Charcoal Drawing

In this session on the 19th January 2015, we were using charcoal to create our life drawings. Before we started out actual drawings, we used an interesting metro of drawing with the charcoal to create different marks and a different style of drawing. We used a piece of charcoal attatched to a long bamboo stick to draw with on a large piece of paper. This was quite difficult to do because you didn't have much control of the marks you were making. After a few practices I got the hang of it and I found it a little easier to control and my drawings looked a little bit like the figure but looked a bit abstract in style and had different mark making because of the technique we used to draw with. 

Materials I used during this session were charcoal, an eraser and an A2 piece of paper. The techniques I used during this session were drawing, shading, positive and negative space, scale, measuring, and tonal study. The formal elements I looked at were line, shape and form and tone.

After practicing using charcoal in other sessions last term and working on it as it was one of my weaknesses, I found it much easier to use the charcoal effectively and made my drawing work quite well. I found that my drawing was quite accurate so I was really pleased with how it turned out in the end of the session. Areas of my work that worked well were the shading and tone which I was really pleased with. Areas of my work that didn't work so well and could be improved are the hands and feet again because I really struggled to draw them, and the proportions of the figure because I think it looks out of proportion, particularly the legs. Overall I was quite impressed with how much my drawing using charcoal had improved since last term and I think the use of shading and tone worked really well.

To extend my skills I have looked at other charcoal life drawings on the Internet and competed them to my own work to identify my strengths and weaknesses.