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.
Last week was “parts of faces” week in my journal. I was fairly pleased with all of them, but this schnozzola stood out:
Noses are hard. Mostly that’s because of a lack of hard lines (see my late 2024 complaint that “there is no such thing as a ‘nose’“). But even in profile—the one position where the nose does have a hard definitive outline—it’s still really hard. It’s a damned odd shape, unique to each individual. It grabs an inordinate amount of our visual attention, and we’re extremely sensitive to the intricacies of that shape. It’s like Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina never said: “All eyes are alike; each nose is unhappy in its own way.”
Anyway, I think this is the first nose I’ve ever gotten right.
I can never decide if these little guys are extremely sad, or sort of inspiring. They’re stunted and twisted by their constraints, but also tenacious despite insurmountable concrete limitations.
If you’re looking at this, you’re almost by definition just a twisty little city tree like me. And, now that I think about it, probably that tree—which I’ve regularly walked past for maybe 30 years now—doesn’t have too high an opinion of me: I could literally go anywhere in the world, and haven’t gotten any farther than he has.
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.
My son characterized several sketches from this week as looking like “ghosts unwillingly dissolving.”
With that second sketch he noted that “the background shadows and the face shadows really look cut from the same cloth. That’s really hard to do but I think you did it there.”
I see what he’s saying, but in this case it was totally unintentional. It was only about a week later that I was clicking through various screenshots of old drawing instructional books I found on Pinterest, and saw a discussion of the problem of hard lines in primarily tonal studies. In both cases it was the use/absence of hard lines that got the effect that made them striking (on the upper sketch the left edge of the face has a hard delineation while the right is allowed to “dissolve”; on the lower the face is framed entirely in shadow, with no precise hard outline).
I wouldn’t have put all that together without his feedback. For my part, I just liked the emotions that wound up on the page.
My son thought this was the sketch of the week: “I like the way middle right seems to lean in a little. Makes it look the spookiest.”
I sorta preferred this one from earlier in the week:
This sketch was the hardest—in that I erased everything and started over several times—and the easiest, once I stopped listening to a brain that was telling me “this is an eye! this is a nose! those are lips, you idiot!” and just put black where I saw black. I sorta love how the lighting make so clear that there’s a skull under that skin and meat. If anything, my failure here is that I didn’t go for blacker blacks.
If you can turn off your brain and just let your eye tell your hand where the black goes, hardshadowed, dramatic chiaroscuro actually almost makes for the easiest sketches.
No Sketch of the Week last week, because it was full week of failed attempts at capturing a specific promotional head shot of Boris Karloff. There’s nothing especially hard about sketching Boris Karloff, just that he has a human head and face, and I struggle at those in general. Probably a great place to start would be actually looking at folks’ faces when I spoke to them 🤷♀️
This week was Glitch Week, and I sorta liked how these two came out (yeah, the first one is another failed attempt at Boris Karloff. This time he came out looking like Jimmy Stewart! Last week, he was mostly the unwholesome splice of Cillian Murphy as J. Robert Oppenheimer and HP Lovecraft as himself).
I don’t know that these are good sketches, but I enjoyed working on them. Carefully reproducing a destructive analog video error in a pencil sketch sorta started as a joke, but quickly blossomed into a really good deep exercise in remembering and seeing what you see in your (fallible) memories.
The top one, of Glitch Karloff, gave me the oddest shudder working on it. Drawing it was upsetting but also fascinating in a way I can’t put my finger on.
Watch their faces. It’s fascinating how often you can see the cognitive dissonance, the battle of voices triggered in an average human’s head by being told they are beautiful. I don’t think this was the filmmaker’s point—in fact, I’m pretty sure it’s sort of the opposite—but it’s kind of heartbreaking. Why the hell should it be so hard to be told you are beautiful?
This video is ten years old. All of these kids are adults now (hopefully). Gott in Himmel how I wish there was a follow-up video of each of them being shown this video.
