ONLINE ART COURSE – MODULE B – CHARCOAL – SUNFLOWER BACKGROUND

I had hoped to finish the sunflower drawing today, but as usual everything took longer than anticipated. Also, I had a lot of cooking to do this morning ready for Christmas, and as a result, lunch was rather late.

I managed to complete the background, more or less. Looking at it on the photo, I can see there are one or two areas that need further work, smoothing out a few portions. As always, these pictures are quite difficult to photograph. The paper at the top of the page has no charcoal and is in fact still white, not grey as in the photo. It is certainly better photographing the drawings in natural light, but by the time I’d finished, the light was fading fast, and I didn’t want to leave it till the morning.

Phil, the teacher, was showing us how to do a really sketchy, scribbly background with the willow charcoal, with lots of texture, but I really didn’t like this, so decided to make mine smoother. One of the members of the group decided to leave out the background altogether and I really liked the clean look of her drawing. I decided to compromise, and add the background to the bottom of the picture only, gradually fading it away to nothing.

In the end it was very dark around the sunflower at the bottom, and Phil said he was keeping his light, as the detail of the flower was darker at the bottom of the picture, and this would produce more contrast. Out came my kneadable eraser, and I began to dab at the background, not rubbing, but just removing spots of charcoal. I really liked this slightly stippled effect and continued with it. The background may still be too dark to produce enough contrast with the foreground at the borrom, but I can always lighten it some more if necessary.

It is amazing how well the charcoal moves on the paper with the aid of the blending stump. This makes shading quite a bit easier than with the graphite pencils, but I am still not convinced that charcoal is going to end up as one of my favourite drawing media! It’s early days though; I have not even completed the first of four projects in this module, and it will be interesting to see how I feel about it at the end.