Charcoal and Chalk
I’ve started a new term of lessons at Chapel Cottage Studio with Jantien Powell, and our first piece of work is large drawing a sheep in charcoal and chalk. The idea of this piece is get some drawing practice but also to focus on the darks and the lights, making sure the darks are dark enough to make the lights really shine.
Using charcoal on a large piece of fairly smooth paper means you can smudge it around quite a lot to get varying tones, but it also makes it harder to layer up because there isn’t a lot of tooth to the paper.
This painting has taken two sessions, each about two hours, so far, the first session concentrating on drawing the sheep correctly and starting to add some tones, and then the second was focused on adding more dark tones and finally some highlights.