Charcoal Painting

The first encounter that a young artist could have with charcoal painting must have undoubtedly left them wanting to experiment with it more, curiously dark fingertips left in the wake of the drawing and the building and the smudging and the carefully rubbing and the erasing. Soft black charcoal sticks are often the basis for beginners. Smooth, breakable materials are forgiving and challenging, so it is perfect for sharpening amateur drawing skills. Charcoal is constructed in a variety of ways — vine, compressed, pencil — and is useful for assessing the play of light and brightness, and enables artists to enhance rich tones. At first, however, it may be difficult to apply to the material. While artists enjoy using charcoal for rich lines and shading production, the dark residue can be difficult to manage. Beginners of coal drawings tend to apply a lot of pressure when rubbing on paper, and inadvertently leave marks that are not soft or easily erased. Yet, professional charcoal on paper works use charcoal to draw a scale that shows the shade gradation from black to gray to white. Instead of creating a scale in sequence, students are advised to fill in the blanks first (as is done for cartoon blueprints), instead of jumping in the middle of the scale, getting familiar with the porosity and the intensity of the coal. Then, charcoal painting can be worked slowly from the center to the outside, to black and white.

This allows for learning easy control and manipulation of the medium, on paper. As paper is more delicate than canvas or board, vine (also known as willow) charcoal can be very useful when learning to get a handle on a piece. Using charcoal with soft, smooth, heat-resistant paper, unlike ordinary paper, is tougher as smooth paper is waxier and the coal reacts to it visibly, while the cheap quality of coarser paper, like the newspaper, will not allow you to easily erase it as a high-quality sewn paper; its equal location gives you a place to practice integration and control. Charcoal painting teaches artists to be extra careful and asks for a skill of the hand that only a few can manage to bring out without making the artwork too forceful or technical. A putty eraser can help with picking up charcoal dust, creating highlights, adjusting details, and creating some illumination. To blend well and create gradations, senior charcoal artists may try to use paper towels, chamois fabric, stitching sticks, and, of course, fingers. Considering the tendency of coal to hold up, some may even want to try different paper textures and methods, which can drastically change results. The advantage of using paper with a strong texture is that the coals will attach to the surface easily, making the artwork brilliantly marked with various shades of the coals. This can be observed in charcoal painting of Buddha where various shades of black and grey beautifully define the lines on Buddha’s face and ears. Nowadays there are various forms of charcoal painting that can be found on the internet i.e. Landscape beautiful charcoal painting, modern Krishna charcoal painting, abstract charcoal painting, Buddha charcoal painting, landscape charcoal painting, charcoal painting on canvas, realistic charcoal painting, Radha Krishna charcoal painting, Ganesha charcoal painting etc. All these categories give the artists their flow to work with charcoal on paper.