How to Draw with Charcoal

How to Draw with Charcoal Drawing pictures and images with charcoal has been a very old practice. However the use of charcoal as a medium of drawing has surely evolved down the years from cave paintings to cartoons. The rules for drawing with charcoal are quite different from drawing with pencils or ink. Therefore, we are listing down some of the very important principles which are needed to be followed while drawing with charcoal. They are:

You need to draw very loosely while drawing with charcoal. You must keep in mind that charcoal does not capture minute and intricate details very well. So only when you are trying to draw something huge and broad with sweeping free strokes, you can choose charcoal as the medium for drawing. The style which needs to be adapted while drawing with charcoal is very uninhibited.
Make sure you take a large paper to draw on. This is because, charcoal is associated with large and free strokes and therefore you will need space to accommodate them. Make sure that you have enough room to stand back and use your entire arm for giving those free and broad strokes.
Incase you want to blend or soften the lines that you have drawn using charcoal, do so with your fingertip. Do not use a blending stub for this purpose as this will lead to a dimension less drawing.
To add or remove highlights from your charcoal drawing, you can use a putty eraser. Putty eraser is very helpful in removing charcoal and thereby makes the process of adding highlights very easy and simple. You can also use a moist piece of bread molded into a ball for the purpose of removing charcoal and adding highlights to your picture.
Remember to set your final drawing with a fixative. You can use spray adhesive for your artwork.

Let us now turn our attention to another important aspect of knowing how to protect charcoal drawings.

After having finished with your drawing, remove any dust or stray particles from it. Then you will have to lay out your drawing on a flat surface.
Make sure to tape all the corners of the paper on the flat surface. This is done to save the papers from curling while fixative is being applied.
Take the aerosol fixative and holding it at arm’s length, depress the nozzle.
Now keep on holding the fixative still and start moving your arm back and forth, so that the entire picture gets covered with it.
You will have to wait for 10 minutes for the fixative to dry.

Charcoal paintings are very lovely to look at and they require certain care from our end. If we learn to preserve charcoal drawings in the proper manner, they will remain with us for many years without losing their shine.

Watch a video instruction on how to draw with charcoal