Stanyer Peter. The Complete Book of Drawing Techniques

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Part Two – CHARCOAL

THE PROCESS

1/ Transfer the basic sketch to an A1 piece of

paper. We have established the basic

composition, and the space of that

composition is well organised on the piece

of paper.

2/ Take pieces of your frottage and establish

where you would like to use them on your

drawing.

3/ Always start at the what appears to be the

furthest point away in the picture when you

decide to stick down your ﬁrst pieces of

frottage. This is usually the horizon or

somewhere in the sky. For sticking, I would

recommend any type of paper glue.

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Compressed charcoal – projects

4/ Start to stick down the textures you have

cut or torn to an appropriate shape that will

roughly ﬁt the background shape in your

drawing.

5/ Once you have layered on the background

you can move forward to work on the middle

ground. It now becomes obvious why we

work from the back to the front in this

drawing as it makes covering up mistakes

easier.

6/ When you have completed the middle

ground you can now move on to the

foreground and ﬁnish the drawing. Putting

any ﬁnal changes to it that you might deem

necessary.

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Part Two – CHARCOAL

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It is always worth spending some time

putting in ﬁnal changes to a frottage

composition. Although working from the

back to the front of the drawing makes it

possible to rectify mistakes as the

composition develops, it is the ﬁnishing

touches that really create a picture to be

proud of.

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Part Two – CHARCOAL

NEGATIVE SPACE AND CHIAROSCURO

Compressed charcoal is very useful for

making strong lines and very dark dramatic

tones. The next series of examples will

highlight how to use the medium for this

purpose.

The drawings use the negative space way

of working we encountered in the Pencils

section; see the examples after Van Gogh

beginning on page 40. This well established

method entails drawing the space around

objects to establish the composition. The

second stage of the drawing requires you to

look analytically at the nature of light and the

way it can be used to describe and express a

scene and mood.

Before beginning the drawing, arrange the

objects on a table.

1/ Establish the composition on the picture

plane, i.e. the paper. You can do this by using

a window mount to frame the composition

that you like best. A tip - don’t make it too

complicated.

2/ Start to draw your composition from the

edge of the paper. Draw what you see

through the window mount. Remember that

your window mount should be in scale to

your drawing otherwise you will get

distortion. For instance, if your drawing is A1

your window mount should be A5. Draw a

line that goes over the top of the objects and

off the edge of the paper at the other side.

3/ Now go back to the starting point on the

other side of the paper, and draw a line that

describes the bottom edge of the still life.

What you have produced is an outline of the

group of objects.

4/ Begin to ﬁll in the shape and form of the

objects.

5/ At this point you need to illuminate the still

life group. Set up a light from an acute angle

at one side. This will create a dramatic

atmosphere by throwing long shadows across

the group.

Draw the shapes of the shadows using

line. It is important the shadows appear as

shapes that exist both on and of the objects.

See them as abstract shapes. It will help your

understanding if you squint when looking at

the group. This action makes seeing the

shadows easier.

6/ Fill in the shapes of the shadows with the

compressed charcoal, making the shaded

areas into a dense black. This will produce a

very black and white contrasting drawing.

7/ Smudge the drawing, either by tonking it

with a rag or, preferably, by smearing it with

your hand. The resulting black and grey tones

will give the drawing atmosphere.

8/ Use a good clean plastic eraser to bring

back the sharp light effects. Do not be afraid

to lose some of the edges of the objects in the

shadows – such loss is true to life and a feature

of this type of drawing. You do not need to

give all the detail. Leave some areas

deliberately obscure to allow viewers to bring

their own imagination to the piece.

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Part Two – CHARCOAL

A CONSTRUCTED TONAL DRAWING

COMPRESSED CHARCOAL

DRAWING DRAPERY

Historically drapery has been used for

centuries by artists and studied by students

and artists apprentices. One has to go no

further than the drapery studies of Leonardo

da Vinci to see it was an integral part of their

research.

There are three drapery projects that are a

fundamental to widening our visual literacy,

and compressed charcoal is the medium that

is most appropriate for this.

Many artists in the past would use drapery

as compositional device to create an

underlying structure for their work. This

process was devised to guide the viewer’s eye

through the composition.

One of these methods was to create the

idea of movement across and through the

picture plane using certain effects with

drapery to create this illusion. Nicholas

Poussin (1593-1665) and El Greco (1541-

1614) both used this process very successfully

to effect this illusion. What one must realise

here is that these effects were not by any

means being used naturalistically. Instead

they where formal visual constructions to

effect away for us to read the picture.

1/ To make a study of this type of work one

should ﬁrst formally set up your drapery still

life. Do this by getting a large sheet and twist

it tightly and also loosely around a tall object

(I use an easel for this purpose). By doing this

we have given a sense of movement to the still

life. In essence, it is the type of movement you

would describe when you see and try to

explain a spiral staircase. In setting the group

up in this way, we have constructed the idea

of an upward motion.

2/ Now set up to draw with a large piece of

paper - the larger the better for this drawing.

Firstly, draw the outlines of the folds of the

drapery using your compressed charcoal.

Immediately you will see that you have

created the sense of movement up the

picture plane through the nature and

direction of the line.

3/ We can now give the drapery a feeling of

volume that will also emphasise the sense of

movement up the picture plane. We do this

by adding tone in a very particular

constructed way. This process is referred to as

front or top lighting and was used by the pre-

Renaissance artists such as Cimabue, and

Duccio. In the ﬁnished drawing, the tone is

applied in the same way as you can see in the

detail. It enables us to read the simple sense

of form. It works in this way. The surface of

the drapery that appears nearest to us is left

white, and as the surface moves away from us

and into any recesses you gradually make the

tone go darker until it reaches black at what

appears to be the furthest point away see

detailed example. The illusion of a shallow

sense of depth is created. As you might have

guessed this process is very mechanical and

theoretical and at this point can be executed

without looking any further at the drapery

subject matter.

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