Speaking of Art Blog

I recently finished this charcoal and pastel drawing.  I wanted to share something that I discovered while rendering this piece.  It’s about the color of charcoal markings.  I guess I never thought of the color temperature of charcoal before because when most people, including myself, think of a charcoal drawing we think of it as being simply black with shades of light and dark gray.  But not all grays are created equal.  There are warm brownish grays and there are grays that lean more toward the color of steel, more of a cool blue gray.

                                       Almost Spring, charcoal

The piece of artwork I drew just before my Yellow-throated Warbler drawing is this one, Almost Spring.

I noticed that the charcoal markings looked sort of warm in color temperature while I was drawing these trees.  But since there is no color in this piece, I couldn’t really compare and figure out just how warm those strokes actually are.  But once I started in on my Yellow-throated Warbler drawing and I focused on getting the bird’s feather coloring just right, that’s when it became apparent that its feathers needed to be a blue-gray, not a brownish gray.  So after I drew the bird with a charcoal pencil, I went back in and added some blue pastel on top of the gray looking feathers.  And that is finally when the bird started looking right.  It didn’t need much color, but it needed something cooler to offset the warmth of my charcoal marks.

Oh and BTW, when using both charcoal and pastel in one drawing, it’s best to render the drawing first with charcoal, and then go in and add the pastel on top.  Doing those two tasks in reverse order does not work well.  It has to do with how the charcoal grabs the paper and stays put even after pastel is put on top of it.  When the pastel goes down first and then charcoal is applied on top of the pastel, the charcoal keeps trying to grab onto the pastel and only serves to muddy the pastel, creating a blurry mess.  Not good.  Just remember: charcoal first, then pastel.  If you want to read more about combining the two media, here’s a link to an article I wrote about that:  The Marriage of Two Mediums.

So what did I learn from that experience of rendering the warbler?  One main take away – charcoal markings are warmer than you think.  On paper they read as a warm brownish-black.  If I want my grays to look cooler, I’ll have to go in and add blue pastel on top of the charcoal to cool it down.