Life Drawing from Home: Charcoal & Gesso (Patreon)

Most people are familiar with charcoal, it’s a great medium to draw with and also great for beginners. It’s a bit messy but very forgiving as it is easy to put on and take off again and again. I love it for its atmospheric qualities and the range of tones and marks that can be made with it. Recently, I’ve been using charcoal in combination with acrylic gesso which is known as a primer for acrylic and oil painting but can be painted onto most surfaces. It is a white, water-soluble paint, similar to acrylic paint - you can create lots of texture with it or make it as smooth as glass depending on how you use it. 

Aims of this exercise

• To encourage you to use charcoal to create atmosphere and contrast, boosting your drawings so that they stand out from the paper.
• To explore the use of gesso, it’s qualities and how it can add texture to your drawings.
• To give you confidence when making marks on paper, it is easy to change your mind about the marks you make when using charcoal, you don’t have to commit to what you have drawn.

I like to use gesso with old rough brushes, bristle wherever possible, so that it creates rough marks. 

There is just one exercise to learn how to use this technique; you should work on several drawings at the same time as you will need to wait for the gesso to dry on each one. 

Materials

You will need:

• Sticks of  charcoal – any size but a variety would be good 
• Putty and/or plastic eraser
• Brushes – Ideally, large flat bristle brushes 2” & 1” and 1/2” brushes, if you don’t have these any old rough brushes will do
• Gesso – you probably won’t need that much so a 500ml tub will be plenty if you need to buy.
• Pot for pouring in some gesso, a yoghurt pot or similar, something wide enough to dip your brush in.
• Jar of water
• Some rags or kitchen roll
• Paper – heavy cartridge is good but any will do. A4 5 to 10 sheets
• Workspace – you will need a flat area to paint and a drawing board to draw on will be helpful. Cover your table with either a plastic sheet or old newspaper to protect it.

Reference images

Start by selecting a range of images. Either work from one of the online classes that you may have started to work from or use the reference material from our Patreon. Download the images, open them up as a slide show so you can quickly toggle between poses and time yourself for each drawing before moving on to the next pose. 1 – 3 minutes to start with. 

Exercise:

Step 1. Choose an image to start with and roughly draw the figure in charcoal by blocking in some shapes with the side of the charcoal and add some contours/lines.  The variety of mark is more important here than the accuracy of the drawing. Use your hand or a rag to smudge some of the charcoal, keep it rough and general, don’t try to blend or smooth the charcoal as it will flatten the marks you make. 

Step 2. Pour some gesso into a pot, a small amount will do to start with as you can top it up as you go along (Gesso dries quite quickly). With a dry brush, dip it into the gesso so that it is loaded with paint. Cover your drawing with the paint using bold strokes in any direction.

You should find that you can see a much lighter version of your drawing showing through the paint. Wait for the paint to dry. Depending on thickness of paint and room temperature, it should take about 10 minutes. You can always hurry it on with a hairdryer.

While you waiting for the gesso to dry, make new drawings the same way as the first one and repeat by covering them with gesso. You may find that as the brush becomes damp it makes a bit of a grey mess, so rinse it out and dry your brush on a rag or paper towel for cleaner covering. Repeat this so you have about 5 drawings covered in gesso.

Step 3. Once the gesso is dry, choose a different image to draw from and draw over the top of your original drawing in charcoal again. Hopefully the texture in the gesso should reveal some interesting marks as you draw and drag the charcoal over. Use some fine lines with the charcoal to create variety so that you have the softer, more smudgy marks underneath and the crisper ones over the top. Repeat for the other drawings.

You should also find that it is quite easy to rub out any charcoal marks with an eraser. Try using your eraser as a drawing or mark making tool as well as removing unwanted marks to add variety to the marks you already have. 

If you are pleased with the result, leave it there. If there are marks or lines you are not happy with, then you can either take them away with the eraser or you can cover those marks with the gesso adding another layer. You can cover the whole thing or just partially cover it.

And repeat... as many times as you think is necessary, but try and change the image you are drawing from on each drawing. You can also turn the paper round so your original drawing is upside down, helping you to vary the marks you that you make. Being able to partially see your original drawing under the gesso can give your drawing a sense of movement and atmosphere.

Summary

This technique is great for recovering unwanted drawings, instead of disposing them, try covering them in gesso and reusing them. If there are parts of the drawing that work or you like, you can leave those exposed and cover the parts you don’t like. Be playful and explore, what usually works best is a combination of very dark and very light crisp marks alongside some softer, lighter, subtler ones to give your drawing some mood and make it stand out.

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This is the second of our weekly 'Life Drawing From Home' blog posts, commissioned using money from the Draw Patreon to keep our tutors and models in work. Please do share your drawings with us, as we would love to see what everyone is up! Just tag us with @Draw_Brighton on social media or use the #LifeDrawingFromHome and #DrawBrighton hashtags. this article was written by Shelley Morrow - you can follow her on instagram at @shelleymorrow1 and you can see more of her work on her website www.shelleymorrow.com.

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