why is charcoal a limited drawing medium

Charcoal is probably the oldest, or one of the oldest, art materials. It was, after all, what our pre-historic ancestors used while drawing on cave walls! It's ease of manufacture and use make it an essential tool for all artists. Charcoal is an impure form of elemental carbon made by burning selected woods in anaerobic conditions (little or no oxygen), hence, it is chemically fairly simple and stable over millennia. While other art materials may have greater color saturation than charcoal, few will last as long!

The major disadvantage of charcoal is its tendency to "dust-off." Not a problem when drawing on cave walls, where there is little air-movement to blow it off, but certainly an important issue if you want to display it in your home! During the many millenia between cavemen and modern times, charcoal was only used for preliminary sketches, and then painted or drawn-over with substances that can withstand a greater amount of physical handling. Only fairly recently, as people have begun to frame drawings behind glass or spray them with fixative, has charcoal recovered its earliest use as an expressive medium in its own right.

The joy of using charcoal as a drawing medium lies in its spontaneity and sensitivity. One can make marks with it which are very painterly, as if with a brush, or one can make fairly technical drawings. Fluid, painterly drawings are best achieved with the softer, richer crayons, whereas detailed drawings are best with harder ones, especially charcoal pencils.

If charcoal is not on your list of "favorite" art mediums, it's probably because its characteristic powder which when uncontrolled, can be messy. That aside, we can control it and discover many ways to effect its beauty.

Charcoal drawing is a well-recognized media. Very professional looking black-white images can be drawn just with a little chunk of charcoal and eraser. It's like making abstract photos without using computer. Charcoal is also a good way of learning gray gradients and lighting techniques. But many people wondered how those images are made to look so cool with just a piece of charcoal.

The use of charcoal for drawing is less limited than the use of graphite pencils, with it being more spontaneous in its creativity than many other types of art material. When using charcoal, its usage has a tendency to be "scribbling or sketchy" in its techniques, quickly expressing the emotions of the artist. I like the speed and response I get from using charcoal during life drawing sessions, ranging from very bold and heavy lines on down to soft and subtle shading, with any sort of shading tones I want to use.

Drawings done with charcoal pencils will usually appear to have more depth than a drawing with graphite. Charcoal pencils produce deeper, darker lines because the particles within the pencil are irregular and do not reflect light well. If you are new to drawing with charcoal, you may find this challenging at first. Charcoal pencils do not glide along the paper as smoothly as graphite pencils do. Additionally it is easy to smear part of the drawing and for beginners it can be difficult to make fine lines for detailed areas.

These types of pencils are good to use with certain drawing techniques and in various parts of a drawing such as skin tones, wood, fur, bark, eyelashes, shadows, coarse fabrics such as leather, denim or corduroys.

Charcoal Pencils come in many forms. There are charcoal sticks, which can be quite messy but are fun to use because you can use the edge, corner or tip of them. There are charcoal pencils encased in wood, which will allow you a fine point to use for your drawings without being so messy.

This entry was posted on Sunday, May 22nd, 2011 at 3:45 pm and is filed under CHARCOAL DRAWING. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.