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odyssey01 — Lydia
Published: 2013-09-22 07:24:04 +0000 UTC; Views: 577; Favourites: 21; Downloads: 0
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Description
Lydia Martin character study.While I'm comfortable with my beloved pencils, I felt that it was time to break out the charcoal and try to use a new medium. Suffice to say that I love the rich contrasts you get with charcoal...but how on Earth do you achieve this gradual, soft shading I've seen on charcoal pictures? Is there a trick? A secret ingredient? Come share your knowledge
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Teen Wolf and all recognizable characters are owned by their various creators. No copyright infringement is intended.
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Comments: 9
A lot of it depends on the charcoal, from what I remember of working with it. (It's been yeeeaaaars.) Some of it just marks too hard for smudging. And sometimes the paper isn't receptive to smudging. We did all our charcoal work on large sheets of Arches, because drawing paper didn't have enough texture to it.
But anyway, I'm amazed at some of the detail you achieved here! That was always my frustration with charcoal, was not being able to work in those tight little details like I could with pencil. (Of course, then I discovered charcoal pencils, hah.) I'm especially impressed with her eyes, nose, and the hair around her forehead. Gorgeous job!
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Thank you! This is really helpful, because I pretty much used the techniques I know from my pencils and applied them to charcoal. In fact, I only have charcoal pencils and was surprised to hear there's a different kind of charcoal, too. I'll have to go and visit the art-section of a couple of shops again...once I put a considerable amount of money aside, since I'm easily tempted
So thanks a lot for your words of inspiration and encouragement
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You know, as silly as it sounds, sometimes I look up youtube videos of people using a medium I'm new to. 
As for charcoal, if you go looking, look for little boxes of vine (gray) or willow (black) charcoal. They're just little sticks with no precise point, so it'd be great for shading large areas, and it's usually softer than pencils, so I find it more blendable (oh dear, grammar correct is telling me blendable's not a word, but I very much need it to be). It's usually around two or three dollars for a small box, so it shouldn't be too expensive if you want to experiment! You can also pick up blending stumps that have fine points to help blend in small areas where your fingers would be too large! And be careful, because that stuff is messssyyy!
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Whoa. Sorry once again for being gone.
Anyway, thanks so much for your help here! I've been rummaging around shops for art supplies and have gone deeply into playing around with charcoal and chalk - it's just that despite the fun I've been having, none of my pictures are fit to be posted here. It's more like experimenting like crazy.
On a different note, how are you doing?
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