HOW TO DRAW | Basics of Charcoal Drawing for Beginners

hey everybody welcome back to my channel in today's video I'm going to be going through the basics of charcoal drawing and so this video is mainly aimed at beginners that are interested in using charcoal or are having trouble with using charcoals for their drawings and so I'm going to be going through the basics of the materials that the shading the blending and all of that stuff to give you an overview of how to use charcoal to create some really cool drawings so let's get straight into it by going through first the materials that I like to use from my charcoal drawings so I don't use too many materials when drawing with charcoal which makes this a great medium because it's an affordable option for beginners so let's start with the pencils and I only use two charcoal pencils I use a HP so for lighter shading and a 2 B charcoal pencil for the shadows I also use a charcoal block and this is normally a soft charcoal block and I use that for shading in large areas and it's great because it shades in large areas weight really quickly and it's good for making charcoal powder that we can add to our drawing with a paintbrush and that's good for creating smooth and really light values now the paper I like to use is one that has a bit more tooth and texture to it you can use any paper designed for use with charcoal and you can also use watercolor paper which is one of my personal favorites the paper needs to be able to grip though onto multiple layers of charcoal which means that you don't really want to paper there is too smooth so for example the Strathmore Bristol smooth paper wouldn't be a good option when using charcoal so try and stay away from using really smooth slick papers personally I use the Strathmore Bristol vellum paper for my charcoal drawings but I've also used hot pressed watercolor paper in the past and that works really well as well now in terms of blending tools I use a couple of different supplies for blending my charcoal drawings so I always try to avoid using my fingers as much as I can as this method is not messy but your hands have a lot of oils on them which can transfer to your drawing paper and give you lucky results so instead I use paint brushes tissue and blending stumps for blending so paint brushes firstly are great for blending charcoal shading as it gives really smooth results and it also gets rid of any graininess and also paint brushes are really easy to control I also love paint brushes because they are great at blending out the skin for portraits and that's one of my favorite ways to use the paint brush is for blending out skin it gives really soft results so also tissues are brilliant for blending out larger areas so you can get really smooth results with tissues as well in fact it removes even more graininess I think then paint brushes do so what I do is I wrap the tissue around my finger and I then blend using the tissue in circular motions and finally blending stumps these are great for blending out the small details that is really hard to blend using a paintbrush and a tissue because they are too large for painting out the tiny details so the blending stems are great alternatives if you need to blend out tiny details in the eyes and blending stumps for you guys that don't know are made from compressed paper and for a pack of them they're really really cheap so they are another affordable tool as well as tissue that's really affordable now moving on to highlights I like to use two different supplies for getting in highlights so highlights is a key part of the drawing process for me and so I used two different erasers like I said when drawing the charcoal mainly I use the tombow mono eraser which is a stick eraser and I use that to add in detailed highlights and to also add texture to my drawing but for the more subtle highlights I like to use a kneaded eraser instead now those are all of the materials that I use for my charcoal drawings and before I move on to talking through the whole drawing process if you want to see how I created this drawing in real time then it is available over on my patreon along with over 300 other real-time tutorials that you can access for just a small amount per month for each real-time tutorial there will be the full narration and also all of the references sketch outlines and materials list you need to follow along with the tutorials yourself but if a monthly membership isn't right for you or you just want to focus on improving your charcoal drawing skills then over on my website I've got lots of different courses to help you master child hole drawing I've got a course on there for drawing portraits in charcoal also drawing animals in charcoal and still life objects in charcoal but if you really want to improve your skills you can get all three of those courses in my drawing bundle and if you aren't interested in my courses you can get 15% off if you use the code SAVE 15 at checkout so I really recommend checking out that drawing bundle and I'll leave a link to my course website and to my patreon in the description below now let's move on to the actual drawing process and I always start off by having the sketch outlined down on my paper first before I go in with any of my charcoal pencils to do the shading but I don't actually use a charcoal pencil to get him my sketch outline for my sketch outline I always start off by using a graphite pencil for this and that is for two reasons firstly because graphite is easier to erase if you make a mistake than charcoal and also graphite tends to be lighter than charcoal pencils but one thing you want to avoid doing is pressing too hard with your your graphite pencil because not only will this make your drawing look more cartoony if your outlines are really harsh but also the charcoal won't be able to layer on top of the graphite if the graphite is really heavy down on the paper so once you've got in your sketch outline make sure it's react Europe before you go in with your charcoal shading before because once you go in with your charcoal shading it's really hard to you change any proportions or anything like that so make sure that you're a hundred percent happy with your sketch outline before moving on to the shading process now the first step in my drawing process is to use the H and to be charcoal pencil to add in the first layer of shading and I start by blocking in the darkest shadows first using that 2b pencil and then I move on to filling in all of the mid-tones with the H pencil so I'm basically blocking in the shadows and the mid-tones but with the highlighted areas I keep them free from any charcoal for now and other stage you really don't need to worry about adding in too many details because we will be blending this layer out anyway so if used to go in and add in lots of details they will most likely be blended out and smudged over when we blend out with all of our different blending tools so once you've got in your first layer of shading it is time to blend out the drawing and I start off by using my paint brush to soften out the shading and I also let some of the charcoal powder on the brush I let that brush onto the highlighted areas to add a bit of tone to them so we don't want the highlighted areas to stay completely white but we don't want to add charcoal directly to these areas either so like I said when we're doing our first layer of shading you don't want to add charcoal directly to the highlighted areas instead the way we toned them is that when we blend with the paintbrush we brush a bit of that charcoal powder from those darker areas onto those highlighted areas this way we are adding a bit of value to them but when we brush on charcoal rather than adding it directly with the charcoal pencils it's actually really easy to lift back up with the eraser whereas if you go in directly with the charcoal that can be hard to erase like I said earlier so if you have any large areas in your drawings blend out particularly backgrounds this is when I would go in and use the tissue instead to soften over these areas so to do this like I said I simply wrap the tissue around my finger and I blend in circular motions just like you would if you were just using your finger and so if you notice that the tissue is starting to crumble make sure you switch to a new piece of tissue finally if you need to blend out any tiny details then this is when you would go in and use it you're blending a stump now once you've blended out that first layer of shading we've got in the foundation of the drawing we've built a pool of those values but at the moment we haven't got in any details ready we've just got in the values where they need to be so the next part of the drawing process is to go in and add in details and the highlights so like I said now that we've built up the foundation we go back in and use our charcoal pencils and the erasers to add in more detail and texture to your drawing so I start by going back in with the pencils and I make sure they're very sharp for this stage because we are building up the details and I start to darken up the main shadows because most probably when you blend out with your paintbrush it lightens up that really dark shading that you added in because it's brushing that charcoal powder over those lighter areas and as well as darkening of the shadows remember we need to use these charcoal pencils to build up the detail and texture in your drawings so it is also the time where we go in with the erasers like the tombow mono stick eraser and add in the highlights so I used this eraser to pull up the highlights whilst adding texture to the drawing so in this drawing I'm not only using the eraser to add in the highlights but I'm also using it to add in the feather texture so that is basically my process for how I go through the drawing step-by-step but one of the biggest problems with using charcoal is smudging so my main tip for preventing smudging is to simply place a sheet of tracing paper or glossy in under your hand and this will stop your hand smudging your charcoal shading but I've recently done a video with a lot more tips on how you can prevent smudging so leave a to that video up above as a card but that's just an overview and the basics of the charcoal drawing so I went through materials the blending tools and how to blend using them and also my steps for building up shading with the charcoal pencils and pulling up highlights with erasers so I really hope that you found this quick guide useful let me know if you want any other videos and tutorials are more in depth stages of the charcoal drawing process let me know your ideas in the comment section but I really hope you enjoyed the video if you did please give it a thumbs up and subscribe if you're new around here and even take that Ballack on so you do get notified on my future videos but that is it from me and I'll see you guys in the next video bye everybody

Channel: Kirsty Partridge Art

Views: 1,136,325

Keywords: drawing tutorial, how to draw, realistic drawing, how to draw with charcoal, charcoal drawing, charcoal drawing tutorial, easy charcoal drawing, charcoal for beginners, how to draw realistic, realistic drawing with charcoal, charcoal drawing for beginners, charcoal drawing techniques, charcoal drawing tips, drawing techniques, how to draw with pencils, pencil drawing, realistic pencil drawing, how to draw for beginners

Id: 8GADVUB1xPY

Length: 11min 50sec (710 seconds)

Published: Fri Aug 30 2019