Life Drawing In Charcoal, Douglas R. Graves – Book Review

This is a 176 page paperback issued by Dover.  Dover books always seem quite cheap and I might be being a bit unfair here but there’s a bit of me that always expects them to feel cheap.  The sort of books that pages start falling out of after a while.  Well, I’m pleased to be able to tell you that there’s no sign that pages are falling out of this one or that they ever will.  It’s perfectly acceptably constructed.  On the other hand there is one thing that bugs me.  It’s not that everything is in black and white (which is only to be expected given the subject matter) or that the pages are thin (they’re not top top quality but are acceptable and definitely not newspaper thickness).  It’s that the pages are a bit yellowy.  It’s as if this book wasn’t printed off from a word processor type document but that an older version of it was photographed, converted to pdf and then printed off.  Still, this isn’t a showstopper – just a minor eye roller.

Contents–wise, the book is divided into a whopping 27 chapters, described as “projects”.  A couple of these projects are exercises for the reader, both of them around getting used to using charcoal.  The rest of them seem more like exercises for the writer (i.e. demonstrations).  There’s nothing in the book presenting a challenge to the writer let alone to the reader, so they’re definitely demos.

Having 27 chapters and needing to include new tips in each of them does mean that this book isn’t short of ideas – there’s plenty in here.  It all starts off at beginner level with stuff about equipment, mark making and value control, although it doesn’t go into anything like the detail that Kate Boucher does in her book.  I won’t list out all the 27 chapters here but pretty well everything is covered.  As well as tips on life drawing in charcoal there are tips on life drawing without charcoal, charcoal drawing generally, portrait drawing with charcoal and portrait drawing without charcoal.  There are ideas here that I’ll be incorporating into my Artgraf, watercolour and inktense figure paintings.  There’s also an overarching idea throughout the book, which is that figure drawing in charcoal is about putting down big value masses and refining them and not about putting down contour outlines and filling them in with values.  This feels like something that would only work with charcoal as it’s a medium that can be rubbed out and pushed around.  It’s a medium for tinkerers.

How about the demos though?  Well, the first few felt like they’d been specially chosen to hammer home the lessons in the corresponding chapter.  But the further I got through the book, the more they seemed like a set of demos that was disconnected from the rest of the book.  So many things were happening in each of the demos that the little steps that matched the chapter were lost in the crowd.  That doesn’t mean I didn’t like them though.  It just meant I felt as if I was switching backwards and forwards between two books: one of tips and one of demos.  The demos themselves were actually really good.  They’re worded as demos for a start and not as instructional knitting patterns.  And all of them include loads of corrective steps where the author tells us what he wasn’t happy with and how he changed things.  If there’s one thing I like to read about in a demo, that’s it!  And all of the demos, while reinforcing the messages about (i) drawing tonal areas rather than lines, (ii) starting at a high level and gradually refining the drawing all over and (iii) correcting earlier errors, were all different, with slight changes to style every time.

So all sounding pretty good.  I find myself wanting to give this one three palettes for two reasons.  One of those is the yellow paper.  The other is that the author’s passion doesn’t come through.  I know how he wants us to draw but I can’t hear his voice coming through and you’ll know if you’ve read a few of these reviews that I do like to feel some sort of connection with the author.    But these feel like quite petty complaints.  I’m going to have to go with four palettes.

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