Charcoal Portrait Techniques
- Charcoal comes in many forms. Perhaps the most familiar is vine charcoal, which is literally a burnt piece of willow wood in the shape of a stick. Vine charcoal comes in three hardnesses: soft, medium and hard. Compressed charcoal is charcoal powder mixed with a clay or gum binder, and it also comes in different levels of hardness. The easiest form of compressed charcoal to use is the pencil form; charcoal pencils are labeled from HB to 6B, similar to graphite pencils.
Charcoal drawings are best done on paper with some tooth to it. Newsprint works well for quick sketches, but for more permanent drawings, use a good-quality art paper for charcoal or pastel. If you want to do a preliminary drawing, tracing paper comes in handy. - Kimon Nicolaides, in his seminal book "The Natural Way to Draw," writes that artists sometimes freeze up when they try to draw the head because they are so worried about creating a "likeness." According to Nicolaides, better drawings will result if you think of the head in the same way that you think of other parts of the human body and if you try to get the "gesture" of each of the features and the hair. The gesture is essentially the movement of the features: Does the chin jut forward or recede? Are the eyes drooping or wide open? Does the nose look pinched or flared? How does the hair curl over the forehead? Think about these questions as you make your first gesture drawing, perhaps on tracing paper. For your first gesture drawing, you could use a medium-soft charcoal pencil. Use a harder pencil to firm up the contours of the preliminary drawing. Any paper is fine, but if you intend to trace the drawing onto better paper, make your first drawing on lightweight or tracing paper.
- You can use a light box or a window to trace the final version of this preliminary drawing onto good paper. Put your first drawing on the light box or tape it to the window. Then, place your final piece of paper over the first drawing and tape it down. Now you can trace the first drawing onto the second piece of paper.
Once the outlines have been traced, your next task is to find the highlights and shadows. This process is very enjoyable with charcoal because it's so flexible. The brightest highlights will be the pure paper white, which you should try to preserve. But other highlights can be picked out with a kneaded eraser. The deepest blacks can be rendered with your softest charcoal or your 6B charcoal pencil. You can soften lines in the drawing with a brush, a blending stump or simply your fingers. As the drawing progresses, you may want to spray some fixative over it from time to time to keep from smudging it. - Some artists like to add a very dark background to their charcoal portraits in order to dramatize the face and its highlights. Against this dark background, the lit contours of the face show up vividly. One way to create a dark background is to scrape 5B and 6B charcoal pencil shavings with a knife onto the background of the drawing and then rub the background with a piece of tissue to work the charcoal into the paper. This creates a dark, velvety black color.
- Most charcoal drawings need to be sprayed with a fixative in order to preserve them. Take the drawing outside or to an exhaust hood before spraying, as fixative is toxic and should not be inhaled. Shake the fixative can and spray evenly from a distance of about 12 inches away. Let the fixative dry for a few seconds and then test with your finger to see if the charcoal will come off. Another spraying or two may be necessary. If you are not going to frame your drawing right away, store it in a box or drawer with interleaving or tracing paper over it to keep it from smudging or rubbing off on other drawings.
