Let's
begin by talking about charcoal. I want you to start learning to draw
with this material. It is a drawing utensil which has been used since
pre-history. In that era they used burned sticks to paint the walls
in caves. In the Renaissance era it was re-discovered. Now this material
is hand made and sold.
There
are two types of charcoal: the stick and the pencil.
Stick.
In the photo below you can see charcoal sticks. You can buy a whole
range with different thicknesses. I recommend that you use a fairly
thick charcoal stick to draw with, because you can sharpen it with
the sander to obtain a variety of thicknesses.
You
can buy charcoal sticks at a stationer's either individually or in
a box. They make drawing a lot easier as we can easily erase our mistakes.
Pencil.
It is like a normal pencil, but the lead is
charcoal and not graphite.
Now
we are going to talk about the smudge stick. When you blur something
you are degrading the colour. We can get this effect using two different
ways: with a smudge stick (as you can see in the next photo). and
with your fingers, because as our skin has its own grease, our fingers
are very good smudge sticks. Using both methods we will be able to
achieve a variety of grey tones.
Using
your fingers you can get better tones, but these are not precise.
With the smudge stick you can get a more precise result, and reach
all of the corners, something that your fingers can not do. In this
course we are going to use both techniques.
In
the photo you can see various different things that we have blurred.
