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[Tutorials List]
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Introduction:
Charcoal is very helpful when you need to quickly darken areas or when you're working on a large drawing.

Types of Charcoal: The most common are vine and compressed

Vine: useful when you're beginning a drawing and want to sketch out your layout. This material is soft and will only leave a slight gradation if you rub it, and nearly come off the paper if you erase it.

Compressed: handy for making medium gray to completely dark areas for your drawing. If you put this stuff down on paper, you better feel comfortable with it being there because you won't be able to undo it unless you only made a slight mark. This type of charcoal is usually seen as a small stick, about a finger in length. Compressed charcoal also comes in pencils, which is useful in making thin dark lines and working in detail.

Powdered: Used to cover large areas. Good for toning.

White charcoal: pretty much what it sounds like. It's white. It's called charcoal. Comes in sticks and in pencils. Sometimes good for highlights.

Tools:

Chamois: Pronounced "shamwah" or "shammy". A piece of porous leather. Great for blending and toning paper in a way that doesn't leave smudges. If it gets too dirty you can wash it with soap and water. It might be a good idea to keep it in the same ziplock bag as my charcoal so that when its removed it's completely covered in charcoal and ready for use to draw directly and for toning, which we'll go over later. Its been said you can get them cheaper at automotive supply stores than at art stores. People also use it for pastels, colored pencils, watercolors and polishing things.

Tortillons and stumps: Both are cylindrical blending tools made out of tightly rolled paper, but where tortillons are short and hollow, stumps are longer, more tightly wrapped, solid straight through and more likely to be pointed at both ends. Stumps are occasionally made of felt or leather. You can clean them by removing the top layer of paper with sandpaper, erasers, or an emery board. They leave slightly different textures.

Erasers: Chances are good you're already familar with these. Kneaded erasers are good for removing the charcoal slower and not as fully, excellent for toning and can be molded into a variety of shapes for detailed erasing and large area toning. Harder plastic and vinyl erasers will erase much cleaner and harder.

Erasing shields: This is a piece of thin steel with holes punched into it, that you can use like a stencil so that you only erase specific areas and get sharp borders to the areas you erase.

Fixative: This is to keep your finished work from shedding charcoal everywhere, preserving it. It's usually available as an aerosol spray, and is extremely toxic so DO NOT SPRAY IT INDOORS. We recommend workable fixative- you can still go back in on top if you want to. Some artists like to separate layers of their work with it.

Using Charcoal:
Charcoal is a wonderful material that lends itself to a wide variety of marks and tones. You can apply it pretty much any way you want. Experiment.

You can also try toning the paper then first working subtractively with the eraser then drawing with charcoal back in. To tone the paper,cover it in layers of lightly applied charcoal, and smooth them out into the paper with your chamois for an even tone. If you press too hard you'll end up with marks that are hard to get rid of. Use compressed charcoal for dark tones. Next, decide what you'll want to be lighter than the main tone, and brush that in with an eraser. Put your dark tones in with charcoal. Fine tune everything, and enjoy.

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