I can see it's a little bit lower than halfway. Let's see if that's about right. That's about right. Something else you can do is look at the angle between two points. So I'm just looking at how these two relate to one another and seeing does that look about right? You can even use your pencil. And that helps you, your eye to see the angle better because it's elongated. And then move it over and just see if it stays, if it's the same and that's about the same. So I think I'm good there. Now I'm gonna go down to the next point which is in this box, pretty close to the bottom of the page or excuse me, not the page. The box about right there. I'm pretty close to the corner or the side butt a little bit closer to this edge than that one. So I'm going to do that, move it over. I'd also like to emphasize I am drawing dark points here and I'm going to be drawing dark lines because I want you to be able to see, but make sure you're drawing lightly because again, you don't want a line like that to show through on your final picture. So this corner, it looks like it's pretty much straight across from this one. And probably about a third of the way into this box. So right about there. If you're unsure, just check it. Use your pencil measuring tool that fits into their 12 almost three times, but a little bit more than three. So it should be a little bit more than a third. Oh, wow. And I'm exactly at a third, so I'm glad I checked because I should make that stick out a little bit further. This also assumes that you want a very accurate drawing. I went a little too far there, so I'm gonna go right there and try again. 12. A little bit more than a half. That middle one looks like it's about right. So the more time you take doing this, the more accurate your drawing will be to this photo. But for something like g, Where does that feather end? That doesn't really matter. If I left those dots in either of those places, that would have been completely fine, nobody will ever care. But what you want to pay attention to is something like where the eye is, how big the eye is, how long each wing is, where the wings are positioned on the body because that's the kind of stuff that's going to stand out as an incorrect or something's up with that bird. By the time you're done with the drawing, you can kinda pick and choose what you want to be accurate with and what you feel it's okay too. Fudge a little bit, or you can be accurate with the whole thing if you want your picture. So you can do however you like. I'm going to measure this one because it seems like it's halfway, but oh, I'm wrong. It's a little bit lower than halfway. So I'm glad I looked. So I'm gonna put that mark looks like about there. Let me see. Yeah, little lower than halfway and very close to the edge. And then it goes straight over and about right there. It'll tilt up into that next mark, maybe a little closer. Just looking at the steepness of the angle of that line, it looks like it needed to move over a little bit. 7. Drawing the Body: So now we have all of our corners marked and we can just draw our line. So I'm just paying attention to the direction of the lines going cute goes in a little bit here and then quickly goes out for the belly of the bird. Down into that dot. Again, make sure you're drawing very lightly. Straight over. This is going to curve. It goes straight at first and then curr is at the end into that a little bit more. Then this will go over and up and then connect. And we have our hummingbird body. 8. Drawing the Head: Now we can start getting into the head since we finished our body. So we've already noted already know where the head starts because we have the top of the neck. So let's go to the highest point. Actually it gets the highest point of the head would be just above this grid line. It looks like about right there. So I'm just going to make a little mark. The outermost corner of the face where the beak begins. Looks like it's about here. And I'm gonna look at making sure my reference photo is very parallel to my paper. I'm going to look at the angle between those two marks and seems a little steep. So I'm gonna move this mark over just a little bit. Try that again. That looks about right. And I'm also going to check the space. That space fits into this grid box once, twice, three times, four times, 4.5 times. So this space should fit into here four-and-a-half times 1234. Wow, Okay, Close enough. And now we can do the back of the head where that hits this grid line is about here. It looks like this space is slightly smaller than that one, which we have. And then the top edge of the beak kinda goes up to the right. From this point, it looks like about right there. So once you have all those and you can draw in the curvy lines connecting them. This goes in a little bit, bulges out a little bit. Then we have a very round top of the head and into the neck. 9. Drawing the Wings: So now we can move on to the wings. We already know where the top corner of this right-wing starts, since that's that corner of the body. So we're gonna go all the way out to the very tip of the wing, which comes almost to the edge of the page. And it's a little closer to this top grid line than the side. So if I go out a little bit and up a little bit, it looks like it's right about there. And then it connects to the body a little ways down from this top grid line. It looks like maybe about a quarter of the way down. Again, remembering that your space is here should all be smaller than your spaces here, but they should be proportional. So if this is a quarter of that box and this should be a quarter of that box. And let's just check it out. 123. That's almost a quarter, just a little bit shy of a quarter. 123. And so is that, so we're good. Now we can draw, there's no more real corn. Oh, actually, you know what? Let's make marks for the top and bottom of the wings at this grid line, since they touch a grid line, those are great places to make marks and that'll just help guide our lines since it's such a large shape. So that one's a little ways down, this one, this space seems a little bit shorter than that one. So I'll make a mark about here, making sure that space is a little shorter than that one. And then I'm just going to look at it and imagine the shape. I think that will work. So now I'm going to draw. The wings are blurry. So this is an approximation. It can be just a guide. It doesn't have to be exact. The beak or the eye or something that's very precise. I'm going to make my line purposely just a little wobbly there because it's not perfectly straight. Now we'll do the other wing, that one's going to start right above this corner of the throat and it ends up, looks like just a little bit lower than this wing is on the right side. So if I went straight across and down just a hair, probably about there. But again, I can check the spacing since I'm unsure. One too, just a little bit less than a third of the way down this box. 12, That's exactly a third. So I'm gonna go just a hair higher. Even though that original mark also would have been completely fine. And then the very tip of the wing comes ends up right on this grid line. It looks like about right there. And I can check the spacing there too, just to see 1234. So this space is just a little bit less than a quarter of this space. 1234, actually, I need to move it in a little bit. I went to small, 1234, that's still a little bit small. Let's try that. 1234. There we go. Now I'm just a little bit shy of a quarter of that box. And now I can draw my shape. Looks like it bows down a little bit right there. Little bit more. And we're set with the wings. 10. Drawing the Tail: So now we're going to get onto the tail. It looks like the beginning of the tail falls on the body about halfway between where the wing touches the body and that corner. So about halfway between these two, I'm going to make a mark and then it goes down, kinda has an angle there. The top corner of that angle. It looks like it's maybe a little lower than halfway down the box? Yes, it is. So that looks about right. And then how far into the box does it go? Something else cool you can do is if you have a space that you think might be similar to another space you already have, you can just compare them rather than having to do 43 across each time. I'm going to see this space and how it compares to this one up here. It's just about the same on my picture. I can take that space and move it down and make a mark. And then I know that's about where that top corner will be. The bottom corner is going to go at an angle down just a little ways out from it and it's close enough to where I am. I'm just eyeballing it. Then we have this corner where the tails changes direction, which is very close to the top grid line about right there. And let's check out this space compared to this one. That's the same. So this space equals this space. I'm just going to double-check that because I think my finger moved. Yeah. No, that's okay. Then it goes into the body right where the body and this grid line meets. So that's easy. So now that we have all of those, we can just draw our shape. We're just sort of connecting the dots as we have been the whole time. This is going to be round or at the top and then go flat. That's around or at the bottom. This is a little bit wiggly, just a little round on the way up. It's going to come down and connect with. It. Seems like that needs to be a bit rounder right there. And just looking at the drawing now it feels like this is a little bit too steep, so I'm going to make it go a little bit more to the left. Again, that doesn't really matter. It's going to be blurry anyway. But just for the sake of being more exact, for the sake of this lesson, we'll do that. Alright, and we're done with the tail. 11. Drawing the Eye: So now we're going to get onto the drawing of the eye. The eye is kind of floating in the middle of the head, so we have to measure the spaces around it as well as the size of the eye to make sure we're placing it correctly. So I'm going to use my pencil measuring technique where I'm going to measure from the back of the head to the back of the eye and see how big that spaces. And I'll compare it to this one again. It's about the same, so I'm gonna take that and put it over here and make a mark. And that's where the back of the eye will be. Make that a little darker so you can see it. Now I'm going to see I can either measure the space of the eye itself or the space in front of it. I'll measure the eye itself and I'll compare it to the space behind it. It looks like just about to yeah. It's exactly half of this space. So the front of the I will be here. Conveniently or not conveniently actually because it's obscured a little bit, it's right on the grid lines. So for the drawing of the eye, that's helpful. But for the drawing of this marking in the front, we're going to use our photo paper copies so we can see a little better. For the bottom of the eye. It looks like it's gonna be about here. And the top is slightly higher than the bottom or further away from that line. And it's very tiny, but I'm just going to check it. Yeah, the top is indeed bigger. And I'm also sorry, the top part of the eye above the grid line is bigger than the bottom. I'm also going to measure the height of the total i and compare it to the width because it looks like a circle. It really is. It's just a hair smaller than the width. But really if you just made a circle, that would be fine. I'm comparing the two. That looks good. Now I'm going to switch over to my photo paper reference so I can see a clear view of the shape of the eye because it's not a perfect circle. It's a little bit rounder in the front there. Kinda comes to a teeny point, goes flat right there and down to that point. And then touches the point and kinda goes flat up again. And then around or over the top. I'll get rid of extra marks. Okay, so there's our I. And then for this little shape in front of it, this sort of rounded triangle, we're going to just draw a basic outline for that as well. So I'm going to see how long that is compared to the eye itself and it's about the same length. So again, you can see we're doing this little rounded triangle shape right here in front of the eye. So I know it's about the same length as the eye itself. So I'm going to take that length again, move it over, lining my thumbnail up with my I am putting my mark right there. I'm also noticing that that corner is closer to the top of the head than the chin, quite a bit closer. So I'm going to see how big that space is right above the corner. And I am being very particular here. You do not have to be this particular. I'm just showing you in case you care. I'm a little bit low. But oops. Yeah, it does. The corner of it does fall just above that grid lines. So I'm gonna, I'm gonna move this up just a tiny bit. And then I will draw just a rounded triangle. So it dips in a bit right there, rounds into the bottom of the eye. And then it looks like it starts about here on the top of the eye. Something like that. And we're good. 12. Drawing the Beak: So now we're going to start working on the beak. Basic drawing of that. We know where it starts. It's going to end just above this point. That was kinda the edge of the face, but the beat goes just a little bit higher than that. Then the tip of the beak comes out of fairways into this box, but very close to this bottom grid line. So I'm guessing about right there, but I'll check it. So how far out? 12. Almost three. Not quite 12. That's exactly three. So I need to make it stick out further. One to maybe not quite that far. To about right there. Yes. And I can also check that against a couple of anything else I want, but it's convenient to check it against the tip of the wing just to see that angle because it happens to be right there. So I'm going to line my pencil up with the tip of the beak and the tip of the wing. And that's lined up from my eye. So it might be a little off from where you're looking at it, but you can align your pencil up with your beak tip and wing tip and then moving it over and just seeing how that compares. It's a little off angle wise. So let me check that against some other stuff. I'm gonna check this space and see how it compares. That space should be about the same as that one. So I'm a bit low there that might have accounted for part of it. Where those two meet. That's where the tip of the beak should be in theory. But let me check that angle again and see if that made any difference. And it did. It's not exact, but it's close enough for my personal taste so you can get as close as you want. Now that we have the corners, we can draw the beak very long and straight. Kinda bows up a little bit underneath though. I need to go higher with that so I can hit my mark. There we go. And then the top of the beak is gonna be a little rounded, the tip. I went, I went a little bit too low there to try that again. Go a bit higher. And then as it approaches the face, I'm going to aim for below that mark and then curve up at the last second right into it. Get rid of my mistakes. Make it a little bit rounder at the tip. And then there's also this extension of the B. It looks like an extension of it. It's sort of a marketing that will be easier to see in your ungraded version. Because again, the grid line goes right through it. And it looks like that ends up right next to the corner of that little triangle we just drew. So we can make a mark right about here. And get a better look at that. Kinda goes up straight right there. And then you can just loosely copy the shape down to the base. It's going to go into the beak. Looks like a little bit lower than halfway up the beak. And then it ends up right at the bottom, just kinda continuing into the face. Erase mistakes. And there we go. It looks like we're done with the beak. Oh, sorry. One more thing. We should draw the line between the dark and the light, which is going to be just slightly closer to the bottom than the top. So we'll do just that one, kind of straight curved lines, something like this and end up right in that marketing we just drew. There we go. 13. Drawing the Flower: Now we can get into the basic drawing of the flower. So it looks like that starts about halfway up this box on the left side. So I'll make a mark there. And it ends up a little higher than halfway on the right, on the bottom. And then the tip of the petal is very close to the edge of the page about ray here. And the tip of this petal is closer to the top corner there, little further away from the edge. Because like about there, the flower I'm going to be less particular about because flowers can be just fine being slightly off of the photo that we're copying, whereas we don't want them is placed the eye of the hummingbird, that will be very obvious. The right edge of the flower comes out almost halfway across this grid box. A little bit further, but not quite. So that's the basic shape there. And then what we're gonna do is kinda draw a dome and put flower petals within the dome. So this is, you can think of this draw lightly as well for drawing everything lightly. But it's sort of the case for the flower. That's going to be round go out and something like that just as a first step. Now we can the petals into it. Conveniently, the grid line happens to fall right in that split or these top divides from the bottom half. And then we have 123, maybe four or five petals on the bottom. The first one is the biggest. So I'm going to just cut in right about here. And then out. The second one is about the same size as the one next to it. But the one next to it is a little flatter and then it just sort of wiggles a little bit, something like that and dips. On the top. This is going to lean and go down slightly. Actually. Let me start with the biggest one. It's always best to start with biggest and go to smallest. It's just easier. So this is going to cut in a little bit, come down, go out, down over something like that. Then you can erase your original shape. If you would like to measure out each one of those petals using the same technique we did on the bird. Go right ahead. Because this is more of an intermediate class. I'm taking some liberties here. Kinda trusting that you've had a little bit of experience in your eye might be able to see these sizes and shapes without the measuring so much. And a flower is the perfect place to do that since flowers are very forgiving. So whatever is your pleasure, you can copy what I just did, or you can measure them out. Either way is fine. That's it for the flower. So we can move on now to details. 14. Drawing Markings & Details - Part 1: So now we can get onto detailing out the bird. We've got a very good basic format. We're not going to draw every single thing, especially since this is an intermediate class. Some of it is going to be left to our devices to fill in with charcoal. But we can certainly help ourselves along with some little aids here. So for the bottom of the body, we'll start there since that's the first shape we drew. I'm just going to draw kind of a sketchy little framework for the feathers. We're not going to draw in the toes. We'll do that with charcoal. So we're going to eliminate this very sharp edge and we're going to draw in the more organic forms of the feathers. You can see that the edge of the toe, the last toe, is just about halfway between these two corners. If I go about halfway between here and here, I know my feather is going to split right there. So we're just going to curve up and then draw out the sketchy little fluffy edges of that feather. And that's it. That's really all you need to do there. Then we'll erase the original line. Going to the wings. We do want to have these markings on the wings. So I'm going to see how big this black marking is on this wing. And I'll just compare it to this space that looks convenient. So it's the same length as the space between the body and this corner halfway up that black mark and goes into the body a little ways. So that means the outside will be about right there. And it looks like it pretty much hits this grid line right about there. And this is gonna be very loose or just guessing here because it's very blurry. So it's just a guideline for when we're drawing with the charcoal. So it'll go into the body, something like that. Not quite touch the top of the wing. Curve down. Backup to that dot, something like that. Then we can do some basic markings for the feathers. So if you want again, just like the flower, you can count them out. You can measure each one. That's fine. For our purposes. I'm just going to make a mark about in the middle where these two feathers meet. And I'm doing that. That's a really good trick when you have multiples of something to divide it in half. And then you just have to divide the top half by however many there are and divide the bottom half. And of course there are different sizes, so we'll take that into account as well. But it looks like 1234 are about the same size. And then there's this tiny one up here. So I'm going to start by making a mark for the tiny one and then just try to divide this space in quarters. That looks about right. And then and I'm not being exact, it is an organic form, so I don't want it to be 100% measured out. And I'm making the loops a little bit rounder on the right edge and a little flatter on the left. But as I come towards the left, there sort of evening out because this is where our focal point is. They're going to look more elongated here, straighter or more even here. And then as we come in, they're getting shorter and shorter. So now I can do the bottom part. This one, it looks like it comes just to the other side of this grid line. And then we've got a bunch of little ones, three bigger ones within the grid box, including the one I just drew oh, sorry. Yeah, I guess to two bigger ones. So it's gonna do something like that and that. And then these get very vague. So I'm not going to be too concerned with those. We'll just kind of let them trail off something like that. For the other wing, we can just draw a line where the top edge of the actual wing is because this mark is just, I think the motion blur. So the top edge of the actual wing is about halfway between here and here. And it's just going to disappear off the tip top of the wing right about there just a little ways before the tip of that, the actual tip of the wing. And it's pretty crisp and street little Concave dips down just a little bit right there. I'm not going to draw in the lines here because there's only two or three of them and there's so blurry and so well, the the top of them are Chris, but there are so in motion that I think it will be better to do those just in charcoal. So that's the first part of our markings and we can move on to the next. 15. Drawing Markings & Details - Part 2: Now we will finish up markings in details. We'll go on to the tail. So there's this larger white section of the tail and then the bottom black section, we're just going to mark out where that where they meet. So the white section, oops, I erased that. Looks like it starts inside the edge of the tail by a little bit. It goes down just below the grid line, this grid line here to about right there. And the corner of it looks like it's just a little ways in from the tail. So right about there. This is less obvious. On this site actually maybe we'll just make it kind of merge into that little corner because it sort of does that anyway. And then we'll just connect. So this is going to be around and then a little flatter. The rest of this is pretty vague. So we can just flush that out when we get to the charcoal part. For the neck. I don't know about you, but when I made my line, I made it almost a little bit rounded up, but it's really the opposite. The markings kind of round down. So I'm going to keep it in the same place, but I'm just going to change the curve of the line to go down and erase my top edge. And you can just adjust any lines you see that have that issue if they're just not quite right, go ahead and do that. In this section. We can add the back white patch on the eye. So that's gonna go it looks like about halfway between the I and the back of the head. Slightly closer to the eye than halfway. So not exactly halfway, right about there. Just below our grid line. My grid lines are starting to get very faint because I've been rubbing the oils on my hands all over it and yours, probably R2. But we need them less and less and we're going to erase them in a minute, so that's not a problem. The white marking is going to go up and curve around something like that. And then curve around below the eye, something like that. There's also just this very kind of vague mention of a overlap of feathers going from that marketing we just made down to the base of the head right about there. We'll draw that into its it'll just be probably helpful to have a mark for where we're supposed to stop the spotty pattern here and start a new one in the back. So now we can go through and erase just anything that you don't need anymore. We don't need the edge of the body line. We really don't need this whole thing actually. We're just left with the marking. Got rid of all that already. That's all fine. Oh, I never got rid of this. You may have already done that but never got rid of my original line for the bottom of the wing. Get rid of that. Lightly put my scallops back in and you can erase your grid lines. So I won't keep the camera running for this part since I know you know how to erase. Then I will meet you in the next section. When we start putting in our vine charcoal. 16. Toning the Paper: Alright, now that we've gotten our drawing grid lines erased and all the extra marks arrays. What I'd like you to do or encourage you to do is make a photocopy of it. If you have a copier at home, That's the easiest way to do it. Or if you don't and you just want to get this done quickly, you can tape a clean sheet of paper on top of your drawing, tape it to a window during daylight and trace it onto the new sheet of paper. And the reason to do this is just in case you mess up, something happens that you don't like and you can't get rid of. Or if you accidentally cover up too much of your drawing with the charcoal and can't seem to see it back then you have this copy of your drawing that you can trace onto another sheet of drawing paper and start again. I find that that just makes people feel more at ease because you kinda know that there is no mistake. You can make that so great that you couldn't just start over again because you have your nice drawing already for you. So now, the other thing I'd like you to do is just lightly erase your pencil lines so that they are lighter. Unless they're already very light. Hopefully you drew lightly and you don't need to take this step, but if you are a little more heavy-handed, we do want your pencil lines to be fairly light because we don't want them showing through your finished drawing. Just go around and lightly erase everything. And I will forward through this bit because you don't need to watch me erase my drawing. Alright, so now we have a lighter drawing or maybe you already did. You notice I also erased lightly my frame line and that's because if you end up framing this and you have exactly an eight by ten frame, you don't want that frame pencil line to show either. So that should disappear with the charcoal. Now we're gonna get onto toning the paper. This is what I was talking about earlier with the cotton balls and the vine charcoal. So first grab your scratch piece of paper and a piece of vine charcoal. It's also called willow charcoal. You can snap a piece off if you want. It's a little easier to work with a shorter piece and a long stick. And what you're gonna do is just color a patch of vine charcoal onto your scratch paper. And then we're going to dab the cotton ball into it to get some charcoal on the cotton ball. So just kinda rub it in there, pick it up, look at it, make sure you've got some and then just dab it off, get any dust off, and also rub it and just see how dark it is going to be. So that's a good sample. Now I'd like you to just draw a few pencil lines as light as your hummingbird is. And do that again on top of the pencil lines and makes sure that the amount of charcoal you have does not cause your pencil lines to disappear because once they're gone, you can't get them back. So we would like to try to avoid having to use our photocopy if we can. Obviously, it's there if you need it. But that looks like a good amount of charcoal. What we're gonna do is rub this over the entire drawing. And what we're doing is adding a layer of value. Value is just the word we use for light or dark. The whole drawing so that we can both darken the darker areas and pull lights out from the lighter areas with an eraser. So I'm gonna do that again, dab it off a little bit and just rub it all over the paper. And I'm going to need to do that several times to get a good amount of tone on the whole thing. I'm going to color, bunch more up there, dab it and keep rubbing. This is actually working out really nicely. My drawing is not disappearing and I'm getting a nice light layer of gray over the entire picture. Once you've got that, then you're done with your toning. 17. Basic Background Value: So now that we have our paper toned, we can get into coloring the background. If your paper looks like mine, you can probably see very faint lines where I erased the grid. Don't worry about that. That will be covered up with the charcoal. As we work. Our goal here is to get the background colored approximately with the same values as this background. So for those of you who may have forgotten or just never got this bit, the word value refers to the lightness or darkness of something. So in charcoal, that's really all we have. We don't have really color, we have value. We're dealing with how light or dark or different areas of the picture. So we're going to try to match the lightness and the darkness of the different values in this picture. So we'll start with the vine charcoal, as I mentioned before, the, we usually start with the vine because it's light and willingly and erases easily. So we put that down as our first layer. Mostly you can just kinda color. But when you get right around the hummingbird, you do want to use a pointy edge. It really doesn't matter where you start. Just sort of outline the hummingbird with the vine charcoal and then color a section. Once you've got a little bit on there, you can wave off the dust or blow it off with your breath. And just use a finger and rub it and just see how dark it looks. In order to keep the sharp edge next to the bird, just use the very side of your finger as you're blending right up next to that sharp edge. For these little scallops, you can fudge it a little bit, go back and erase the value out of the bird later that accidentally got smudged. Or you can use your blending stump. If it's brand new, you don't have to worry about it being dirty, but if you've used it before, you can just rub it on a piece of scratch paper to make sure and get most of the charcoal off. And then you can go in and use it to blend and get right up into any teeny little points that your finger is just too large to do. So you can see that works really beautifully. Anyway, the reason I wanted you to smudge it is just to see how the charcoal reacts with your paper because you probably have different paper than I do. You might have different charcoal than I do. So it may go on slightly lighter or slightly darker. It may blend more easily. Different art materials are different, so just kinda get a sense of it. And this is where this piece of paper comes in really handy. This piece of paper with a little hole cut out into it that I talked about during the materials section. This is a tool you can use to compare values. So what I'm doing is laying it over an area of my color and just taking a mental note of what that gray looks like compared to my white in my photo. It's a purpley a little bit, but it's still a black and white photo. So I'm just looking for darkness and lightness, not any sense of purple. So I'm kinda memorizing what that looks like. And then I'm going to move it over here and see, does that look about the same? And fortunately, it does. Usually that's not the case. Usually it goes on too dark or too light in the beginning. But since that happens to be working, I'm just going to continue doing what I'm doing. Now that you've tested it, you can just go crazy. So I'm gonna go outline the hummingbird and then color a little bit more. I'm gonna do this to the entire background, just this color, even though it's darker in some places. I'm not concerned about that right now. I just want to get this nice even layer of the basic value on the entire background. And because this is a very repetitive thing and it will take a little bit of time. I'm going to just sort of speed forward through this bit so that you can pause it if you want, you can turn it off, you can whatever. But that way you don't have to sit here and watch me color the entire thing. Um, and then if you do pause it and you can just forward to the end of this part when you're ready. Okay, now that I'm done with the coloring part, I'm going to take my paper and shake it off into the trash can I have right next to me. You can do that or you can blow off the dust if you're in a place where you don't mind the dusk going everywhere, or you can do a little of both. And you can see shaking it off, got some charcoal dust on the hummingbird. Totally fine. We are going to be toning the hummingbird and erasing on that as well. Now I'm going to start blending and I'm going to fast-forward through this bit as well because it's the same thing, kind of repetitive. Okay. And we're done with that part. 18. Adjusting Background Value: Now that we've got the main color in the background, use your value checker thing again and just look again and spot check and see. Do your values match pretty closely? It does not have to be exact. But if there's a glaring difference and you'll want to either darken your sky if yours is too light or lightened it. If it's too dark, if you're darkening it, all you do as a second coat of vine charcoal. If you're lightening it, you can take your kneaded eraser and stretch it out, find a clean spot. I'll just show you even though mine is the right value, I'll put my value back in in a minute, but you'll just kind of erase lightly around the whole picture, stopping and see it's gotten gotten dirty. So stop and stretches. You need to do a little bit more and then you can read blend it. And even the act of blending will get charcoal on your finger sea or removing color, removing value as you do that. You actually, you could try that too, just not even erasing, but just using your finger and blending again with a clean finger. And I need to add a little bit more vine there because I just removed some. Just play with it until you feel it's a pretty good match. Blow off the dust. 19. Darker Background Values - Left: Now we're going to add the compressed charcoal, which is the darker one, these little squares. And we're gonna do that in these darker areas. So I'm going to start around the flower. It doesn't really matter where you start again, but that's kinda drawing my eye. So I'm gonna do it. And to try to keep the edge of the flower very crisp. I'm using a corner of the pastel to get in there and stay out side of the flower completely, but get right up next to it. What we don't want to have is like a gutter between the dark and the flower. Because then it will look sort of outlined. So you really want to get right up next to your object. Try and do this in my hands, not in the way. It's pretty impossible because I'm right-handed, but I'll get out of your way in a second. So I've outlined the flower and then I'm going to just color in around it, around the outline so that it's the same darkness and it doesn't appear as an outline anymore now it's sort of a low of dark coming from the flower. And then as I move away from it, I'm going to make sure and start coloring in a circular motion so that also pressing lighter, lighter and lighter and lighter as you go out so that it appears to fade into the lighter background color. Being careful around the hummingbirds beak to try not to get any color inside the beak. It looks like it kinda goes next to the wing here. And then down. And kind of fades off right here. Then I'm going to blend just using, I don't know why I'm using my third finger. I think it's probably more intuitive for most people to use your pointer finger, but for whatever reason, I'm more comfortable using my third finger. It doesn't matter which finger you use. Just pick, pick your favorite. Get. Again, get right up next to the flower, and just blend in circles. The reason it's good to blend in circles when you're doing a totally blurry area is because it doesn't lend itself to any direction. Like if I was blending a sky or an ocean that was very horizontal in nature. Sorry, this is a sky, I guess. I mean like a far away sky with clouds that tend to be streak this guy with horizontal direction, then I would be blending smoothly, sideways. But since it's just totally blurry, I'm blending in circles and that helps it to appear very, very smooth. So I can't really get too specific next to a flower there. I'm going to take my picture and shake the dust into the garbage can. And then I'm gonna go back and use my blending stump to get a little bit more specific around the flower. I'm just rubbing into those little corners. You can kinda see maybe my white pencil lines showing up right here. Don't worry too much about that. We can always go back and cover it up with more charcoal. As long as the dense aren't too ingrained in your paper. And that comes from the light drawing that we were talking about before. If you're seeing major dense, you may want to stop and retrace your picture and try again on a new sheet of paper with a light drawing. You haven't gotten too far in right now. So it would be a good time to do it if you're seeing that the dense just will not go away, even if you were to take your compressed charcoal and color pretty hard over it. If it doesn't go away, then it's not going to go away. So you, you could choose to start again. So I'm pretty happy with that now I'm just going to blend out a lot more. Try to really get the compressed charcoal to blend into the vine charcoal so it's more seamless because right now I do have a defined section of dark and I want it to be more, more extremely gradual. Gonna get right up next to the bird. And do really big circles to really encourage that dark and light to mix. You want sort of a, an ombre effect, just a seamless transition from one value to the next. 20. Darker Background Values - Right: I'm pretty happy with that. So I'm gonna go over here and do the same thing on this side. This one is less specific because there's less to go around. It's just the end of this bird's wing. The flower isn't here. It's more of just putting a big watch. Oh, see. My hand doesn't have charcoal on it. So when I touched it, it came off but don't worry about that. You will be touching up frequently as we go. The oils, the natural oils on our fingers will adhere to the charcoal dust and just pull it off, especially vine charcoal, it's very vulnerable to just being removed, which is both a blessing and a curse. In some cases, I went a little too far with the compressed charcoal in the top corner, but that's okay. I don't care if it's a little darker in some places than in the photo. If you care though, feel free to be as accurate to the photo as you would like. You can go back with your kneaded eraser and pull some color off or not? Just covering up those fingerprints. I left there with some residual charcoal dust. And I'm getting a little sloppy around the wing there. But that is okay because the wings actually going to be blurry anyway. So it looks like we're pretty much done with the darks. 21. First Layer on the Body: So now we're going to get into the pudding, the values on the bird itself. But before we do that, I just want to mention quickly, I had said that you want to try to match your background color values to the ones in the photo. And now is a really good time to pause and just make sure you're happy with it. If you're trying to go lighter than the photo, that's totally fine. But if you really want to be accurate to the photo, then take the time now to really make sure your values match. Because if they don't, then it say they're too light, e.g. then everything you're putting it on the bird, you're going to tend to also put into light and the whole thing will feel to light when you're done. But maybe you like that, maybe you want a really light effect. The important thing is that the values match relative to one another. So if your vet background values are lighter and your bird values are lighter, it will still be a beautiful picture. It just won't be as contrasted. But what you don't want to have is a really dark background and a really light bird or the other way around because it tends to have too much separation between the bird and the background or parts of the bird, or a little disjointed and it might feel cartoony if you end up with that. So use that value scale to your advantage or the value Finder. This thing, I'm just making up a name for it right now. And hopefully you're happy with your background values. So let's get into the bird. We're going to start with the body, since it's the largest area, and that's what we started the drawing with. So grab your vine charcoal. Don't worry at all right now about textures, no feathers, nothing. What we're doing is just trying to put blocks of color where we see color. So I'm just going to darken the darkest place I see, which is right in the middle of the belly. And then work my way out to the wing, leaving a big white spot around the edges of throat there. Halfway across the body. Value starts to creep in again, but very lightly. So I'm just sort of very barely touching my paper with the vine charcoal. And notice I'm also making small short vertical strokes. Not because I'm trying to get into texture right now, but because I may as well sort of lay the groundwork for texture because we are going to get there after we do the blocking of the color of the value, keeps saying color. I mean value. But anywhere that we have just darkness, you can just color. So you can think of like the short strokes is a roadmap for where we're going later on. But again, don't worry about creating feather texture right now. So now I'm going to blend. Just rub it in. And I'm gonna wipe my finger off because I have too much charcoal. And that's going to cause this part to be too dark. If I keep kept going that way, I'm going to blend, kinda rubbed the gray into the white there, but keep it a little sharper right there. And that looks pretty good for a first coat. So I'm gonna go back now and put a little more vine charcoal in where I see the darkest part of the belly. Hello off the dust. Rub that around a little bit, but I'm very lightly touching it with my finger. The harder I press with my finger, the more vine charcoal is going to come off. Another thing you can do if you're finding that to happen is you can actually color some vine charcoal right on your finger and put it on the paper. Or you can color some vine charcoal on your scratch paper, rub your finger in it, and then come back. If you do want a little bit of charcoal on your finger. If you don't just wipe it off. And you'll get a sense for gain, a sense for this as we go. So that is the body. And we can move on now to the head. 22. First Layers on the Head & Tail: So now we're going to use our vine charcoal again and fill in basic values on the head and keep going into other parts. For the head, it's a little more challenging because what we want to try to do is ignore the spots and it's, there's a lot of spots, so it's hard to ignore them. But just kind of look at the head and notice the value between the spots in different areas. Here it's very light, but it's not bright white. See how it's just a little bit gray. The bright white is right here behind the eye and a little tiny bit below this black marking. Those, I guess a little on top of the head. Those are the areas we're going to try not to get vine charcoal on. But the rest of it, we're going to tone and we're again, we're going to put the spots on later. So what you're trying to do is get the value onto the lighter areas of the head. So you could approach it with your vine charcoal, but that goes on fairly heavy as you saw with the body. So let me show you that actually if you put just a little bit of vine charcoal on and blend, you'll get a nice light value. So that's one way to do it. Another way is to rub in your vine charcoal on your scratch paper, put as much on as you want and just get some on your finger and then rub it in that way and that goes on nice and light too. I'm just kinda putting that value over the entire head with the exception of those little white parts I mentioned. But that's gonna be I mean, it doesn't matter if you could do the whole head. It's fine because you can always erase it out. And my finger is too big to try to keep it out. So I am going to just color the whole head and then I'll show you how to pull out the whites in a minute. We've got that. I'm going to darken a little bit at the base of the throat and put a little bit more right next to the edge of the throat because it does appear to be a little tiny bit darker there than it is in the rest of the face. I'm going to get a little bit more up here too. That's the shadow or that piece of the head overlaps or the it looks like it kind of his curved at the bottom. And I'm going to use my blending stump. And I'm going to find a clean area, rubbing it on my scratch paper and use that to blend it. And that is way too dark, but I've got the right blend going, so not concerned about it. I'm just going to erase to make it lighter. When I'm done with this, I'm gonna go right around the back of that white marking on the eye underneath it. Not so much because it needs darkening, but because I'm losing the shape and I want to make sure I keep it. Same thing with the edge of this little white streak of feathers right here. I'm just going to rub my blending stump along that, pressing a little bit harder to encourage it to show. Then because that went on too dark. I can use my eraser pencil. It's a little dirty at the tip, so I'm going to just rub it on my scratch paper. And then I'm going to come in at a top angle here and rub down. You can turn your paper if you wish. If it's a little easier, That's fine. You can turn it any which way you want. And I'm just rubbing very, very lightly. You could also achieve those with your kneaded eraser. If you pull it into a point, then you can just rub and pull a little bit of the charcoal off. That's actually a bit of a smoother effect. So that's nice. And there is our head and we'll go into the tail as well. That is pretty blurry, but there's kind of a medium gray color over the top part. White patch right here. And this dark under on the tail kind of frames the whiteness of the feathers above it. I'm going to be a little specific and pointy with those feathers just as a first pass, it doesn't matter if they get blended out, we'll just put them back. And then I'm gonna go down here, darken the top and the sides. Something like that. It's just very, very basic, rudimentary at this point. I'm just dabbing around at it. Wipe my paint, my finger, I'm dabbing because I don't want to blend that out too much. I don't want it to get too fuzzy. And that is good. Well, actually let me take my pointy part again and just lightly erase out the bottom edge of that shape on the tail. And that looks pretty good for now. 23. First Layers on the Wings: So now really we just need to do the wings and the flower. We're not gonna do the specific stuff like the beak or the I or the feet. Because if we do those really tiny little precise and very dark things now they'll just get in the way when we're trying to texture around them. So it's better to leave those to the end. So use your vine charcoal again. Let's start by darkening the darkest part of this wing and do color in the direction that you see the value's going in the photo. So that kinda goes to the side and then the rest of this goes down but it sprays out. It's like a fan shapes. So don't get into the habit of going all diagonal in one direction. Think of it as kind of like this is the sun and the rays are coming out from it so that each ray will hit one of these little points. And you'll have a very believable wing if you're able to follow that. So we've got the dark part there. And now I'm going to just go back to the middle scallop. Remember how we drew starting from the middle scallop? Let's color doing the same thing. So I'm going to start here and just imagine this is a point and this is a point and you're drawing a straight line to connect them. We're gonna do the same thing for each point. All to the same, starting at the corner of one of the skeleton, returning to the same point, there's an eraser crime right there. Okay. Now that we've got the lines, don't worry if they blend out completely, It's fine. This is just your basic coat. But we're going to put a little bit more value here. And these two feathers, the base of the third one because it looks like it's a little bit darker there. And then also at the top of the wing over here. And there's definitely a couple of more lines there too, so I can just sort of faces and something like that. And then at the very top there's a little bit going on here. So now I'll just blend and kinda see what happens. I may have to dark and I may have to lighten, add more, subtract, race, blend, all sorts of stuff. This is just a first pass off the dust. And that looks pretty good. So that's all we're going for it just something Basic, not too specific. Let's get to the other wing. Same thing over here. There's very dark and sharp edge right along our pencil line here. I'm going to do that first. And then I'm going to color lightly this top part, which looks like just a motion blur. And then from there we don't have any scallops to guide us. So I'm just going to look at the photo where it starts kinda the strongest lowest line is looks like it's a little further than halfway across this wing. So about halfway between here and here is here. So I'm gonna go a little further than that. Just draw kind of a very gently concave line curving down, something like that. Then from there, 12 on a little extra it looks like. So I'm going to just try to divide this space in approximate thirds. And I didn't do a very good job. So guess what? I'm going to fake and a fourth one. Nothing wrong with that. Nobody's ever going to look at this hummingbird and say you have an extra feather? Actually I'm going to darken that one. And I'm going to add a little bit of value here. But again, making sure where I plant my vine charcoal is returning, pointing up to that corner. And then I can blend the edge of my finger to keep that one edge sharp. And there went my lines and it's fine. We'll just put them back. Got a little too much charcoal on my fingers. I'm going to blend. 24. First Layers on the Flower: So the last section we're going to put basic values on is the flower. So we could just start with the vine charcoal again and coloring a little bit right where you see the center of that flower kinda going inside towards the stamen. Then we're going to pull out a sick line and curve it over down. Same thing into the next petal. Just kinda pull out a thick line and make it center. A little points here towards the end. And then something like a few little lines going out into the rest of the flower in the same way. Something like this. There's a little bit right there. That's pretty much it. So I'm just going to use my finger to soften that. It's pretty blurry. So we don't have to be that specific. Got a little too much charcoal, so I'm going to wipe my finger off. And then it's pretty dark also. So I can go back with the kneaded eraser and pull out parts that I want to be a little bit wider. Again, this is just basic, but it's such a small shape and not that specific. So I'm spending a little bit more time getting it kind of accurate than I did on the bird. We're gonna go back and do this anyway on the bird and the flower. But I'm just doing it now because I can doing some of it now. It is your picture so you can kind of bounce back-and-forth around between areas as much as you want. Also, the area I left showing is a little bit too dark I think, but I'm going to use my value compare a thing, comparing thing. Yeah, It's actually quite a bit too dark. You can see that value. Compare it to that one. So I'm going to just pull off color on the whole thing. So that's the whole thing gets lighter. You get a new point on my eraser. Leave some parts of it a little bit dark, but try to pull off color on most of it so that it's very delicate. And let me check that again. Closer, pretty close. I'm going to pull off just a little bit more at the bottom. And I'm just barely dabbing at it now just to not I don't want to pull off too much. I'm pretty happy with that. Now we are done with putting in the basic values with vine charcoal. 25. Textures on the Body: So now that we have done the main colors values on the body, we're going to start in textures. Or excuse me, we've done the main values on the entire picture. We're going to start in on the textures. So starting with the body, you can see the belly part is the darkest and it's got a little bit of mottled texture from the feathers. The modeled part is everywhere but it just gets lighter as it goes up towards the neck. So I'm going to start with the vine charcoal and see if that even has an effect because we've already kind of colored with the vine charcoal. This may not be dark enough, but I'm just going to start by going in. And you can see it started with little lines because I happen to have started on a sharp edge, but this wears down so quickly that that's fine. If you end up starting with little lines, you just keep going and it makes more like sicker lines, smudges. And I'm just putting a whole bunch where I see it here in a bigger area than I think I need to. Like, I probably could have isolated it to about that much, but I'm going away wider because I'm going to use my finger and just dab at it. And just the act of dabbing pulls a lot of color off, a lot of the value off. But it's also kind of enhancing the texture a little bit by leaving fingerprint shapes, I guess, in the feathers. I'm gonna do that again. I'm just gonna kinda layer, layer, layer until I feel like I can't really get much more action out of the vine charcoal, but I do like that. The cool feathery texture that the layering of the vine and my finger are creating. So I feel like that's about as dark as I can get. So now I'm going to switch to the compressed charcoal. Go ahead and just test it on your scratch paper. If it's even a little bit intimidating to you because it is really dark and then just kinda play with it and see what that will do. That's pretty dark. So I think I'm going to just do a few little dabs instead there and white my dirty finger off and then do that again. That's a little more like it just not quite as oppressive to begin with. So I'm going to start with a few little lines here. Even though there are two skinny for what we're going for, we're going for more like patches. Just going to put that on as a base and then keep doing it. This one I'm being more conservative with in terms of staying just in the dark area because when you dab at it, it really doesn't pull the color off the way the vine does. It just softens it a little bit. So I've got a main dark area there now, this is really cool trick. You can go back with the vine charcoal and do the same thing over the top of the compressed charcoal. And the vine acts as a blender, but it also adds value instead of taking it away since it's a type of charcoal. So I'm doing that. I'm keeping the texture, keeping the darkness, but also adding a little bit more value to the belly area. I went a little too far with that, so I'm just going to use my finger, but I've got too much charcoal on it now, so I'm not pulling enough color off. So I wipe my finger off and go back and keep going until I feel like that somewhat mirrors what we have over here. Now. I'm gonna go up into the neck with my dirty finger and just put a few little dabs there to get some suggestion of feather on there. And that looks pretty good for the body. I'm going to just go down right underneath it where the feathers are and put these few little more specific lines of value right there. Get a little bit more on the base of the belly here, dab those out just a little bit. Hello, off the dust. And then I'm going to use my eraser pencil and go in and do just a little bit of pulling off. Or actually, you know what? Let's use the kneaded eraser because this is less specific, so it'll be a little blurrier which we want for the body. So now I'm gonna go in and dab in the same manner I was dabbing with the charcoal, but now I'm pulling color off or I want it lighter areas. And I already darken that quite a bit. So I'm going to stretch it out, find a new little place and the little corner, sort of a rounded corner on my eraser there. And do a little bit on the neck. That's more like about adding texture than it is about pulling color off because I just wanted a little feathery are there. And now I'll use the eraser pencil and just go in and color along the outside edge to get a crisper edge on the edge of the belly. And I'm barely touching the paper now when I when I first started pressing the outside, I was pressing pretty hard. But now as I come into the belly, I'm just kinda giving it little light wispy stroke. And that looks pretty good for the body. 26. Textures on the Right Wing: So now that we're done with the body, we can move on to the wings. We're going to start with this wing. The more detailed one, I've already got enough vine charcoal on there, actually probably a bit too much. So I'm not going to add anymore right now. I'm just gonna go in and start detailing out the darker area because that's the most prominent thing. So using my compressed charcoal, I just find a sharp corner and I'm outlining the top edge of this shape at the top of the wing that's a little bit rounded there. And then I'm going to darken the part right under it and put a little patch of dark right here for that part. And then just pull out a few lines using the tip of the charcoal, blow off the desk so I can see what I've got. Making sure making being careful to pull the lines into the same lines I already have laid down for the vine charcoal so that it just looks like a darkening of the top of each line. Pull a little bit of color down here. And then right next to the body, there's a sharp black edge right there. And that's probably good for the compressed charcoal for now. Now I'm going to use my blending stump, rub it on the scratch paper a bit just to make sure it doesn't have a ton of charcoal on it. It's okay to have a little bit because we are gonna be doing this in a very dark area. And I'm going to use this to blend instead of my finger because it's a much more precise area. So just kinda getting the tip of the blending stump right up next to that edge off the dust. And then I'm going to pull multiple times on each line to encourage the dark to spread into the lighter line on each wing. I'm sorry, on each line of each of the wing. Here, I'm actually just sort of coloring with it. And then I'm going to pull out the lines, the dark lines into the light lines. Here I'm going to color again to just encourage that patch to soften. Goes into this darker line right here by, by dust. And then on the body, I'm going to blend in little circles right here because it's a bit fuzzy. That's not working that well. So I may go back with some more color in a minute, some more charcoal. I mean, this patch is a little fuzzy on the bottom edge. And pull it into this light line right here. Then just soften the whole top part. There's no real dark charcoal there, but I don't want the crumbly texture of the compressed charcoal to show anymore. Now it's all about smoothing it out. I've got a bit of a too hard of an edge at the top here. So I'm gonna go back and put my blending stump tip slightly over the edge of that line so that I'm encouraging the charcoal to soften a little bit across the top of that shape. Whereas before it had the tip of the bindings number right on that edge because I wanted to keep it sharp for the time being. Now we're doing a little softening, just trying to copy the shapes I see pretty as carefully as I can. And going back and just sort of refining edges where I feel like it needs to be softer or darker. Now I'm going to take my kneaded eraser and pull off some of the color. Whoops, I have a dark edge there. I just need to stretch it to get a clean edge. Pull off some of the color in this lighter area of the wing so that those lines are still visible but not nearly as dark. And that is pretty good for adding the texture on the wing will go back later over the whole bird and refine details as needed. 27. Textures on the Left Wing: So now for the second wing, we're going to do the same basic thing we did for the first, using far less charcoal because it's just not as dark there, but the dark part is right there. So I'm just going to put the corner or my charcoal right there and pull out to the left trying to keep the top edge pretty sharp. A little bit bowed down but mostly straight. Then I'm gonna do the same thing I did over here. I'm just going to pull a little bit of the compressed charcoal into those lighter lines. And I'll put a little bit up here too. But I'm really barely touching the paper. I don't want a whole lot of it up there. And I'll go back and sharpen and blend this top edge. Flowing off the dust. Dust does get in the way of you being able to see what you're doing very well. So it's nice to blow it off frequently or throw it and shake it off into the trash cans. So I believe I mentioned this in the drawing phase, but I'm not too concerned with how many lines there are on the wing. I do want an approximately correct amount, but in this case, especially where it gets blurry and you almost can't tell how many there are as long as they're all going in the correct direction. So starting from a single point and fanning out from that point, it will be believable off the desk there. And blend this darker area up here and really try to blend it into the wing, even on the part I did not color. Over here to the left where it got outside left edge almost just disappears right into the background, obscures the edge of the wings. And I'm gonna get, I'm going to turn my hand awkwardly here so that I don't cover it. So you can see I'm just trying to get right up next to the edge of the throat there with that darker part. And then up here that lightness is too bright. It's almost the same brightness as the throat. But as you see in the picture, it's darker here. So I'm going to just smear the charcoal over that edge to darken it a little bit, sort of gray it down. Same thing with this edge. It's too bright and it's actually a little crumbly also kind of rubbing the blending stump over the area with out being specific. Just encouraging the vine charcoal and the compressed charcoal into that area to darken it a little bit will help that quite a bit. And then I'm going to take the kneaded eraser and remove some color in the wing where it's both lighter and a little bit more specific. So just kinda planting it and pulling planting from the outside and pulling towards the darker side. And that way I'm creating the effect of brightening the lighter part of the wing. And still, whoops, creating a seamless transition into the lines. And you can see I dropped my eraser. I've got tons of fingerprints on the bottom. Don't worry about that. We'll fix it all up later if that's happening to you as well. Also, don't worry too much about getting the motion blur exact. We'll do that in the details section, whatever there is to touch up. But for right now you can get it a little bit blurry. Or if you really want to focus on it, you can just use your eraser and erase in sort of little circles. So it creates the illusion of scallops at the bottom. You could do the same thing on the other side. I just didn't happen to. I'm going to pull a little bit more color off the top here because I feel like I went too far darkening it. But I'm not pressing hard at all with the eraser just enough to lift off a little bit of the value. And then lastly, I feel like these lines are a little bit too severe, so I'm just going to soften those a little bit. And that looks good for that wing. 28. Textures on the Tail: Okay, now we're gonna go in on the tail and do the same kind of darkening and there's a lot of blur on the tails. So not too much real texture, just more like darkening areas and blurring them. So I'll start with the darkest part, which is this little sliver on the right. And it goes up into the lighter part of the tail, down into a line on the right. There's a little bit of it at the tip there. I'm just making very loose edges. Then just coloring right next to the left edge of the tail. That's probably enough of the compressed charcoal. Blow off the dust and go ooops, go in and blend or you use the accidental, I accidentally use the tip of my blending stump that I was using for a color picture. So I don't want to get orange on this. Just blacks and whites for hummingbird. Just softening all of these darks. I just put in, Going off the dust and pulling the tip up in a way that sort of disappears into the upper part of the tail. Pulling this down and also the left edge of that shadow kinda blurs into the center of the tail itself. Does something like that. Then there's a little blurry dot right there. This edge goes out further to cover up more of that bright white. I'll reshape that with the eraser in a minute. This edge kinda comes out a little bit further right here. And then right here. I'm just leaving these white areas and shading the part between them. Then on the tail itself, there seems to be darker, kind of going down the center and a little bit of a lighter gray here on the left. So I'm just going to really rub kind of hard with my blending stump to encourage all that charcoal to smear a little bit more. Then I'm going to use the eraser pencil because it's more specific and easier to see what I'm doing for these little tiny highlights. And I'm just going to erase out where I see lighter parts on the outside edge there. This needs to be reshaped a little bit, so I'm brightened right here. And then at the tip of the tail, this angle going up, a little bright band right here of a highlight. And up towards the top. This sort of turns into the back edge of the bird. Something like that. And a few little lines to mimic feathers right there because it's got a little bit more in focus. We can also do a little bit actually, I'm going to rub off the charcoal that's stuck on the tip of the eraser on my scratch paper and pull out a few little feathers here. Don't worry about making these perfect or if they get obscured later when we're doing the feed or just working on the tail. This is just a first pass and you can see how easy it is to put these in. So we can always go back and sharpen and refine them later if they get messy. But for right now, just putting them in because I can and it's fun. And then I'm gonna go back with the blending stump and just blur out some of the lights I just did. So I'm not really trying to dim them as much as just soften the edges so that they appear to be more in motion. Actually, I will dim this one just a little bit. I'm just rubbing over it to soften it, darken it. And then I'm also going to take my vine and put a few little dabs. That's not quite dark enough. A little bit of that. And then I'll use the vine to darken it right underneath the tail where it meets the body. And I think we've got the tail. 29. Basic Textures on the Head: So now we're gonna get into doing textures on the head. As you can see, that's much more of a pattern and it's much more specific. So we're going to spend a little bit of time working on this. Let's just start at the bottom with the vine charcoal at the base of the head, putting in some larger dabs and dots. So you want these to be fairly separate. Some of them can kind of go into each other and it's also not super straight on the bottom. You can see it's a little staggered, so I'm kind of putting one low, one high, one low, one high. Like a little pearl necklace over here. This sort of a clump of dark. And let's just follow that up right on that band of dark that we put in there earlier, just because it's easy since it's there, we'll use it as our first line going up towards the eye. So this part is more of a band of color. I'm not going to separate that like the other parts of the head that are more like next to it, I'm going to start putting in little dots and get, getting them bigger as they go down towards the color. This is sort of like the wing texture and it doesn't matter how many dots there are, so don't feel you have to count them unless you really want to. I'm not going to do that. That might drive me nuts. Totally fine if that is your game and you would like to play that, please go ahead and it will make it all the more joyful for you if you do it your way. Just like I'm doing it my way. So just putting in loose lines. You can see there's a line there, line there, line there, but they're not straight and perfect. Right here where it kind of starts at the throat and goes towards the beak depths, the straightest line I see. So I'm going to pay attention to making that one street. And that will kind of a little bit crooked there. That'll kind of help inform the lines in the areas around it. The one below it is a little bit spaced further apart. There's a wider space, whiter, not wider space. Actually, it's both white and wide. So I guess that works either way. And then the dot's kinda come together at the top. Then there's just a few on the throat here. Up around the beak. There's a few little ones, something like that. And then right around the eye, I'm going to fill in some dark, almost like a little pitchfork shape. There's one prong, there's two prongs and then the middle one. And then up on top of the beak there's a ton of little dots that are darker and above the eye that are darker, kinda right where the beak meets the eye. And then as we go up, they're going to be further apart and lighter. So I'm making, I'm really not worried too much about the lightness because as you've seen so far, vine charcoal blends out really easily. So it's more about the size of them and how far apart they are. And then here on the back there's these two little areas of line which this is too thick for, but I just put them in any way. So that's our first pass on the head and then hello off any dust. Use your blending stump there actually, let's try our finger first. I'm just going to touch it with my finger. See what happens and you can see it when I touched it, I got little dots on my finger. I'm going to use that and do it again and see. Yeah, I like that. It's kind of it's blending them out just slightly, but also lending itself to sort of shading in-between the dots, just barely so it kind of darkens the whiter feathers as well. I'm going to do the same thing of top here. That being said, you can also use your blending stump and go, go in and smudge each one if you're more comfortable with that or he just liked the effect better. But now that I've done that, I'm going to, oh, I forgot to do this one. This shadow around the eye. Now I'm just gonna go in with my pencil and darken a few of the dots that are darker. You can also do this with a corner of your compressed charcoal if you prefer. I'm just using a pencil because it's a little more specific. And then I'll use my finger again. And it looks like that is pretty good for our first pass of textures on the head. 30. Refining Textures on the Head: So now we can get a little bit deeper into head textures because we did a nice first layer there, but we can get more specific. So I'm going to start by pulling out some color just so that it doesn't get too muddy. I'm going to use the eraser pencil and just kind of lightly pull off. Actually not lightly. I'm pressing pretty hard. Pull off the color around the back of the eye and then get this shape back, this light area going down the back of the eye. By the way, you can take a piece of scratch paper. I'll use this as an example and put it under your fist like this so that you can anchor your fist and then erase if that's more comfortable and just be careful when you pick it up that you're not smudging. I am not doing that because I want you to be able to see what I'm doing. So I'm trying to keep my hand out of the way so you can see the tip of my tool. But most people, including me, find it more comfortable to put a piece of paper under your hands so that you're able to anchor your hand, but not pull color off of your picture. I'm going around the top of the head, pressing pretty hard, pulling a little bit of the vine charcoal off. And also when I'm making the erasing motions, I'm going in the direction of the feathers. Blow off the dust. Some of the dust particles, especially when you're erasing or a little stubborn so you can just loosen them with one finger and below again. And it's also a good idea to pull off a little more area than you think you need to like it's okay that these are a little bit thick and chunky because we're going to go back and refine them with the charcoal pencil, at least right here. So here we can use the pencil and create these teeny little feathers. Not pressing hard. I'm just putting a little bit of color right there. Use my finger to get the eraser desktop. And I'm going to do the same thing right here, right next to it. Or there's some feathery textures right under the eye. So I'm planting the pencil and sweeping to the right so that we create a wispy look where the feather ends. And then down here it seems to be kind of going down, so I'm going to change my direction. You can see it really, it makes barely any difference. But all of this little stuff that you're doing, we'll make a difference as a whole picture. It's not like you can see that one little area really closely, but the more detail you get into, the more realistic your image will look. I'm just darkening these little lines that I only alluded to earlier with the vine charcoal. I'm going to darken right below these dots. I put above the beak and the eye. And I'm really going to dark in this, the base of this little pitchfork, which also doesn't show up very well, but the fact that I'm doing it will make a difference in the long run for the same reason, all this detail makes a difference. Just all of it works together. In a dark and a few more little spots here. One thing you can do to really help you see what still needs to be done as squint your eyes. Occasionally, it will help you to notice where things needs to be lightened or darkened or textured more. And I'm gonna go back to my eraser pencil now. And I've lost, largely lost the edge of the face. These little details are some of my favorite things to do because they make such a big difference when they work together. Just very carefully and pulling out that highlight along the throat, that's going to create separation between the head and the background. Same thing over here on the back of the head, but this is a little bit feathery, so I'm just going to make it, I'm gonna kinda color with the eraser instead of doing just a clean line. Now I'm just going to take a look around and notice that I did lose a lot of my dots here. So I'm going to put some back in with the vine. A little bit more, kinda like any texture on the back of the head there. And make this edge a little bit more irregular right now it's too straight, so I'm just gonna go in and add a few dabs of vine charcoal to make it look a little wave here. Same thing with the top edge of the white marking behind the eye. I'm going to add a little bit of value there to define it. In the bottom edge. It looks like that's pretty good. 31. Textures on the Flower: So there's not a lot to do on the flower, but we're gonna do what there is. Yours may look very different than mine also. So maybe you have more to work on then I do. But really all I really see as darkening this shadow a little bit and then refining the outside edges of the petals. So first thing I'm gonna do is darken the shadow at the very base and into this first little curve that comes out. Kinda pull some lines into the rest of the flower. And then I'm just gonna make sure I have a clean finger and pull those lines into the flower. Then I can use my kneaded eraser, pull out a clean edge, brighten the white part by starting at the tips of the petals and pulling into the darker part. Then I'm going to find another clean tip of the eraser and go around and just soften and brighten the outside edges of the petals. You might get a little bit of charcoal inside your flower. When you do this, don't worry, you can erase it out when you're done. So all of these little crumbly edges, I'm trying to just smooth out and soften a little bit. So it's kinda requires me to need the eraser frequently because I don't want to encourage too much of a background to get into the flower and every time you touch it, it gets dirty. So I'm gonna do a lot of stretching and needing to try to do this left-handed because I realized that I'm covering up what I'm doing and you can't see it very well. However, I'm not super great with my left hand, so bear with me. Actually something else you can do, which I should have shown you is you can also just turn your picture. And that way you're pointing towards the edge. If you happen to be right-handed, if you're left-handed, then it's just easy. You just do it right side up. But you can always turn your picture so that you can more easily access whatever edge you're trying to get to. Right in this part a little bit. Then I'm going to turn it right side up again. I can see if there's anything else that's standing out. I think that's pretty good. So you can just refine it until you're happy and then we'll move on. 32. Rendering the Feet: So now we're gonna get into some details. We're gonna get the area around the feet and the feet themselves. So we'll start just by refining the area around the feet. Just grab your eraser pencil. Assuming you need to pull out color or maybe you need to put a little bit more charcoal and you just kinda have to look at it and assess what you think it needs. But I'm going to pull a little bit of a round area right here so that those little toes can stick out into it. And then a little bit of a highlight right next to that. I'm also pulling the feathers down a little bit because I feel like my body got a little bit short right there. Highlight right there. This is approximate. It's all just keep consider the feet in the left half of the body. So if halfway across is about right here, you're not going to go beyond that with the feet that is, but I am gonna go beyond it with the feathers because I can see more feathers needs to be pulled down right next to the foot. Wipe off the charcoal. Pull down some bright feathers right there. I love this tool, this eraser pencils, so delightful. It's so precise. Now make sure you have a nice point on your charcoal pencil. Once you're done with the eraser pencil, blow off any dust, and go ahead and just put, put in the little toes as you think you see them. So little line right here, thick line. Another one right next to it. Very precise, precise, very dark, tiny little toes off the dust. And then here there's a little nails sticking out. And I'm just realizing this part underneath is too dark, so it's not helping because I can't really see the nails against that darkness. I'm just going to use my eraser pencil and very lightly go in and sort of color and little circles over that to pull off some color. You may not need to do that. You probably don't. Just happens to be the way mine looks. There we go. Now, those Neil's, we'll hopefully stick out a little bit more. A little bit of a line right there. Then another one right here. I'm not sure if that's a nail or just a crease in the fur or feathers either way, I'm going to put it in. The feet. Don't draw a whole lot of attention to themselves, but there they are. Now that I've got them in, I do feel like I still need to pull a little bit more color off. So I'm going to use the kneaded eraser, pulling color off on the tail that is, so that the toes can show a little bit more and just dabbing around it. I think we got it. So you can monkey with that until you're happy with it. And then we'll move on to the eye. 33. Rendering the Eye: So now we're going to do the I, which is pretty simple because it's just really a black circle with a highlight in it, black shape with a highlight on it. Go ahead and do put a piece of paper down. I'm just using my little value finder thing. And you can do that too if it's big enough or just any piece of scratch paper so that you can really have control over the eye because you don't want to be hovering like this or like what I was doing with the feet. Putting your hand way over here and trying to be that precise. So just start by outlining the shape that goes all the way around the top and ends up in a point at the middle. What do you call those things on a fork? A tendril, the middle prong of the Pitchfork that we drew earlier. Then outline where you want the highlight. And it's gonna look kinda like a little long Jelly Bean on the top-right of the eye. And then all you do is colored and solid and it might squeak a little bit. Kind of sounds like a puppy. Blow off any dust. You can dab in where you have a really teeny area that you need to just get a little bit of charcoal on. That might be all you need to do. In my case, my highlight feels a little bit too sharp. So I'm just going to wipe off the tip of my blending stump and go in and dab with the blending stump or right around the edge of the highlight, just to soften it a little bit. And that's all. Now that we're done with the actual eye itself, we can kinda look around the outside edge of the eye and see if there's anything we can do. I can add a little bit more, a few little dabs right here on that white marking at the top edge of the pitchfork. It's a little bit too dark, so I'm going to use my eraser pencil that pull off a little bit of value there. And same thing here. I'm just gonna kinda go out and pull off a few little dabs of value. And same thing on the bottom, prong of the Pitchfork. And then there's a little bit of value that I didn't want right here, but I'm just going to rub off. So that makes that very clean and bright white little dabs on the back of that marking. Again, you can just kinda mess with it as long as you'd like until you're satisfied. And then we can move on to the beak. 34. Rendering the Beak: Okay, Now we're gonna move on to the beak. I'm going to turn my paper sideways as well as my reference. It's always helpful to have the reference and the picture facing the same direction if you're doing anything for any period of time. Because it's just easier to see. I'm going to start with the compressed charcoal. And actually right away, I'm putting my compressed charcoal against the paper and I can already see my background is going to be too dark right there for my beak to show up. So the first thing I'm gonna do is pull off some of my compressed charcoal in the background around the beak area. Does not have to be exact, but I do want the beak to be able to show. I also don't want there to be just like a cloud of lighter area around the beak. So I'm going to erase out into the background a bit so that it fades off gradually next to the flower and around the flower. Stretch it a little more. And then I'll blend. There we go. Now I have a lighter area. So now I can take my compressed charcoal. I mean my charcoal pencil and just color the bottom of the beak. Just like the eye, very dark, very specific. And right along that little line going out to the tip. And what you don't want to do, like my beak is actually a little bit too thick the way I drew it. So don't just rely on your original drawing. Use your discerning artists I right now and determine how thick you believe the beach should be even if it doesn't cover the full original area. Because it is a very, very fine little beak. What I'm gonna do is bring some of my background charcoal right up to the bottom edge there so that it is now a sinner week than I had before. And when it hits the head, it's going to just keep right on going into that marketing that we may keep calling the pitchfork because it sort of looks like one. Now I'm going to use a clean eraser pencil, just get all the excess charcoal off and I'm going to erase out anything in the top beak That's not bright white because that's a very, very bright and very precise going all the way out to the tip. The eraser crumbs are not coming off happily. So I'm just going to use my finger. With each stroke. I wiped my finger off. There we go, so that I don't smear charcoal into the beak. Now I'm going to take my vine charcoal and color, the background color right up next to the bottom of the beaker. And I'm gonna do it on the top just a little bit more for this shape because I've got a bit of a speed bump right in the middle there. I'm going to bring that down. And then I think, let's see, let me try the blending stump first because I think it will pull off less value. Yes, that works. That works. And you can kinda see the remnants of my pencil line there, which is disappointing. I may or may not be able to get rid of that if I can't, it's not the end of the world, but I am going to try by going over again. I've now succeeded in darkening the background again a little bit too much for the dark of the beak to pop out the way it does in this photo. But I'm going to leave it like that because if I lighten it to much more well, you know what? Let me try. I was going to say it. I feel like my pencil lines would show more, but maybe that's not true. It might even help the pencil lines to disappear more because the surrounding area will be lighter. As the pencil lines are lighter. I'm just rubbing. I'm not needing the eraser and just rubbing the same area with the kneaded eraser. Because if I need it too much, then I'll pull too much color off. And I think that's slightly better. So I'm just going to use the blending stump one more time. Try to obscure that whitish line and call it a day. 35. Touching Up: So my friends, we're getting very close to finishing this picture. Now. We're just going to go through and kind of put in finishing details, touching up, adding, subtracting whatever you think you need. Let's start with the background. So I'm going to touch up the bottom edge here where I have all these fingerprints showing just with coloring some vine charcoal over that part and the area where I accidentally dropped my eraser earlier, got a little bit of lightness right there, too much lightness right there. A little bit up here over the wing, just some area of paper showing through little dabs of paper. If you want to touch up with any compressed charcoal by all means, go ahead. I'm going to blend. So it's nice and even white my finger. And then I'm gonna go back to the body and see what else does that need? And right away what stands out is the chest doesn't stand out from the wing too much. I do need to darken the wing a little bit right there, but I'm just going to start by using the eraser pencil and redefining the edge of the chest against that wing. I started by pressing hard with the eraser pencil to pull off the color. And now I'm just barely touching it. And that will help also to loosen the extra eraser crumbs and that's better. It's a little bit too bright though for that particular area of the body. So I'm going to try barely just using my blending stump to soften and a little bit. And then I'm going to look at the rest of the body. It looks like I could use a little more brightness right here. Again, pressing hard to begin with, and then lightening up on the pressure to help loosen the eraser crumbs. Blow those off. You go a little further into the throat here. Let me check out the tail. Feels like the tail shape got a little bit off. So there's a bit of a point there that I don't want to have, so I'm going to use the vine charcoal. Whoops, I pulled off too much color by blending it. And go right up next to the edge so that I'm reshaping it. Still pulling off too much color. Now I'm going to use a dirty finger to blend and hopefully, Yeah, There we go. That'll keep the color from pulling off too much. Check out the rest of the tail, that's pretty good. I'm really happy with those feathers. I'm going to do a little bit more with the feathers right here. Brighten that up because that does seem to really pop out. So I'm pressing hard and then lightly. And then I'm going to pull out a few more little lines. Actually my eraser pencils too dirty, so let me clean it. There we go. Those are just delightful to me. I'm going to add a little bit more lightness here on the side of the body, or is this too little bright highlights right there? Soften those at the top just barely, I'm just barely dabbing the paper. And then the wing. I'm going to make just, I'm barely touching it, touching the paper. I just want to make this a little bit rounder at the top, that shape. And on the bottom edge right here, on the right, a little bit rounder there. I'm going to use my blending stump and go back and soften this again. So I want to emphasize everything I'm doing is probably not the stuff that you want to be doing. It's just a matter of looking at your picture and deciding what is it that you feel you need to do to make this more complete? And you can certainly copies the techniques I'm doing. You can certainly copy the exact thing I'm doing. I just don't want you to feel like you have to go back and do the exact things if you're already happy with yours. So this is a time where you break off and do your own refining for the motion blur at the tips of the wing, I'm going to just rub a little bit to make sure they're soft against the background. Who's already are n over here and do a little bit of that too. I'd already done some with the kneaded eraser when I was filling in this wing, if you remember. But I'm just going to soften a little bit more. And then at the very tip of the wing I'm going to pull out with the blending stump just to get a ghostly disappearance of that fine little tip. Then I'm just gonna kinda take a look around and see if there's anything else. I'm feeling pretty happy with that. So I'm going to call it done. 36. Signature: So you are more than welcome to skip this next step. If you don't want to sign your picture. If you do want to sign it, definitely use your charcoal pencil. Pick a corner, bottom, pickup, bottom corner, either the left or the right. And you can either sign your full name, just your initials. You can sign your first name only or maybe your first name and the year you did it. You can kinda look around at other artist's work and see what type of signature you wanna do. But whatever you do, make sure and make it not that obvious because you don't want a giant signature down here taking away from your picture. It's just an acknowledgement of who did it. The other thing is if you're good, especially if you're going to frame that, make sure you come up with ways from the original edge of your picture. Because if you frame it, there's gonna be a matte going into the picture a little bit, maybe an eighth of an inch or a quarter of an inch. So you want to sign it kinda well above that to make sure it does not sink below the frame edge. So I'm just going to assign how I usually do, which is my first and last name and the year. And that's it. 37. Workable Fixatif: So now that we're done with our picture, I'm going to show you how to put workable fixative onto the surface of your drawing and this will help protect it from smudging. I highly recommend doing this. It's not necessary, but anytime you touch your picture, you're going to remove charcoal or anytime anything touches it, it's going to take the charcoal off. So this just helps it to cement it to the paper a little bit better. It's called workable also because you can continue working on the picture after you've sprayed it, that's fine. It'll just be a little bit harder to erase or move the color, the values around. Anyway. First thing you wanna do is just test splits out into the air a little bit to make sure it's a nice fine mist. And then hold your fixative about 12 " away from your paper and go in little circles, but start outside. So don't start by spraying directly at the picture in case there's just an initial little spritz, you wanna do that out here. So I'm spraying away from the picture and then I'm going to move into the picture and keeping it about 12 " away. I'm just spraying in little circles and you can kind of air it out and do it again. By the way, this might be obvious since I am outside and since you've probably used spray cans before, but definitely be outside to do this because you don't want to spray it all over your house and it stinks and it's toxic and bad for you. So just be outside when you do this. It dries very quickly. But you may choose to leave your drawing outside for a while because it's going to smell pretty bad. So if you bring it in, It's going to outgas or not. You can bring it in and just live with the distinct up to you. Anyway, that is spray fixative. 38. Congratulations!: Alright, We did it. Thank you so much for joining me on our journey today. I had a great time making this drawing with you. I hope you enjoyed it. I hope you got a lot out of the class. Just to recap, what we did when we made our hummingbird is we learned how to scale, or maybe you already knew how to do that, but we practiced scaling, working from a smaller reference photo and making a drawing it's a larger. We also worked on matching values so that the pic, the values in our picture, we're at least similar to the ones in the reference photo, which creates a much more finished rich picture. We did some animal textures, the feathers, the hardness of the beak, the shininess of the eye, the motion blur of the wings. And I hope you had a great time doing it. I do have other classes in a couple of other ones in charcoal for more beginning students, as well as chalk pastels, oil pastel colored pencil, graphite, watercolor, acrylic, just a bunch of other art mediums for both beginners and up. If you're interested, if you'd like the class, I hope you explore more. And I very strongly encourage you to take as many classes as you can from as many teachers as possible. Because I firmly believed that the more people you learn from, the richer your experience will be, and the more joyful your art-making process. I wish you all the best and thank you again for joining me today.