Charcoal is one of my favorite art mediums
to work with
especially when doing close up portraits,
it works great with darker contrast portraits
with just one black pencil you can build up
several tones of gray's and it's also soft
enough to
erase to give you bright highlights.
Here are some tips and tricks
i used to
create my Silent Night artwork.
I started out with basic clean sketch charcoal lines
, i then blend very lightly ..
how i work
with charcoal i basically move it around in areas i want
to shade and slowly build up darker layers.
You can see this transition in the following pics above.
I also have piece of papers that i scribble down with my
large charcoal sticks to pick up charcoal residue
with my tortillons or pencil stumps
etc...to use in areas .
When i want to pull out highlights i use my
kneaded eraser :)
I blend with toilet paper,my fingers
(not recommended especially if you don't
want to get your fingers
messy)
chamois,cotton fabric,q-tips,brushes ,pencil stumps,tortillons
or anything else i find suitable.
I repeat all the steps above for a couple of layers
of work until i get my work to look the way i want to,
it can take several hours of work .
After i'm done with my artwork i keep in a small clear bag
all the stumps q-tips etc... i used for future charcoal artworks,
since there is charcoal residue on them you can use them as drawing tools :)
Materials i used for this Artwork
Strathmore Smooth Bristol board - Link
General's charcoal Link
Kneaded Eraser - Link
Chamois - Link
Hope this walk through was helpful.
Tutorial copyrighted to Katerina Koukiotis
katerinaart.com