Portrait Drawing with Charcoal

Hello there everyone, Matt here with VirtualInstructor.com and there is a great misconception out there that charcoal is a difficult medium to use for drawing. Exactly the opposite of that is true. Charcoal is a little bit messy and it is easily manipulated, but those two things actually make it a wonderful medium for creating drawings. Charcoal, I like to think of charcoal as the medium that's somewhere in between drawing and painting. Now in this video, I'm going to walk you through the process of creating a charcoal portrait of an old man smoking a pipe. Now this is going to be sped up, but I'm going to walk you through all of the steps and you can see that charcoal drawing develop and how malleable charcoal is. And if you've never used charcoal or you've used it once or twice and thought it was just too messy, maybe this video will change your mind. Now this video is taken from one of our recent live lesson series where I walk artists through the process of creating a portrait in charcoal from start to finish in real time. If you want to learn more about this specific class series, I'll leave a link in the description below and I'll also include a coupon code so you can get 20% off this class series if you decide to purchase it. Now with that being said, let's go ahead and take a look at how to create a portrait with charcoal. For this drawing, we'll be using vine charcoal, which is the softer form of charcoal. It's also the most forgiving form of charcoal. I'll also be using some compressed charcoal in charcoal pencils. This form of charcoal is better suited for finishing touches since it's more permanent. We'll also be using several blending stumps and a blending tortilla, and an assortment of erasers, including a couple of vinyl or plastic erasers, and of course, a kneaded eraser as well. We'll start here with the vine charcoal, and I'm going to start by loosely sketching out what I see as the contours. Now you'll notice that I'm holding the vine charcoal between my thumb and forefinger. This is different than how we hold a pencil, and for some of you, it may take some getting used to. Once I make my initial sketches, I'll do some smudging and smearing and just move the material around the surface so that we've got some value in place. Now value is one of the seven elements of art, and it deals with the darkness or lightness of color. When we're creating the black and white drawing, of course, we're only dealing with different values. So it's important to create a full range of value in your drawing, and it's always a good idea to kind of have a middle value in place, especially with charcoal. This will allow us to push the light and dark values so that we have a full range. Now we're going to make the values darker, as you can see here with the vine charcoal, just adding more material, doing a little bit of smudging and moving the material around on the surface. We're going to create the lighter values or highlights by using the eraser. So I'm coming in here with a kneaded eraser and also the vinyl eraser here and there to remove some of the charcoal, leaving more of the white of the paper visible. And hopefully you can see just how easy it is to erase or remove the charcoal material from the surface. This is one of the benefits to working with charcoal. Even though we're creating a drawing, the process is very similar to painting in that we can change the image very drastically with just a few marks. It's very easy to manipulate and move the charcoal on the surface. Now, of course, I'm referring to the vine charcoal. The compressed charcoal is a little bit more difficult to erase, but we haven't even started to use the compressed charcoal at this point. Now obviously this is a strength of working with charcoal, but unfortunately a lot of new artists view this as a something they have to overcome because the charcoal is messy. But because it's messy and easily smeared, it makes it easy to move around and manipulate on the surface. But unfortunately this turns some artists away from using the medium when they just need to be a little bit more patient and embrace its versatility. Now another benefit to working with charcoal is maybe you're starting to notice is that we're able to get such a broad range of value relatively easily. It's easy to create dark values with charcoal and these values are nice and black instead of being a gray like we see with graphite. Another thing with graphite is that it can be shiny when it's complete or when the drawing is complete just because of the nature of graphite. Charcoal doesn't have that characteristic, so the blacks are actually very flat, which makes it more suitable for photography. So your images are going to look a little stronger if you work with charcoal just for the simple fact due to the nature of the material. Now you can see here I am continuing to work here. I'm working on the hand that's holding the pipe here and I am thinking in terms of shapes of value. So normally we would create a drawing with graphite or pen and ink. We're thinking in terms of line. We're looking at edges. We're defining edges and we're developing the values or the shading by using lines. With charcoal instead we're thinking in terms of shapes of value and this is again closely related to how we approach painting. So we're only looking at the shapes that we see and trying to determine what value they are and then replicating that same shape with that same value. And that is as simple as it gets. Now of course this takes a little bit of practice in order to develop this skill, but it's a crucial skill for learning how to be an artist, whether you're drawing or painting. Now I'm working on the hair up here and I'm using the vinyl erasers here. This is a Tombow mono eraser, which is very good for precision erasing, but I'm also using an electric eraser that has a vinyl eraser inside of it. This allows me to create some very strong erasers. They're a little bit harder to control depending on the electric eraser that you use. Some are stronger than others, but they do remove quite a bit of the material. Now I'm working on the wrinkles up here on the forehead and one of the things that's important to keep in mind with wrinkles is that wrinkles, although they feature a dark area like a dark line, they also feature a highlight as well. And some folks miss this when they draw wrinkles. They just draw the dark line instead of the highlight. You need both a highlight and a dark line in order for the wrinkle to look realistic. Continuing to work on the hair here and now that I'm confident with what I've got up here in the upper right hand corner, I'm starting to add some of the compressed charcoal with the charcoal pencil. Now the compressed charcoal, as I mentioned before, is more permanent. This means that it's less powdery and it's blacker and darker, but it's also more difficult to erase. So I always like to leave the compressed charcoal applications to areas that I feel like are close to completion. So I'll work with the vine charcoal as much as possible before adding the compressed charcoal to make the darks really black and rich. Now the charcoal pencil, as I mentioned, has the compressed charcoal material in it. Compressed charcoal is also available as sticks like the vine charcoal, but the compressed charcoal pencils, of course, give you a little bit more precision. You have to be aware though when you're working on a charcoal drawing, especially one as large as the one you're seeing here, is that the palm of your hand can smear your previous applications, especially in areas where you've applied the vine charcoal. So you want to be mindful of this. I'm keeping the palm of my hand away from the surface as much as possible. So I'm not resting the palm of my hand down on the surface. Instead I'm holding the pencil in a similar fashion as how I held the vine charcoal when I applied it. But it might be helpful to put down a paper towel underneath the palm of your hand to help prevent some of that smearing. Okay, now we're working down into the beard and the lower portion of the face. And in this beard area, the highlights are going to be incredibly important for looking like hair. So I've got the highlighted area determined, but I'll go back in just a minute, you can see here how I'm doing so with the electric eraser, and I'm just pulling out some strands of hair. It doesn't have to be an exact replica of what we're seeing, but I do want to make sure that the lightest values match where I see the lightest values in the reference. So some of these lines are going to imply the illusion of hair without actually having to draw or erase every single hair out. All right, moving on now to the hands again, applying some of the compressed charcoal. And as this compressed charcoal is added, you can see just how much it broadens the range of value and increases the contrast. When we increase the contrast, we increase the illusion of light too, or the strength of the light within the scene. So the highlights feel stronger and the shadows feel stronger because we have more of a broader range. All right, now I'm going back to make some finishing touches to the face and the hand and the pipe before attacking the area of the smoke here, which is what we have left. So I'm covering the entire surface that's left open with the vine charcoal first, and then I'm using the kneaded eraser and also some of the blending tools to pull out some of the areas of smoke. Now the smoke is a little bit complex, so you'll see it goes through several different versions. So I'm erasing out some areas, creating some highlights, trying to create that flow that I see there in the smoke. So as I'm using the eraser to pull out the lighter values, I'm trying to pull it in the direction that the smoke is flowing. So the direction that you make your stroke does play an important role in the final look. Now this is true for any material that you're adding to the surface, but also when you're erasing out areas as well, because your eraser is definitely a mark making tool as well. We can see this very clearly, especially when you're working with charcoal, that the eraser is used for making lighter marks. So a few more revisions here with the kneaded eraser and also with the vinyl eraser here and there to create some stronger highlights and some smaller lines within the smoke. Then again with the blending stump, before going back with the compressed charcoal to define the darker areas around the smoke. So the compressed charcoal you can see down there in the corner, it also easily smears like the vine charcoal. It's a little bit harder to, or a little bit more difficult to smear compared to the vine charcoal, but that's of course because it's a little bit more permanent and falls into the grooves of the texture or tooth of the paper a little bit easier. So with the addition of the compressed charcoal, I see that I need to go back and pull out a few more stronger highlights, again increasing the range of value and the contrast here. And our smoke has gone through quite a few different versions here. But you can continue to work the charcoal material as you can see until you're happy with how things look. And again, that's just another added bonus to working with charcoal. So you don't need to fear charcoal. Charcoal is a wonderful medium for drawing and it's a great transition medium if you're looking to go from drawing to painting. Thanks so much for watching this video. Hope you enjoyed it. Hope you were able to pick up a couple of things here and there. Of course, charcoal is a wonderful medium for drawing. There's no reason to fear it. And a little bit of messiness is just fine. We as artists should be a little bit messy, right? But anyway, if you're new to the channel or if you haven't done so yet, make sure you click on the subscribe button and also click on that notification bell so you're notified when new videos like this are uploaded. 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