Last week my lovely assistant selected the first parcel from the DIY art advent calendar. It was charcoal! I always think of charcoal as the quintessential art school material. I don’t remember when I bought this little pack of willow charcoal, but I know I never tried it out properly.

First we grabbed some paper and had a play around. The paper was very smooth and rubbing the charcoal basically just wiped it completely off the surface. My assistant loved this and was soon covered in charcoal dust. Then we followed along with a little YouTube tutorial and tried out a few basic charcoal techniques.

The big surprise to me was that you can use water with charcoal. Draw a solid charcoal shape, and then just use a paintbrush and water to push it around a bit. I loved this! You instantly get rid of the rough charcoal texture that leaves gaps and instead you can see the paintbrush strokes. I think the result looks almost like black ink. And as a bonus, this (mostly) sets the charcoal, so it doesn’t rub off so easily.

This was the end of experimenting with charcoal for the first day. I then planned to do lots more exploring, but every time I thought about doing it, I just couldn’t bring myself to start for some reason. I think a lot of it was the mess. But also, I watched a few other charcoal demo and tutorial videos and people were working with different types of charcoal, pan pastel charcoal, special erasers, sponge applicators, blending sticks, and more. I don’t have any of that stuff and the whole point of the DIY art advent is to not buy more art materials, so I wasn’t going to get any of that stuff.

I did have some mid-toned paper and a stick of white chalk and so today I went through my photos looking for something suitable to draw. This is the view from a local park at sunset last winter. The foreground was almost silhouette, with a white house behind the trees and the sunlight just touching the tops of the chimney stacks.

I didn’t want to risk putting this in my scanner, and the photos don’t quite do it justice, but you can see the nice textures.

Will I ever use charcoal again?
Once I started then I did enjoy the process and I like the result – the bold black and ability to fill in big solid shapes quickly does suit my heavy-handed drawing style. But it was so hard to actually get started! The potential mess was quite a substantial barrier, and even though it wasn’t insanely messy in the end, I now don’t really know what to do with the finished sketch. It’s too powdery and fragile!

I could maybe see myself using charcoal for urbansketching as it was super fast and the mess would bother me less outdoors.