Charcoal Portrait of Woman- Problems With Charcoal

Charcoal Portrait of Woman.

Problems with Charcoal Discussed.

Charcoal Portrait of Woman With Tilted Head

Here is a charcoal Sketch of a woman I did this afternoon. I admit it is not my best drawing but I was trying to experiment with the use of the darkest pencil I had, I normally use a 2b and medium. The great thing about the dark charcoal is the texture it gives on the paper. The resource material showed a woman with lots of black hair and a face in deep shadow, so I thought the dark would be effective. I found the dark charcoal pencil is soft and frustratingly messy for a large project.

 I didn't want to just make the hair a mass of black or a generic shape so I tried to give it highlights and texture, but I am not sure I like the results. Maybe the contrast of a large dark mass would have brought out the highlights of the face.

The dark was harder to control when I was trying to blend it than the 2b or the medium. I wanted to give the entire face a half tone of grey so I would have a few points of highlight such as her nose and forehead, but the blending was chunky and not even. I tried to use a napkin to finish after my attempt with the blending stub but it didn't help much. I know I could have used my finger but I was hesitant to bend by touch since I was having so many other problems.

When I tried to shade areas that needed to be dark the dark charcoal worked well like in the hair, where the blending stub easily pulled the medium along; and when it was needful to do a second line over a blended area it worked nicely.