So this was a different experience to using pencils. I feel like charcoal has up sides and down sides. The up side is that you work pretty loosely, it’s harder to use charcoal as a pencil so you tend to work more freely and more loosely. You can get such character strokes using charcoal.
The downside is that it’s physically quite tricky to work with. You can’t touch the paper with your hand because it will smudge the charcoal, so if you are used to having that precision, using charcoal can feel a little clumsy. Also I found it quite hard to hold the willow and the compressed sticks, so kept being drawn back to the pencil charcoal frequently.
Charcoal has a lot of texture and a lot of character, I would say much more so than pencil. But I do love the delicacy of using a pencil, for me it has more charm.
TIP OF THE DAY:
DID YOU KNOW You can use fixative DURING your charcoal process to fix layers, and then continue drawing more layers on the top? :-).
#charcoaldrawing #stilllife @milanartapp #charcoaltips
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