Charcoal Value Drawings

Observational Charcoal Drawing is one of the best ways to improve your accuracy and add to your understanding of value. 

In this week’s Adult and Teen class, we sharpened both these skills by drawing from still-life setups.  
I started by showing them some of my old charcoal drawings. These were drawn from life while I was a student at Gage Academy of Art.

Working on tinted paper, we used charcoal and followed these steps to create a value drawing:

1. Use tinted paper and draw big rough shapes. Check accuracy with:
   1. Negative Space
   2. Horizontal Lines
   3. Symmetry
   4. Diagonals 
   5. Vertical
      

1. Lightly apply vine charcoal to the entire drawing – holding the vine charcoal on its side color over the whole drawing.
2. Using compressed charcoal, squint, and color in the shadows.  
3. Next, squint and erase all large light areas. 
4. Squint and color in the darkest darks.  
5. Adjust middle values drawing into the image using your kneaded eraser. Readjust the lights and darks as you work on the middle values.  
6. Pick your focal point and emphasize it with higher contrast, sharper edges, and more detail; This is where you tell the story you are conveying through your art.
7. Squint and color in the darkest darks.  
8. Lastly, apply the highlights (lightest lights) with a white Conte crayon. Note that highlights will follow the form of the object.  
   

It was the first time many students had drawn from “real life” and worked with charcoal. They did a great job! Here is a look at their work: