I wasn’t super happy with this one (but much less happy with everything in my journal; I’ve spent the last couple weeks trying to learn to quickly capture facial expressions, and now feel more face-blind than when I began).
My son opined that my dissatisfaction with this charcoal arose from the fact that a deciduous tree has harder lines and holds snow differently than a pine, and thus doesn’t lend itself to the sort of gauzy effect I got in Week 49. I think I maybe just lucked out last week and ended up punching well above my weight. I did like the way further mixing media (adding in white gel pain overtop the Mod Podge that’s overtop the soft charcoal) made the snow pop the way I like.
Anyway, it’s still winter here, so expect further snowy trees in your future.
I was up in Prudenville, MI, visiting my in-laws for Thanksgiving and took some pictures. It had snowed before we arrived, and then snowed much more overnight. There was a fair bit of digging out to do so we could get our early start to get our son to his bus so he could travel 11 hours back up to Michigan Tech for finals, and then take another 11-hour bus home again within a couple weeks.
This is my fourth charcoal sketch, working with that same old and forgiving willow charcoal. A nice thing about willow charcoal is that it erases damn near completely. This is great for me, because it lets me build up a tree “logically”: I can rough in the tree, then start erasing back down to white paper for the snow while deepening the blacks with more charcoal for the deeper shadows.
The tricky bit is that willow charcoal is so soft and forgiving that it is damn near ephemeral. If you want the sketch to stop changing, you have to seal it. I don’t own any fixative, so instead I cut old Mod Podge with a little water and spray it in sloppy puddles over the drawing, than squeegee it with an old plastic gift card or credit card or whatever. This lowers the contrast, bringing down my whites and blending in my darks (which is a bummer), but it imparts a streaky surface finish I really, really, really like. Also, it’s fun to have this whole other dimension along which to experiment with the drawing once the drawing is done: changing the thicknesses of the application, adding more layers, squeegeeing in different directions, etc.
FUN FACT: Prudenville, MI is the setting for most of what’s in this essay from 2014 or 2015.
This is my second attempt at sketching in charcoal. Instead of using a charcoal pencil (as I did in my first stab, which I wasn’t happy with), I used some old willow charcoal my wife had kicking around. This stuff is literally just charred sticks. It’s not nearly as dark as charcoal pencils, tending to more gray than black. But it is so soft that you can practically erase a line just by rubbing it out with your fingertips. It’s a blunt tool, but incredibly forgiving. As you build up layers of it working toward black, it basically grinds down to powdery ash. Drawing with it is half drawing and half finger-painting. Very fun and liberating, if you can release yourself from needing to control how things go.
