Charcoal Drawings

Today we were given charcoal and were told to draw a self portrait and a drawing of someone else in the class. 

This was the first time I had used charcoal to drawing in a number of years so I was quite rusty, this was also one of the first times I had tried to draw a face in a long time. You can see looking at my drawings that the proportion was all wrong and the size of the mouth, nose ect were wrong. Steve did show us how to get our proportions correct by drawing examples on the board, I found these very useful. 

The smudging that you can do with the charcoal I found very interesting, you can see looking at one of the pages that I experimented with this a number of times. I found this to be a very key part of charcoal drawing and I did use it when drawing the goatee. I also managed to smudge my drawings by accident quite a lot and that is something that annoyed me during the lesson. 

I like the way the charcoal looks on paper and the many ways you can alter it but I found the features to be very to use myself. I think if I had the choice I would stick with a pencil. Even though I did not enjoy using charcoal I did find todays lesson very  interesting and it was a great experience.