If you draw flower where the leaves are too big, or the pedals are out of proportion, it will be flawed. That solid foundation should be built on basic shapes and the right proportions. When sketching your flower, you need to have a solid foundation to work on. It’s merely the framework that you are building your finished piece on. When you sketch the outline of a flower, keep your strokes light so that you’ll be able to erase or cover them later. It’s kind of like a road map that can help you to get where you are going. After you’ve established your irregular forms and values, keep working on the piece until it feels finished.īefore you start to add detail or dark areas on your charcoal flower drawing, sketching in a light and loose outline can be very beneficial. You also have to be careful not to tear the paper, and realize that no matter how much you work on it, the paper will still be a little grey after there has been a dense layer of charcoal on it. If you find that you have gotten too dark, you can erase charcoal, but you need an eraser explicitly designed for charcoal.
Continue to develop your drawing by slowly adding more darks. Just make sure that you use workable fixative, if you use a final fixative it will be challenging to do any more work on your drawing.Īs with any other type of drawing, when you are drawing with charcoal, you should start your drawing with light lines and basic shapes. Using workable fixative can help to protect your drawing while still allowing you to work on it. Charcoal is also very unstable after it has been applied to paper, so you need to be careful not accidentally to smear it as you draw.
Does that mean you can’t create fine details in your artwork? No, it just means that you’ll have to learn how to control charcoal in order to create features. The first thing you need to know about drawing with charcoal is that it’s messy. The ways that you can use charcoal to create artwork are vast, which is why this messy medium is worth your time. If you decide to try using charcoal with water, make sure that you use a heavy watercolor paper. Charcoal can even be wet with a brush creating an ink wash type of effect. Charcoal can be used under an oil painting to establish form, or it can be used over acrylic paint or watercolors.
Charcoal is also extremely versatile and works well with many other art mediums. A light touch of charcoal can add just a hint of grey, while bolder strokes can achieve an ink-black consistency. When you are sketching you might want to use a cheaper paper since these are only sketches, so using newsprint is a good option.Ĭharcoal is messy and more difficult to control than graphite, so why would anyone want to learn how to draw with it? Because it is incredibly versatile and allows you to obtain a range of values that graphite cannot compete with. One of the beautiful things about sketching in charcoal is that if you like a sketch, you can always work on it until it is a finished piece. Always loosen up and use loose, light strokes when you are sketching. They can also let you figure out what type of style works best for you. If you want to learn how to draw a flower in charcoal, then starting with some rough sketches can help you to get used to working with charcoal. Whatever you do, don’t use hairspray, which won’t work as well, and it will also cause your paper to yellow over time. When your drawing is finished, you’ll need to protect it by using workable fixative. You also need to decide for how you want your piece to look, if you want a softer look then using your finger, or a blending stub is very helpful. Start to add those in, then finish your drawing by adding more delicate details, a charcoal pencil works best for this. Next, look at your reference photo and examine where there are shadows and where there are highlights. Try to keep your wrist loose and move your entire arm as you make strokes, resist the urge only to move your wrist as you draw. Start your charcoal flower drawing by sketching in shapes lightly. If you want to draw a realistic flower, then using photo reference is helpful. You can also use white charcoal, which is great for adding highlights to your artwork. You can use charcoal pencils, or you can use vine charcoal that comes in a stick form. Once you have chosen the right paper, you need to select the kind of charcoal you are going to work with.