Charcoal Life Drawings – Away From The Grain

I’ve been trying out working in charcoal during the last month. In the continued spirit of full exposure , here are my efforts of the last few weeks. As ever in chronological order and unedited.

001 Working from a Midtone

This involves laying an even midtone grey all over, then working ‘up’ to the lightest vales with a rubber and down into the shadows with more charcoal. As ever my drawing group started out with short poses, 5 x 2 minute poses

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I found these really tough, just trying to get to grip with removing charcoal with an putty rubber, how charcoal works and poof 2 minutes have gone. And even as the poses lengthened to 5 minutes (below), I still felt like I was floundering. I had to remind myself that it was fine if didn’t get close to ‘finishing’ a pose, I was just trying out a new medium for the first time.

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And as I got to the 10 minute poses, I started to feel more relaxed. I’d also figured out that working from a gentler midtone grey helped.

First of the 10 minute poses. Working from a lighter midtone grey.

And by the time we got to the 15 minute poses, I was enjoying working with charcoal – trying out different marks and starting to get a feel for things.

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And my penultimate drawing someone very kindly mentioned it reminded them of ‘Naked Man, Back View’ by Lucian Freud.

And by the last pose another, 15-20 minute pose, I was definitely feeling frazzled. I felt like I was having a real fight with this pose.

002 Gesture Practice

I’ve been finding out more about ‘gesture lines’ in life drawing. The big movement that characterises a pose. An almost instinctive feeling for how a body occupies space. Apparently a great exercise for getting a feel of this is drawing from 30 second poses by a model.

Lacking my own model, I improvised with an old Evening Standard magazine. As I turned each page, without picking and choosing, I tried to draw the gesture line for each figure I encountered.

003 More charcoal

Trying out these gesture lines with a living, breathing model. Starting out with short poses, 5 x 2 minutes and 3 x 5 minutes.

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Then on to the 10 minute poses, I really enjoyed this first one.

But then, I think inspired by the big sweep of charcoal on the right in the sketch above, I decided to switch to working from a mid tone ground. I learnt, switching approaches mid-session is not the best idea. My brain just couldn’t find it’s way into this, as witnessed below …