Charcoal Types for Drawing the Human Form

Series Summary

Drawing the human figure suggests the outline of a figure against a background, as opposed to painting which involves filling in the figure that is drawn. When drawing the human form, you must first choose the materials you will need for creating the drawing. Your medium can be dry (graphite, charcoal, pastel, pencil) or wet (marker, pen, ink) or a combination of the two. You will need to choose the appropriate paper, erasers, blending stumps, and sharpeners to accompany you.

In this series of videos, you will learn how to apply the materials and translate what you see to paper. Our expert will teach viewers how to draw using charcoal and pencils. You will learn how to draw the correct proportions of the human form and face. Watch as our expert uses shapes and shades in drawing the human form. Learn how using a human dummy and color wheel can help you draw different types of faces and forms. If you want to add color to your drawing, our expert can show you how. If you wish to draw a profile view of the human form, watch these videos for tips. You can learn how to measure the proportions of the lips, chin, hairline and eyes in order to simplify the human form.

Video Transcript

"Hi my name is Alaina and I’m going to start off by showing you a little bit about charcoal drawing. First when you start with charcoal drawing what you need to get is a few pieces of charcoal. Now your best thing to get is actual charcoal sticks, most people get charcoal that’s encased like a pencil with would around it, but these actual works better for drawing. So you go to any kind of art store they’ll have stick of charcoal for you. Now you want to get, actually this a sandpaper pad and it flips and you can tear it off like a pad of paper, but what you want to do is you want to sharpen it to a point, just like you would do with a pencil. But just rub it along it’s really soft so it’ll come to a point really easy. "