The joy of drawing with Charcoal! Original artwork by @mayasky

‘’Drawing at its best is not what your eyes see but what your mind understands.’’

Millard Sheets

Since I joined steemit a couple of months ago I’ve been posting a lot of pictures of my paintings, however another passion of mine that is well connected is drawing. My first year at the Florence Academy of Art, which is where I got my main education in art, we were only allowed to draw. Like many other art academies with roots in the French and Italian 1800-1900th art education, drawing was seen as the foundation that was needed to be able to produce a classical realist painting. A well known expression was, and still is, ‘’ painting is just drawing with paint.’’

Portrait drawing on Canson paper With Nitram charcoal

My favorite medium when it comes to drawing is charcoal. A great charcoal I would recommend anyone who’s interested in making drawings that require a lot of layers is Nitram Fine Art Charcoal. It is a charcoal that has a good variation in softness/hardness and is easy to sharpen as the shape and consistency is compressed into a square shape that is a lot more solid than for instance vine charcoal. Good drawing paper would be either normal Canson Mi-Teintes or some softer Roma paper.

The drawings I’ve posted here are all produced on Canson and Roma paper and drawn with Nitram fine Art Charcoal. For erasing I use normal kneedgum that easily can be rolled into different shapes to help you erase bigger or smaller arias.

Hope you enjoy! 

Model drawing in charcoal on Roma paper. Time spent, 75 hours.

Stilllife sketch on Canson paper.

Portrait on grey Roma paper

Portrait on Canson With chalk and charcoal.

Charcoal on grey Canson

Studie for a painting made in charcoal on Canson paper.