Art Supplies for Charcoal Drawing

Series Summary

Charcoal drawing is often the foundation of any 2D art curriculum. Learning how to draw with charcoal teaches the artist how to understand light and form, and provides the basic knowledge and skills that can be applied to painting, ink drawing, and even computer-aided drawings.

In this series of free videos you'll learn how to draw with charcoal from a professional artist. Expert William Cotterell shows you what types of art supplies you'll need to get started, including various types of charcoal, compressed and pencil varieties, types of erasers that work best with charcoal, and the best types of paper for making charcoal drawings. He also shares tips for choosing a subject, understanding light, blending techniques, adding highlights, and using Fixatif to protect your work of art.

Video Transcript

"Hey there my name is Bill Cotterell on behalf of Expert Village I like to show you the fundamentals of charcoal drawing. First of all I like to talk about the basic utensils that we're going to use for drawing charcoal. First of all my preferred method of charcoal is the pencil charcoal and these come in various sizes and different weights and of course different densities. Soft all the way up to very hard so the softer ones crumple easier so they leave more of the charcoal on the paper as your drawing. So this particular one you can peel this off and it will peel layers away and of course you just sharpen the end of it when you're done. This one here is just a straight sharpen, all you have to do is sharpen this when you're ready to prefer tip that you want. Each of these are the same these are more of graphite type but like I said many varieties that are out there. Here are another set that range from hard on down to soft and these like I said can be sharpened straight where they are and I'm going to leave you a very nice tip when done so. I like to use highlight pencils when using for different types of charcoal drawings of my own these here will add highlight ends, where in neutral paper such as this you can show your darkest and dense black and shades. But when you add these colors of these pencils there's a great deal of highlight that can be added into your feature. So this utensil here is basically really tight cotton that once unrattled and sharped will blend in different patterns and tones very settle. Much better than your finger can ever do because your finger has oils and other substances on them, this gets to the right heart of it. If you have a texture of paper that has modeled finish, it will actually put the shading a lot better into the crevasses. Lastly I wanted to show how these erasers even though while they're gum they have a great effect on being able to erase precisely on where you want to go. Because of how they are and they can be modeled and twisted in any shape or form, you get the tightest slight of mark of eraser. But very very accurate this gum eraser here leaves shavings that need to be wiped off, but it also has it's advantages in that. It will not smear it more or less it takes off everything from the paper. So those are the two different types of erasers that we have, so that's an overview on the types of utensils that you will need to produce at least some basic fundamentals charcoal drawings."