Hear The Wind

September’s starting off with a big project that will take at least a week to complete, maybe two. It’s going to start with five charcoal drawings of bits of me, focused on the five senses. At one point I was thinking that a collection of five such drawings would make an interesting project but I’ve thought some more and, you know what? These five drawings will just be stage one of the project. There will be a stage two that takes them to another place entirely.

Here’s the first of the five. It’s my right ear. Like all five drawings that kick off this project, it’s about 4.5 inches by 6. I mainly used charcoal pencils, with the XL blocks being used a couple of times and the vine charcoal once. Going forwards, it looks as if the pencils will be my main charcoal weapon, with the XL blocks being for white highlights and the occasional low density, high area application of violet, sanguine or ochre tints. The charcoal might fade way into obscurity.

I used techniques from the Stephen Bauman book, starting from an envelope of straight lines and gradually refining it, then filling out the shadows first before darkening some of them and bringing in half tones. Oh, and I scratched in some hairs with a pointy stick before adding any charcoal: this works for coloured pencils, so why not give it a go with charcoal? And, after that, just continuing to refine the drawings while at all times keeping the relative values unchanged. A couple of times I found that either my original outlines were wrong or that I’d deviated away from them. But it’s easy to make corrections with charcoal. Whenever the drawing started to feel too dark, I would add white highlights with either the white XL block or a putty eraser. I would blend the values together with paper stumps most of the time but occasionally with fingers. I tried to leave hard edges hard but to soften imaginary edges where surfaces bent away from view. I tinkered with this one for a long time before getting to a happy place and am fast coming to the conclusion that, in marked contrast to watercolours, a less than perfect charcoal drawing just needs to have more tinkering time spent on it. But, yes, eventually, I got there and stopped. I didn’t smooth out the very last application of charcoal marks: there was enough body underneath it for this to not be necessary and for me to allow a bit of texture to show through.

So that’s me done for today. It’s a pretty good start to the project. Maybe I’ll be able to get through two senses tomorrow. On the other hand, the ear might be one of the easier of the five drawings. We’ll see.

This drawing was incorporated into Hear The Wind, Smell The Reindeer.