Charcoal Witch

So, for some strange reason I decided to do a charcoal drawing in my studio. I love working with charcoal while demonstrating life-drawing or life drawing for my own benefit in a life drawing studio. There I don't have to worry about all the charcoal dust getting everywhere.

I think what spurred this on was finding a bag of broken charcoal pieces. I always wanted to make one of those porous charcoal bags for stamping down a grey value on the paper to control base values, so I made one (I had some time to kill yesterday). And, having made one, I decided to use it.

It's been a long, long time since I tried to use charcoal as an illustrative medium and I had a number of moments where I realised I was working rather haphazardly, building the drawing out of order. Being completely out of practice can do that to you. I also realised I'd need a chamois if I really want to do more of this.

Anyway, about an hour into it I decided to let it go and just play with the materials at had and see if I could wrap this up into something. My recently acquired Moo erasers did some impressive work and clean-up.

I think I'll try this again in the future, but for portraiture or longer life studies and on much larger paper. This was on 10x14"smooth bristol.