How To Use Charcoal to Draw 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. When you start, the best eraser to have for using with charcoal is actually a gummy eraser and it molds so you can mold it to the paper. It picks up a lot of the charcoal if you want to erase something. So when you start, you want to start with your form, like the picture here, we started with his head and just start off by drawing like you would with a regular pencil and draw the head, a circle to start. Now for heads you want to draw two circles, for a side profile. With charcoal there’s two ways to draw, you can start off by drawing and draw the same as you would with pencil and just shade in, like start shading his eyes, you would shade. You can use your fingertip shade or you can use an eraser and actually erase out what you want. Another way to draw with charcoal is actually to coat your entire paper with charcoal and then use an eraser tool to take the design out and you’re going to take out all the light parts, so in this I would start taking out the cheeks and the nose since they’re the lighter parts and leave in his beard, I would leave that completely dark. "