Grid Charcoal on Charcoal Paper

This was incredibly challenging. The exercise this week was to break down a drawing of our model into 4 sections. I decided to start with the model’s left hand (lower right) and go section by section.

Vine charcoal is nice because it’s a very forgiving medium, and I can erase and fix the piece as I go with a kneaded eraser.

Other sections I used either graphite or medium charcoal pencils. That was tougher because I felt like I had to commit further in comparison to vine charcoal.

With this exercise I learned to leverage the background for proportional scale. I took into account the writing on the back wall, and the shadows from the model and the chair she’s sitting on.

It’s a technique that I think would serve me well when I do murals and very large art pieces.