Realistic Charcoal Drawing for Beginners

1. 1.1 Charcoal Trailer: hi there. Today, I'm going to teach you how to draw a simple scene with charcoal. This is the scene we're gonna be working on. And my name is Diane. I've been teaching art for 11 years and making art my whole life, and I'm worrying a buffalo hat because wearing a buffalo hat is more fun than not wearing a buffalo hat. So the skills you're going to pick up today are that you're gonna learn how to draw simple image from a photograph. You're going to learn how to apply and manipulate charcoal. You're gonna learn how to create textures and chuckle if you've never drawn before or have drawn very rarely or if you've only free hand drawn and would like to learn how to measure . This is a good class for you. If you've ever been frustrated by charcoal, this is a great class for you. This is not a class for artists who want more of a challenge. Or if you've had a lot of experience with charcoal, I hope you enjoy the class 2. 2.1 Setup: So now we're gonna talk about how to set up your area, how to set up your materials for our drawing session. So first you want to be somewhere. You don't mind getting dusty. It's not gonna get hugely messy, but you are gonna be having a little bit of best residual. So, you know, somewhere maybe not on a brand new white carpet would be good. Um, And you want a table? I have, ah, drafting table here at a slight angle, which is really nice to draw it. Or you could just be at your dining room table or a desk or, you know, have your paper take two aboard like this. So it's a photograph. So it's real portable going to put in your life. So you want to download and print your reference photo, and you're gonna want to have a piece of paper with a eight inch by eight inch frame taped to the board. Um, don't do this drawing in a sketchbook. You don't want a squishy surface you want have a nice hard surface 3. 2.2 Materials: materials. You're gonna need a few things in order to get started here in order to do are drawing first you need charcoal. You can find all of these materials at any art store. The first kind of charcoal you need is called compressed charcoal. It's these big, thick, chunky, blocky like things. They're quite dark, and I'll show you examples of what they look like on this scratch paper here. So the compressed charcoal goes on solid black. It blends really well. It erases. We're blowing off the dust there. It erases, but not entirely. I'll talk about this. A racer. In just two minutes, you can see it. It does come off, but there's residual. We also have the vine charcoal, which is much lighter. These are these thin little willowy sticks, and they come in a package that looks like this. It's like a little plastic bag, and they also blend really easily. But you can see it's much lighter and it's easier to a race. And then we have a charcoal pencil. This is for fine details. You could do grasses your trees dabs. Dots would have you fine edges if you want to. Hard edges we'll get to that later. You also need a blending stump. This is actually a very, very tightly rolled piece of paper into a point, and this is good for softening and blending edges when your finger just feels a little too bulky for doing fine details. This is optional, but it's one of my very favorite tools. It's an eraser in the shape of a pencil, and it's great for erasing fine details. Or you can do some inside dark areas. Uh, the eraser itself for charcoal. This is called a kneaded eraser, and it's called that because you need it in order to clean it so you can see the more I stretch the CO, the lighter it gets and the lighter it gets the cleaner it is. So any time you go to a race, you want a clean area, your race and then it gets dirty again. So you just stretch it. It folds itself into itself and become cleaner. We also need cotton balls, these air for applying a large area of charcoal at one time, and we'll get to that when it's time to do it, and then you need a little white piece of paper. Make sure it's bright white, just white and cut a hole in it. And that is to be able to see value. Value is just the art term for lightness or darkness, and we'll talk about how to use that later and then sandpaper or a sandpaper pad. They sell these in art stores, but if you don't have one, just a piece of sandpaper is fine. And that is four sharp innings sent, creating fine hard edges on your charcoal so you can see that made early. Nice point. This is optional, but something I really like to have is that just a clean towel. If it's a little bit damp, that's helpful just to wipe your fingers on. If you don't care, you can also wipe them on your pants. Um, and that's all 4. 2.3 Mindset: in terms of your mindset for this class. We want to keep it light and loose and fun, but you also want it to look good. So as you're drawing, don't tell yourself that it's good enough and you'll fix it later. When you get Teoh the charcoal part, even if it feels a little bit frustrating, you have to put in a little bit more time. You have to double check your measurements. This is where you want to do that in the beginning stages in, the more you do it in the beginning, the happier you will be in the end, so let's get to it. 5. 2.4 Blend: So I'm going to show you how you can use the blending stump in a few different ways. Ways that we're going to use in this picture. So if I have an area of charcoal colored, the most basic way to use the blending stump blow off the dust is to use it as a blending tool. So you're just rubbing through it the same way you would use your finger. But the blending stump has the advantage of having a nice, pointy tip. This one is around her than this one just because I've used this one so much, but you can get right up next to an edge and keep that is really sharp, where sometimes your finger is just a little bit too bulky to do that. The other way you can use it is actually is a drawing tool so you can rub the blending stump in some of the charcoal and then you can color with it. And we're gonna be using both of these techniques in this picture, and you can see when you're coloring with it. It starts out dark and gets lighter as you go, because as you go, you're rubbing more and more charcoal off of the blending system, so you can either use it in that way. If you're going from dark to light on something or you can rub it in the charcoal, rub it on your scratch paper until you get the color you want and then use it to color in your picture. 6. 3.1 Measure Intro: in this section, we're going to be doing some measuring and learning how to draw accurately. We're going to put down all the lines needed for the whole drawing. And the first thing you need to do is make sure your reference photo is parallel to your drawings. So whether you have it take down on a surface or minus sitting next to it. But I happen to have this little metal lip here, which is ensuring that these two are parallel to one another. That's important because it will throw off your measurements a little bit if there s que from each other. So the purpose of having a good line drawing in the beginning or composition, which is just a fancy word for how things are arranged on the page, is that that is the backbone of your drawing. It's the foundation of what you're going to be creating here. So you wanted to be very accurate and, um, pleasing to you. It does not have to be exact. You do want to make you feel good. So take the time now to make those measurements accurate. 7. 3.2 connect: so make sure you take a minute before you start drawing toe. Look at the scene and absorb it. Kind of feel the weight and presence of the objects in the scene. Maybe put yourself in it. If that's helpful, try to hear the ripples of the water lapping on the shore, lapping against the boat. Feel what the wood might feel like. It's wet, It's dank. It's kind of a foggy, misty morning or evening, and you've just come back from a journey or you're about to embark on a journey and having all those kind of thoughts in your head or whatever thoughts. This image of oaks for you is helpful in terms of translating a photograph to a piece of art. 8. 3.3 Measuring Practice: So in this video, we're just gonna talk about the concept of how to measure and do a little practice before we actually do it on our drawing. So what you're going to do is use your pencil as you're measuring tool. So it's important that you're holding it in a way that you can both lay it down on the paper and pick it back up again. So you don't want to hold it in place like this, for example, the first thing we're gonna do is measure distance, and we're gonna measure the distance from this bottom corner to the horizon line in the picture. So I'm gonna use the tip of my pencil on line it up with that bottom corner and then the tip of my thumb or thumbnail for the top of the horizon line, and I'm gonna hold that space and pick the pencil up. And then I'm gonna move it over to the new paper, and I'm gonna put it down so that the pencil tip lines up with the bottom of my page. And then I know where that horizon line needs to be, and I'm gonna make a mark. It's always a good idea to go back and double check. Yeah, that looks like it's about right. So measuring distance is one way of measuring. The other one is measuring angles, which will get to later in the picture when we're drawing the boat. But I'm going to show you how to do it now so that you have it in your toolbox. So an angle is the directional line is going Which way is appointing? So for that, I'm going to use the long edge of my pencil and line it up against the two points that I want to measure from. Where my eye line is may look slightly different from where you're sitting, but you go ahead and measure your boat from your eye line and see what angle that is. Um and then pick up your pencil. But it's important to keep your elbows straight here because otherwise your angle can move . So we're gonna pick up our pencil, move it over to our sheet, and this might require some slightly awkward leaning back, and I'm gonna move it down to where it approximately looks like the boat is and mark it with two fingers and I'm just gonna hold those two fingers there so I can pick up my pencil and make a couple marks. It doesn't matter how long it is right now. We're just checking the angle of the line. Angles are more finicky than distances, so it's doubly important to double check your work. We do have a heartbeat, and we have breath which throws it off often. So I'm just gonna go back and do exactly the same thing again and check to see if those to line up correctly. And I was a little bit off, so I'm gonna poop. So I'm gonna move this up a little bit and then just triple check it. Yep, that works. 9. 3.4 Background: So to get started, we're going to just measure using our pencils a tool. So what, I'm gonna dio because our frame is the same Size is this frame. All the shapes you see here are gonna be the same size as what you put on your page. So I'm going to use my pencil as a measuring tool lining the tip of the pencil up with the bottom of the page and putting my some nail right that horizon line, because that's gonna be our very first shape, which is that that, uh, straight across line. And now make sure you're holding it in a way you can pick the pencil up reasonably well, like you wouldn't want a market like this, for example, cause you can't pick the pencil up. So you're holding onto the pencil, pick it up, move it over and line up the tip your pencil with the bottom of your page market was your other finger and make a little mark. So that's as high as it is. And it's always good idea to double check, not 100% necessary. But oops, I was off, so I'm kind of glad I did that not by that much, though. That definitely would not have been a deal breaker. But it's nice to be to be accurate, and I'm gonna do the same thing for the other side. The other side has a bush or this some island in front of it. So I'm just gonna imagine the top of the horizon line where it would end up if that Bush wasn't there. If it was going straight across, it's probably completely the same size as it is over here. It's not. Actually, it's a little bit higher, which means the horizon line doesn't go completely straight across. It goes slightly up towards the right. Make a mark over there. I mean, a double check it. So again, I'm just imagining where that line would end up if that island was not there. Yep. Got it. So now I'm going to draw a straight line for approximately straight. Don't use a ruler for this. You don't want it to be 100% straight because the natural wobbliness that are heartbeat and our breath contribute to drawing makes it feel like a little bit more of a looser image and less wooden looking. So you actually want that. It's a good thing. Now I'm going to see how told this Back Island is, I guess, or this this mountain range hilly range. And I'm gonna use the same measuring technique and putting my pencil down on one side. My thumbnail on the other gonna move it over, make Mark. I'm in a double check it even though it's really tiny. Yeah, that's good. And then it goes off the page. Who knows what happens behind this bush? So I'm just gonna measure how tall it is here because it's so small that if it gets a little smaller, it's not really gonna matter. And I'm going to use that same measurement to market on the other side, and then I'm gonna draw, Do make it pretty lumpy. But don't worry about being 100% accurate again. If you if you try to really copy every little bump in line there, it's going to feel kind of wooden when you're done. So you don't want to have a perfectly accurate penciling right there. 10. 3.5 Island: So we've got the background and we're not going to draw the clouds. Will freehand those later? We are going to draw a basic shape for this little island here. I'm going to see how far out it sticks into the water from the side of the page and move it over and make a dot And then I'm going to do the same thing from top to bottom, and I'm not going all the way to the top. I'm just I'm going slightly below those leaves because I don't want a pencil line showing through the leaves when we're done. So what we're gonna do is overlapped the leaves later with charcoal. So the height of that is this tall. And I'm going to guess that the bottom of its right there and the tops right there because I can only do one measurement at a time. I guessed where it is, but I know that the height is accurate. So now that I know the heights accurate, I'm just gonna measure my space and see if I put it in approximately the right place. And I did That was a close one. Okay, guess. All right. So now We're just gonna draw a basic shape for the island, something like that. So if you're feeling any sense of tension at this point, drop your shoulders, breathe deep and try to draw really lately and remember that perfection is not important. It's important that you like what you see at this point. And if you don't take a minute to adjust it. So now that we've got the background on, we're not going to draw a line for this either. That's easy enough. Toe eyeball. Later. We don't want a pencil line showing through the charcoal, so we'll leave that alone. We're just gonna draw in the boat. 11. 4.1 Boat Outline: So now we're gonna move on to the rowboat in the reflection again. Picture yourself in the scene. Imagine what this sounds like. Smells like feels like feel the cold hardness of the wood on the water, the sound of the wind or the breeze and let that inform your piece. It's you kind of want to feel the spirit of of what you're drawing as you're going at it and it keeps it more light and fun. So the first thing I'm gonna do is measure the distance from the front of the boat to the rear, and that will kind of be an anchor. And then we're going to check the angle like we talked about before. So I have got that distance. I'm going to move over, and I'm guessing that it's It's a little closer to the bottom of the page than the mountains back there. So I'm gonna guess it's right there, and I'm going to guess that the angle is right here. So the only thing I know right now is that that distance is correct. So I'm gonna check this distance to see if that's correct, and it's not any to move it up a little bit, Maurice, My old mark. I got a little easier to see, and now I'm going to check the angle. So if you remember this from the how to measure video from a little bit ago, we lay the pencil down against the two points we're trying to measure keeping your elbows straight. Pick your pencil up, very slowly, move over and lay it down. Oh, when? As it happens, that did work out Well, I thought I was going to change it cause I changed the distance, but I guess I was wrong the first time. So now it's right. Fat worked out. Now I'm gonna do corner to corner here to see the distance and move it over. And the angle looks pretty straight actually There, Like, almost parallel to the bottom of the page. So I'm gonna put a mark there, and then I'll check that keeping my all those straight mood over Yeah, that works, and then I'm going to go back to here. Well, actually, we already have the dot there. So now I'm just gonna draw the shape. So ignoring notches and and all that sort of thing. Little details. I'm just gonna connect the dots right now. Straight line a straight line, but this is gonna be a curved line, and it's gonna dip down a little bit first and then get pretty wide and connect to the back . And I need to go a little further there right into that dot and I'm just gonna look at it for a second, see what stands out. One great thing you can do to make your drawing accurate is looked back and forth back and forth between your reference photo and you're drawing very quickly because differences will stand out to you. If you do that, it's kind of like a flip book to sort of technique. And what I can see right away is that my dip here is pretty much in the middle of these two . Whereas here the depart is closer to the back of the boat. So I'm gonna just that I'm going to make this a little bit flatter here so that it appears that the rounder part is in the back and looking back and forth very quickly. I feel like it's now a little bit too round back here, so I'm gonna flatten it out and you'll you can go through this process as well. Just kind of adjusting until you feel like it looks rift or until you're happy with it. And I still feel like it looks to around here. So I'm gonna take this opportunity to measure this space here, and I'm putting my pencil perpendicular to this line because it's easiest to measure that way. If I were to measure diagonally this way or that way, it's hard to replicate it reasonably well. But I can see that it's perpendicular here, so Oh, that's my problem. I went too low. So I need to go a little bit higher here. Race my original line. All right, Now, I'm feeling pretty good about that. So I'm going to move on to the bottom edge of the boat. Um, I'm gonna measure from this top corner to the very bottom corner of the boat again, ignoring all the fancy detail and see how big that is. It is that big, and it looks like it tilts down to the left. So I'm gonna measure that angle, have it over. Yeah, that works. And then this is a round shape, so there's no real corner there. So I'm going to just measure from the lip of the boat to the bottom at what appears to be the thickest point. So it'll go down to there, all right? And then there is a little bit of a corner here, so I measure down to that corner just to see how far it is. And it's close enough to the edge of the page to where you could just eyeball the distance there. So now I've got some connect the dots thing going on here that will make it easy to draw, the easier to draw the shape. So it's gonna be quite thick and around in the beginning, out to the back and then connect there. So that's my basic boat shape. Now we can go in and out details. 12. 4.2 Boat Reflection: So now we'll add the reflection. And I'm going to just measure from the side that from the bottom of the boat to the end of the reflection, see how long that is. It looks like it starts. Ah, a little higher than the thickest part of the boat. And we'll end up about right there. That's a guess. But I'm going to check the angle a little off their looks like that needs to move up. So I can't just move that up because I need to keep the same size. So I have to move both of them. Those thoughts over my race, my old ones. If you make my dots a little easier to see there, then check it again. Here we go. And then, um, the bottom edge of the reflection comes down just a little bit. I'm not gonna measure. That was It's so tiny. And I'm gonna measure over here from the bottom of the reflection to the top, move it over and make a couple of dots. Measure the angle. Yep, that works. And I'm gonna even though I've measured these two angles, I'm gonna measure the angle from here to here to make sure it all matches up. Yep, that works. So now I'll draw. And this is just gonna be a little wobbly. Thank you. And don't worry about making it exact. Just do something like that. Oops. Hi, Miss my dot So go over there. And a race. My mistake. 13. 4.3 Boat Slats: and now we can go in and out some details. So first I'll add the horizontal slats I'm gonna measure from one side to the other to see how long it is. And it looks like this one is totally parallel to the back of the boat. So I can't see the back of the boat cause my pencils covering it. But I'm gonna guess that it if I put a dot there and there, that should be parallel, and I'll measure the angle. Although it's pretty easy to eyeball because they're so close together, that will work just fine. So I'm gonna make a line across. This is just a placeholder for right now, we'll get into details in a minute. Same thing with this slat. The length of that is this long, and it appears to be a little Well, no, I guess it is kind of parallel to the back one. So I'm gonna try that. I'm guessing that it's right here and here, and we'll check that out angle ways. Does that angle match up to this angle? Not exactly. Try that again. I feel like I moved. Yeah, it needs to move up a little bit, But that means I need to move my bottom mark two in order to keep the length correct. So now I know I've got the right angle, but the wrong length. So if I take this and move it back, you have that are ready to move. Oh, you know what I'm gonna measure from the corner of the boat to the tip of the slats. So I know where that Mark needs to be in the front. It needs to be right there. So now I can accurately measure the angle. So right there in there, I'm gonna raise my old marks. And now, although we'll check the length. So I did that one a little bit backwards. But either way, it doesn't really matter if you measure angle or length first. It's not working out now. I'm feeling frustrated, but I know I will get through it. So I'm gonna check the angle again. No, I guess I could move a little bit. Okay, so it is kind of a really extreme angle, which makes any little tiny change. Very market. It's almost completely horizontal. Okay, now I think that's right. Only double check the link. All right. Got it. So it took a little back and forth, but we arrived, and now it will connect. So now you've got your basic skeleton of your boat, and now we can go in and out even more details. 14. 4.4 Boat Details: next, we'll add the, um carved out edge there. So the back of this this corner slants down a little bit from there and then goes straight across. So from there, we're gonna go just a little dip a little bit below the edge of the boat and connect right there, and then we can erase the original outline. That's really close to the new line. So it's gonna be hard to not a race that too. But I can always put that back in which I'm going to do right now, and I'm gonna add the little decorative accents back here. So this tips down and back and then from the bottom curve is a boat. It goes up well, this follows the same angle we had, but it goes out a little bit. And then there's this very, very tiny edge right here, which points a little bit more diagonally than this one does something like that, and just to be very accurate, I'm gonna measure it if you feel compelled to go right ahead. Yeah, that's the same size. So we're fine there and we'll add the lip of the boat, this front edge here, which is going to come from actually really erased the old line. First, that front lip is going to come from the inside edge just a little bit down from this corner. The original corner we drew and follow the curve of the boat, starting out sicker and getting a little bit center as we go. And then it disappears beneath this board thing, which will put on in a minute. And I feel like I need that too sick, pretty much the whole way. So I'm gonna go back and try it again. Dinner. There we go. That works. Now this board thing or I don't know what the tip of the boat is called, um, the stern, right? I think so. The length of that is this long it's gonna come out to about right there. And from there it just overlaps that edge I just put on and it kind of cuts in front of the boat. It's very thin from the angle. We're looking at it out. You can barely see it, but then you can go back in a Reese. That bit of edge 15. 4.5 More Boat Details: I guess Let's finish off. The slats will add the other side of each slat. So I'm going to see, uh, which which way I should make this, lad, if this is the front edge of the back edge by measuring, they're all measure from the front, actually of the boat to the beginning of my sweat so that this right here, this line I drew will be the front edge of the slats. I'm gonna draw the back one, which is nothing more than a parallel line that's very close to the front. The first line I did. So I'm not even gonna measure. It is. It's so close. And then the back one, I'm going to see a measure from the back of the boat to the back of the slat. Very tiny tiny space there. Yeah, so it looks like again I did the front of the slap the first time I measured. And I'll just drop Caroline. Great. Next with that as well. And then we have this little notch next to the fronts. Let and the front slat, actually the top edges of both slats protrude above the boat just a little bit. So I'm going to go up and then over, uh and then over and try to erase the little tiny bit of boat line that's inside those slats. But it's completely fine if you don't get that because you're gonna cover it with charcoal anyway, and then we'll have the notch. So I guess I'll measure how long it is. We're gonna dip down just a little bit and then go over injuries. That remnant of original line that we have there. Okay, so that's Oh, I'm sorry. There is one more thing here will just draw in that little plate on the front. It looks like it starts about right There. Goes up in a sort of trap is a little shape right there in the front and that that will be it for our drawing. Now we can move on to charcoal 16. 5.1 Shading Overall Tone: Now we're going to start adding the charcoal, and the first thing you want to do is put a tone or value on the paper so that you have something down that's not pure white. And you can pull highlights out of it really nicely with an eraser. And you also just don't want it to look pure white like the edge of your paper. If you look at your reference photo and look at the lightest part of the sky, even that is a little bit darker than the pure word of the edge of the paper. So to tone the paper, take a stick of your vine charcoal. Have a piece of scratch paper handy and color on your scratch paper, a large area of vine charcoal, and then you're going to use the cotton balls to tone Your can't your paper. The way you do that, it's just rub the cotton balls in the vine charcoal a little bit, kind of dab it on the side to make sure you don't have a lot, because what you don't want to do is put so much on that. You lose your pencil lines once you lose your pencil lines that you can't get them back. So you want to make sure you're not toning, Not over toning. You can always put more well, Dad. Yeah, there's not a lot on their Not at all. We can go much darker, so I'm gonna put more on here, get a little bit more on the cotton ball. Now, we're just gonna rub all over, and I'm gonna keep doing that and keep running until I get a nice even coat of grey over the entire picture. Incidentally, you can also use a Kleenex for this or a makeup sponge or anything that kind of will be a vehicle for light amounts of charcoal. But I like cotton because I feel like it spreads better than Kleenex does. Kleenex is a little harsh, so we'll just keep doing that. Playing it on lightly and pressing harder and harder is I go because the first touches has the most charcoal on it, that you want that to be the lightest. So I'm just gonna keep going here, and it doesn't have to be completely even either. You do want it relatively even, but it's not going to be perfect, so don't try to make it perfect. Okay, so I feel like that's pretty good. And I'm gonna stop there 17. 5.2 Shading Sky: So now that we have put the tone on the camp on the paper, some of your lines may have lightened. Hopefully, they didn't disappear altogether. But take this opportunity to go back and redraw them lightly. You don't want them to be dark because again, you don't want them to show up in the final picture to will or at all, actually, but you do need to be able to see them. So put them back in just dark enough to where you can see them clearly, or even not so clearly, as long as you can see them. And now we're going to start out in charcoal. So we're going to start with the vine charcoal because it's the lightest one, and therefore it's the most easily reasonable, the most flexible and the one we want to put all our first values down with, so that we can change it if we need to. We're going to start by building up the whole background at once, putting lightest values down and then going back and putting dark values because we want our values. Or, as I mentioned before, value is the word for lightness and darkness. We want our values to match the reference photo pretty well again. It doesn't have to be perfect, but we wanted to look pretty pretty close. So we're gonna color the sky with vine and then the water basic values only. So in the top of the sky, you can see it's a little bit dark. So I'm gonna put some lines with my vine charcoal, and I'm using kind of the wide side of it to make really broad strokes and also notice on coloring horizontally. Because that's the dinner. The direction this guy goes, you don't want to have any sense of vertical nous in the sky. And then I'm just going to use a one finger and rubs. I decide into that charcoal to really make it smooth and blended both into itself and into the sky below it. And I feel like that's pretty good. But right now I'm going to stop and introduce you to you're a little window, which we talked about earlier. This is great for determining if your values are accurate or not. What you do is lay it down on your reference photo where you wanna check. I want to check the top of the sky and see if my value matches that one and you can see that's pretty light grey showing through right next to the white. So if I put it next to mine, it's pretty close. I'm a little bit darker, so I'm just gonna go back and lift some off with my needed a Reeser. And you can do this by just dabbing at it. If you rub, you'll tend to take too much off with vine charcoal because fine charcoal is so light it doesn't need a lot of encouragement toe lift off. So I'm just gonna gently dab all the way across and then use one finger and rub again to make sure it's smooth because the eraser will leave little patterns in it. And then I'm going to check the value again, and I'm happier with that. I think that looks pretty close, so I'm gonna leave it. Um, I'm also going to check the value of the lightest part of the sky, and mine is definitely darker. So I'm going to go through and dad with my you did a race or through the lightest part here and pull some color off and actually I am going to rub a little bit here. It doesn't feel like it's doing it an adequate job by just dabbing, ignoring the clouds. I'm just focusing on the cuts color of the sky behind the clouds. And then that left some lines here. So I'm gonna go back and rub those out. And if it seems like it's not rubbing as well as you would like it to try pressing a little harder or try blending in circles like mine wasn't blending out that line I left wasn't blending out as well as I'd like it to. So I'm trying different ways of rubbing, and that worked pretty well. And where did the vine go? Here it is. So now I'm gonna put a little bit on the bottom edge of the sky because that appears to be darker than the top again. Nice broad strokes going just down to the top of your mountain mountains hills and looking frequently back from your reference photo to your drawing and rubbing sideways. And then here I have kind of a blended line right here and rubbing sideways, and that's creating the bloodline. But here it seems to be more of a gradual change from darker delight. So here I'm going to color. I'm going to blend in circles to force it up into the lighter part of the sky. And now that I've got that down there, I'm gonna check the value, and that looks accurate. But this to me seems almost the same. Values the top of this guy. So I'm going to go in and pull a little bit more off, and that's optional. If you want to have your top of the sky a little darker, that's completely fine. Or maybe yours is lighter than mine. They're all gonna come out a little different, which is good because it's art. It's an interpretation of a photo. Okay, I'm happy with that. 18. 5.3 Shading Water: So now we'll put in basic values in the water and I'm skipping the mountain range cause it's kind of precise, and I want to get these big areas that aren't very precise in first because that way I don't have to work around tiny little details. So I'm going to do the same exact thing I did in the sky putting large areas of buying charcoal down where I see some darkness. Any darkness gonna go right over there where the reflection for the island is gonna be. There's a little strip of white there, but I can't ignore that. And we will erase it out later just cause it's easier to do that way. And then it kind of stops. But I'm gonna put a few fours until lines coming down from not to suggest ripples in the water. And I'm gonna do the same thing on the bottom here. Typically, it would be totally fine to color over the reflection of the boat, but since I want to preserve that shape so that I can see where it is later, I'm gonna color around it and I'm gonna get lighter and lighter on my pressure as I come up away from the bottom of the page because it is pretty dark down here. And then I'm gonna put a little bit over here next to the reflection of the both blow off the dust and blend again mostly side to side. But you can go in circles if you feel like it's two horizontal or you don't want to see any lines at all. Or if you're in this case right here, trying to encourage it up into the lighter area circles is a good way to do that. And right up into the top sections, I decide. I'm gonna look at it for a minute. I feel like this area needs to be a little lighter, so I'm going to use my eraser damn some out and go back and blend some more white. My fingers on my damp clause actually doesn't have to be damp either. It could be dry. I just like it down because it seems to get me a little bit cleaner, all right? And I like that for now. So I'm gonna erase out that white ish line. Just put a poor is on the line right there. And then if you'll notice right along the horizon. It's a little bit light to, um, we'll get to that in a minute. First, let's will put in the mountains in the clouds. For this, I'm gonna wipe off the eraser crumbs and at the same time just soften it into the water. That's often a little too much. It kind of disappeared. Only put it back. So just one stroke in each direction. I'm pulling it off the end so that the ends don't remain blunt. They kind of blend into the water, and I think that works fine. 19. 5.4 Shading Clouds: So now I'm going to go into the clouds. And again, you don't have to copy these clouds. Exactly. If you want yours a little fluffy or slightly different direction, or fewer or more, do what you will. It's your drawing. I'm gonna try to copy them, but I'm not going to try to be to exact, because I want this to be fun. So I'm putting some more precise lines with precise spaces between them, pulling them off to the side and allowing them to disappear by pulling the divine charcoal off the page kind of gradually. And then there's the these little wispy ones that are a little more bumpy in the middle. I'm gonna put a few little dashes up there, and that's good enough for now. We'll see what happens when I blend. So to blend these, you want to just rub a little slower and do one at a time, wiping your finger between so start at the longer edge of the cloud and pull into the finer tip so that it blends into the sky a little more seamlessly, starting from the wide side, pulling towards the sin tip and you'll see that leaves a really nice little wisp at the end . Wipe. And then up here, I'm going to just dab thes because I don't want to. Over. I don't want to blend them out. And if I pull on them, I feel like I might just do that. And now I feel like they're too dark. So I'm just gonna go back and wipe them again. Maybe that'll help. Not really. So I'm going to use my razor and Abbott them all the way across and again if you have your clouds to dark. But like it, you don't have to do this. You can leave them darker or maybe years or too late. And you like him that way. Are you wanna dark in them? Now is the time for you to be able to do all that stuff. Okay, Now I'm feeling satisfied with my clouds. 20. 5.5 Shading Mountains: so I'm going to go into the mountains and just color solid and pressing as hard as I can. I'm going to keep the top edge and the bottom edge really sharp. So it doesn't really matter if you have a sharp edge on your mind charcoal as long as you are pointing an edge towards those sides, so I'm pointing an edge towards the bottom. I'm gonna pull that all the way across. It doesn't matter if you do this all the way across here in a little section at a time, just like I did whichever way is fine. And then as I go, I'm trying to keep the top edge really sharp and adding a little bumps as I go blowing off the dust. It's not really defining very well, though, so I will go back with some compressed charcoal to make it a little bit easier to see the top edge. It's because of the cloud I made there is pretty dark, but as you can see as I get out into the lighter area of this guy now I can see the top edge of those mountains really easily. I'm going to go into the island a little bit, and then I'm going to see what happens when I use my finger. My finger is taking off quite a bit of the charcoal. So now I'm going to introduce you to the blending. Stump the tool you can use when your finger feels too large or, um, if it's taking off too much color. The blending stump will also take off some color, but sometimes you can manipulate it a little bit better, since it's smaller. Yeah, that's taking off quite a bit of vine charcoal, actually, so I'm still going to use it to blend. But then I'm going to go back with compressed and dark in this area, but I'm using. It's really, really nice to blend this stuff because it keeps the integrity of the top of my mountains really nice. Blow off the dust. And, um, in the beginning, I introduced you to the charcoal pencil, which I don't remember if I mentioned or not. But this is also compressed charcoal. It's just the precise form of it. So one thing of to mention here is when you're starting to go into details of the temptation is to put your hand in your drawing, but that will lift off some charcoal, so there's a couple ways to get around that one way is to put your hand outside the drawing . If you're comfortable doing that and then coloring like this, if that's feels too awkward or you're too far away, you can also have a piece of scratch paper and put it over your drilling where you want to put your hand and lay it down like that. And that way that protects your drawing to Andrew. Well, you don't really care about your hand, I assume getting charcoal on it, but you don't want to lift the colors off of your picture. What you don't want to do, though, is slide the scratch paper, so every time you move it, pick it up and re position it so that you're not smearing your color your value. So I'm not pressing very hard here, just pressing hard enough to get the top edge to show. And then as I move along, impressing lighter and lighter until it just sort of disappears into the vine, and I'm not gonna continue here already, have a nice sharp it. So blow off the dust get my, um it's just delete my scratch paper. Get my blending stump back and go in and soften. Here we go. 21. 5.6 Shading Island: So next we're going to do the island. And for that you can just color solid with the vine charcoal color. In that shape, you did as a first layer blow off the dust. You don't even need to blend because we're gonna be adding so much compressed on top of this, that is, lending is a point. Um, also, make sure you're going off your frame a little bit, because when you do, put your beautiful finish charcoal in a frame, you want to have something for the edges of the matter, the frame to overlap. So you colored that in with your vine. Now will go in with the actually, let's use the compressed charcoal first, and we're gonna add some darks. So I'm just gonna go in and color in some little swatches. No particular place reason for this for where I'm putting them, except I'm tryingto loosely coffee where I see darker areas here. But other than that, there is very little rhyme or reason, and right now it's may feel like a blotchy ness. But don't worry, we're going somewhere with it. So, um, now, just dab with your finger. One finger, whichever finger you want and see what that does. If it feels like you need a little bit more, you can rub. Yeah, I felt like it in a little bit more, but you do want some of the vine charcoal to show through. Don't worry about there being a fuzzy edge here. You actually want that? So I'm gonna wipe my fingers off, and now I'm going to grab the charcoal pencil and go back and create the illusion of foliage. And we're gonna do that just by flicking out some little lines. So plant your charcoal pencil inside your bushes and just very lightly. Very tiny motions with your wrist of flicking out go in multiple directions. So kind of from one point out like a rainbow. You can do little dots to you want some variety here because there's a variety of foliage on that island, and this one actually appears to have a few little leaves showing or whatever. Those are chunks of leaves. So I'm gonna put in some bigger chunks, more dots and dabs, And then of here there's this big one, which is mostly little chunks, but also just tons of little dabs. So dots thought start stopped, and then I'm gonna go back and just adjust it. So I feel like these are a little too spiky for my personal taste. I'm gonna add some dots down here and on the bottom edge. I want to create that that look of it laying into the water. So I'm going to copy that shape. It kind of comes back, had a diagonal on following my pencil line. And then there's this little suggestion of some bit of it jutting out into the water. So I'm putting that in, but going completely horizontal common, the steak here is to make it go diagonal down. But that wouldn't be following the water. So make sure you're following the direction of the water by going completely horizontal with that little bit sticking out, and I'm just gonna color. It's solid with the rest. And then I'm going to use my blending stump because my fingers too big for this and just soften the bottom edge, just rubbing it side to side, blowing off the dust. So there's your island, which currently looks like it's floating because there's no reflection. So now we're gonna put it in the reflection and to do that. We're just loosely copying the shape. It's gonna come straight down, almost as that's going straight up and then kind of curving back to the right on we coloring with the vine Charcoal Just Sol is the same way we started with the island itself blowing off the dust again. Don't worry about blending here and now we're gonna put on a little bit of compressed charcoal in a darker area going horizontally because the waves are suggesting horizontal motion there something like that. But I'm not going to go up all the way because this part is quite light. It's misty looking, so I'm only gonna put the dark where I see it. And then I'm going to use one finger and blend first side to side white, my finger off a little, put that down, blow off the dust, and then I'm gonna go back and disturb the edges because you do want those to be pretty soft. They're not hard like the edges up there. They're blended into the water, and then this edge between the dark and the light seems pretty hard to me. So I'm going to soften that and dab into the area between the dark shadow or dark reflection and the island so that they meet a little bit in the middle. It is darker over here, next to the edge. And I don't want that light strip to be too dominant. And I feel like that that works. So I'm going to stop there and hopefully by now, your hand looks something like this. Just a lot of fun, but you can wipe it off white, most of it off. 22. 5.7 Shading Water Highlight: So now I'm gonna go back and add that little strip of light to the underside of the hills like we talked about earlier. I'm going to use the eraser pencil for this. The eraser pencil is something that you may not be able to find it. Art stores. I've had trouble finding it. So if you can't find an eraser pencil, you can just you can use the tip of a regular eraser. Or better yet, like a pink pearl or some something with like a really sharp corner is fine. This one does not have a particularly sharp corner. So as you can see, I'm making a larger white strip than I need to. But then you can go back and amend it with the vine. Ideally, you have that eraser pencil, but it's just a lovely, lovely tool. It does appear a little bit soft. I'm gonna take my finger and just over of it through once. And I got rid of most of it there by mistake. So I'm gonna go back and do it again. And this time I'm going to take off a little less by pressing not as hard with the eraser pencil so that I don't need to go back and blend it because that clearly didn't work very well. There we go. 23. 5.8 Shading Boat Reflection: and now we can move on to the boat. So, actually, I'm going to do the boat reflection first, because technically, that's laying behind the boat, and it's easier to do things in the background before you do the foreground. This water here is pretty dark, so I'm going to see if the convinced divine charcoal is even really worth putting in here. If I should just skip to compressed if it is showing up against the reflection, so I will put a coat of this on. Charcoal is a beautiful medium because it's Ah lot about layering, and I really enjoy the concept of layering both physically and of a metaphor for building a drawing rather than taking a snapshot or using a photo coffee or any sort of instance image reproduction method. It's just feels very gratifying to me. So coloring that in solid and then, in theory, I would go and put the lights on the boat to, But I don't want to lose my lines that I've drawn so carefully by putting in the light. So I'm gonna put in darks first on the boat so that the lights pop out and then we'll go back and adjust those lights later. But first I'm gonna put the compressed charcoal into the reflection so that I don't lose my reflection when I put the boat in. So I'm gonna take this and dark and write words closest to the boat. And it's quite thick here where the vote diverge is from the water, and then it gets seems to get a little darker at the tip. And I'm purposely adding Cem, really. Ripley roughly lines here because I wanted to look like it's water like it's a ripple e. So who are just adding more dark into the underneath the reflection of the boat. And it's very dark where the boat touches the water all the way across. And then there's just little dabs of dark along the top edge. So I color that in, and I'm gonna use my finger to blend. Since this is a pretty large shape, my finger will fit in there. But feel free to use your blending stump if it's more comfortable. And I'm blending in tiny little circles because I want to encourage the compressed charcoal to to blend with the vine, blow off the dust, and then I'm going to use the blending stump for the edges. If you'll notice the edges in the reference photo summer sharp. And then there's summer fuzzy. So you want to replicate that you don't have It doesn't matter which edges you keep sharpened which ones you keep for the as long as you have some of each. So to keep them sharp, you're just gonna put your blending stump right up next to the edge and don't go any further. So I'm going to do that with a few of these little edges. I'm only going right to the very edge there and blending in little circles into the vine that I'm going to just wipe it off because that's got a lot of charcoal on it. And to make the fuzzy edges, you're gonna go into the water a little bit and blend in circles and see how that softens the edge. It makes it not hard. So I'm just doing it kind of randomly all the way back. And I'm gonna do a little more here because it's kind of crumbly looking. And then I'm noticing that this it just is not nearly dark enough, so I'm going to go back and put more compressed charcoal back there. And there is the reflection is calm enough. The water is common of where you can see the end of that boat sticking out. So I'm gonna add that to the reflection to We're also welcome to use your charcoal pencil if the compressed charcoal there feels too clunky and just going to blend the rest of these edges and that my little end of my boat reflection there didn't attached to the boat itself . So I'm going to use the Terkel pencil to color that in, and I'm also going to use the pencil anywhere. The edge seems very crumbly. I'm holding my pencil fairly far up the shaft of the pencil, by the way, so that you can see the tip. But really, the closer you're holding your pencil to the tip of the pencil, the more control you'll have. And that's true of just about any tool. So I'm just going back and adding more dark work to the edge. Adoree Seymour dark. Okay, and I'm happy with that. For now. We'll probably go back and adjust it later. 24. 5.9 Shading Boat: now, as I talked about before, we typically would do the lights first. But if I color light over my whole boat, I'm gonna lose my pencil lines. So instead, I'm gonna go backwards and do the darks, and I'm just going to start with my charcoal pencil. Actually, I'm probably going to use my charcoal pencil entirely. Whoops. And colored into the slap there. I'll get rid of that in a minute that I'm using my charcoal pencil entirely because this is a very precise object, and the compressed charcoal is very large, so I don't want to use it here, so I'm just coloring it in solid inside the boat and I'm gonna put my paper down so I can rest my hand on the next sec. Actually, let me get rid of that mistake I made so that I can I don't lose my sled. I'm using my eraser pencil. Now to do that again. If you don't have an eraser pencil, try the corner of Appointee Eraser. That'll be fine. So I mean, a color in this next section of dark and getting right up to the edge of the boat Very, very sharp. So to do that. I'm pressing pretty hard with the pencil and just going slowly back and forth. And there is an area of lighter wood in the photograph right here at the bottom, but will erase that out shortly. So right now you can just color. It's solid black, Yeah, blowing off the dust and same thing on the bottom edge here underneath the rim of the boat . And this is where that board overlaps the edge. So I'm going up purposely into this darker area, and then I'm going to continue coloring underneath the rim of the boat all the way back, keeping that edge very sharp on. And I'll do the same thing here, right next to my Travis oId shape, Very dark, right up next to the rim of the boat. The bottom in both here. I'm going to color a little bit lighter because I don't want to lose the separation between the boat and the reflection. And the boat is lighter here, so that works well in both capacities and then for the body of the boat. I'm gonna color lighter because it really is lighter. It's darker. Both of the stoppage and bottom edge and it's lighter in the middle. So all I'm doing is using lighter pressure here and you'll see little tiny dots of white showing through white paper. That's fine. You'll blend that out later, and then the back of the boat is also very dark. So I'm pressing very hard there, and I'm going to go out to the little notch we talked about earlier and just just sort of dabbing the tip of the pencil ings that's so tiny that it would be hard to do any other way . And then the top edge here is very precise as well. At this point, I'm going to use the sandpaper pad to sharpen because, as you can see, the tip of my pencil has gotten pretty dull, and it's making it more challenging to keep those edges short. So I'm just gonna road my charcoal pencil on there to get a point. Your tip. Test it. Yeah, that works better. Okay, so now I've got the main areas darkened. Oh, I'm gonna put a little bit in the front edge of this trap is wage a to and then pressing hard in the front color behind it. Lighter so that it gets not a dark. Okay, Now I'm gonna use the blending stump to soften all of this. So I'm going to start in the lighter section because I don't want to pull too much dark in there right away. So I'm gonna blend all of this lighter area first and then pull the darker part into it by coloring in little circles, and that's actually lightning it quite a bit. I'm gonna have to go back and dark in that again. I accidentally just got some into the room. But that's fine, because you're actually gonna use the blending stump to color the rim and the slats blow off the dust and I'll do a little bit in the trap. Is oId shape there? I'm just sort of dabbing at it to blend. Had I'm going to blend very carefully inside these darker shapes well off the dust. So now I'm gonna just rub the blending stump over here to get most of the charcoal off and lightly just plants it in that would to see what value I get. And I really like that value That's nice and light. And it's it's contrast ing enough with the dark toe where it stands out. So I'm going to just use that and color it. I mean, do the same thing on the rim, And I'm also purposely kind of swing into the darker areas because I am running out of charcoal on the tip of the blending stump. So going into these darker areas gets a little charcoal back on the tip and allows me to push it into the lighter areas. The other advantage of doing it coloring this way rather than using the vine charcoal. The color those in is that you're not only coloring, but you're doing your blending at the same time so you don't have to go back and blend your edges, which is lovely. So now we have our basic boat and reflection. We have our basic picture. Now we're going to go back and refine and add details 25. 6.1 Refining Darks: So in this section we're going to focus on finishing touches, just refining the whole drawing all over, checking each area as well as the picture as a whole. So since we're on the boat and we're not quite done with it, we'll start here. We want to focus on Larger is first, so we won't want to do details like a little chain until the very end instead will focus on darkening and lightening and adjusting edges in the larger part. So I'm going to start by a darkening the reflection a little bit in the front because it seems darker here than it is back there, and I had not seen that before, so I'm going to rub some more in to the front, and I'm also going to darken areas on the boat. Before, I had used the charcoal pencil. But the compressed charcoal is a little bit darker than that, so I'm going to use the compressed here to darken. I'm just gonna be very careful to keep my edges sharp to keep the edge sharp with a large thing like compressed charcoal. Just make sure you find a corner of the past still a corner of the charcoal and put that corner right up next to the edge. You're trying to keep sharp and just go really slow and be very careful. And if for some reason you accidentally get it into another shape, you can just raise it. So it's not the end of the world. So I do want those the whole edge of the boat darker. So I put in some compressed blow off the dust, and I'm going to use the blending stump again to blend it into the vine, charcoal in the middle or into the lighter charcoal in the center. Put off dust. He was continually blow off the dust as you go. 26. 6.2 Erasing Highlights: Then inside the boat, you'll see these lighter areas. So I'm going to use the eraser pencil to get those off or again. You can use a pointy eraser tip if you have one, and I'm just going to erase out lightly. I'm not pressing very hard because I do want it to be fairly dark, darker than these slats, but not as dark as the intense, compressed charcoal everywhere else that indicates the bottom of the boat inside. And it does seem to be a little bit lighter along the very top edge here. So I'm gonna rub a little bit. There is well, and underneath the notch, and I'm just gonna look at each piece and see where else needs some help. So here I feel like the rim of the boat got a little bit sick. So I'm going to take my charcoal pencil and make it sinner by pushing down on it with the inside into the boat. I'm just respond. Finding that shape a little. Where else I'm gonna add a couple little sin lines one right there, one of the very top edge of that board to give it a boundary, and then the top edge of this part needs to be very much darkened and sharpened. It was a little bit loose, and I need to add the front part of those slats, which is just a very tiny, slightly hired dark edge. So I went up into the water just a little bit there. And now I'm pulling back into the slap. Same thing on this one, and it ends up overlapping the edge of the boat. A little bit was a dark line parallel to the room in the boat. Same thing on this one. 27. 6.3 Sharpening Edges: looking back at the slide over here, I notice I went a little bit into the water. So I'm going to just take my razor pencil and very, very lightly dabbed at it to get it off. So these are the kinds of things you'll probably find different things that you need to change about yours. But you get the idea that you're just going back and refining. I have a little bit of extra charcoal here. I don't know. I don't even remember doing that. But there it is. So I'm going to get rid of it. And I'm also noticing at my reflection, edge is still a little bit sharper than I'd like it to be. So I'm going to use the blending stump and go around and soften. And now I'm feeling pretty happy with that. So let me take a look at the rest of the drawing. And this is where you'll want to go back and notice the sky and look at it compared to your reference photo, are you happy with it? Is there anything else you want to add? I don't know why, but I feel compelled to add this one little last cloud at the very top. So I'm going to do that now. And I'm gonna look at the mountains and feel happy with that. The edge of my island seems a little pale here, so I'm gonna take some vine charcoal and see if I can add a little bit more there. Let me look at the water like the water reflection on the boat. 28. 6.4 Chain Signature: the chain is something you can choose not to add if you don't want to have your happy Was that the way it is? By all means, believe it. If you would like to add it, I would suggest practicing first on a piece of scratch paper. Actually, let me do it over here. Um, and make sure your pencils very, very sharp and just draw some tiny little circles. They don't all have to be completely open, but something like that. And that's just a suggestion of your Jane. If you want to go ahead and do it on your picture and you're just going to draw a tiny little owes going off the page ovals and then for the reflection something less precise, it'll just be sort of dabs something like that. And that does look a little bit soft. So I'm going to just take my blending stuff and dad at it. So I'm feeling finished with my picture, and now you can choose to sign it if you would like again. If you want to sign it, I would suggest practicing on your scratch paper and use a very sharp pencil and you can just sign your initials the year you can sign your first name Onley. First name in the date. However you want to do it. Or maybe you have a signature that you're fond of. I'm going to sign mine just with my first name in the year. And I'm gonna do it very small in the bottom corner. And you want to sign pretty quickly if you take too much time to sign your picture. Typically, it looks like you took a lot of time to do it. And you wanted to seem very casual. Also, you don't want it to stand out a whole bunch. Which is why you want a very sharp pencil and you do want to do it very tiny in one corner . 29. 6.5 Final Thoughts: so some final thoughts are. If you feel like you want to clean up the edges by erasing, you can, but it's not necessary. If you frame your picture, your your mat will go over a very small amount of the picture. So you actually want a little bit of your charcoal expanding beyond your pencil lines. And even if you don't frame it, it looks kind of cool. It tells the story of how you came about making this picture. I don't raise my marks if you want to. By all means. Go right ahead, and in a moment I'm going to show you how to preserve your image by using what's called a spray fixative. It's a missed that smells terrible, so we have to do it outside. But it keeps your charcoal from smudging quite as much as it would if you didn't use it. 30. 6.6 Spray Fix: So the last thing you want to dio I recommend it's not necessary. But it will protect your drawing in the long run cause charcoal does rub off, as you've experienced is to put some spray fixative on it. This one is matte finish, which is really lovely for charcoal or any dry medium, and you just hold. Give it a quick little test spray to make sure no drips. Come off or splatter anything and make sure you're doing this outside cause it smells really bad and it's not good for you to breathe. Hold it about 12 inches away from your your picture and just sweet back and forth or in circles. So you get a nice even coat over the whole thing. You don't want to hold it closer than that because you might end up with, um, wet spots on your picture. 31. 7.1 Recap: So I hope you've enjoyed the class today. I hope you enjoy the peace you came out with. Just to recap. We have learned today how to measure and how to measure angles and distances, translating a photograph to a drawing in a realistic way. And you've also learned how to apply charcoal. You've learned about the different kinds of charcoal and different tools we can use in order to create different textures. And you can now apply those skills that you've learned. Teoh. Any other picture you'd like to do, I would recommend sticking to very simple subject matter. And you can get more complex as you become more comfortable with it. Thank you again for joining me and stay tuned for more classes.