Experimental

Charcoal

Objectives:

• When I start a figure drawing in charcoal, I will sometimes loosely block in the direction of the overall pose in a soft grounded mid tone, either with the broad side of the charcoal vine or some on my finger. This helps give me a visually smaller area to work and compose within instead of having to relate back to the four sides of my picture plane or sheet of paper. Here, within this odd shape, I will pull out the darkest shadows as they connect throughout the body. Then, I can erase the highlights in a similar way. The initial mid tone, thus, finally connects between these two extremes as the eye completes the picture. I find this drawing approach beneficial in two ways because it makes the viewer create a connection to the piece while they look and interact with it. I also enjoy the way that the drawing creates an essence of the pose without deliberately being confined to explaining every part of the figure.