BethR In Charcoal

Time to have another go at a charcoal figure and to put Anthony Ryder’s lessons to use. They worked last weekend, so why not keep going? Today’s model was BethR, making her third appearance.

Once again, I didn’t use a grid, working instead in Anthony Ryder style ne starting with an envelope and gradually shrinking it to fit the model. And it worked again. And once I’d put down a final outline, I was ready to fill it with colour. Just like last time, I went for charcoal pencils and started with the darkest colour in the darkest shadows (and in particular in the terminators) and a white and, later, sand and burnt orange in the lighter areas. Then I filled in everything else with whatever colour felt right at the time, while trying to control values with the amount of pressure I applied. I smoothed out all the pigment with a paper stump. So far, this was all a repeat from last time.

But then I made a change. I still didn’t use vine charcoal but I did get out XL charcoal blocks and used these to add most of the second layer, only really using the pencils fro the fine detail in the face. Those blocks are absolutely crammed with pigment compared to the pencils. In particular I found it much easier to brighten up my highlights with the white block that I’ve ever done with the white pencil. After adding this second layer and blending it, the painting looked even better. I should probably have stopped at this point and just tinkered with some fine details but I thought that if two layers worked better than one, then three should work better than two,

So I put down a third layer, again mainly using the blocks. There was no noticeable change in the quality of the painting, suggesting that the optimum number of layers was somewhere between two and three and that I was into that dark zone where any more work would make things worse. So I stopped adding full layers at this point. I just tinkered a bit in places with the charcoal pencils (not just in the face but in some other places that had deteriorated). I found that, while paper stumps made great blenders after the first layer, finger blending was great at the end for sculpting the body pay in three dimensions. And my background was smudgy, so I went over it with the XL blocks. And that was me done.

I think this one’s come out too dark and fuzzy to be worth putting up for sale. The darkness is the result of using too many layers (two!) of XL charcoal block and the fuzziness (I mean, compare this one to last time) is from being loose and expressive with the blocks rather than tight and accurate with the pencils. Maybe next time it needs to be blocks, then pencil. Or pencil, blocks, pencil. Or two or three layers of pencil with no blocks. Pencil on its own without blocks definitely works, so maybe that’s the way to go.