I love charcoal, but not the mess it makes.  You’ve got to prepare to make sure absolutely EVERYTHING isn’t completely covered in dust.  But it’s such an expressive medium.  I love the strong lines you can get, a love blurring the lines out – and yeah I do use it to cover up dodgy marks!  The marks that are possible with a stick on its side can be so… gestural, for want of a better word.

But I’m still not getting the levels of shading I think are possible – I’ve seen work where the charcoal goes from the purest white to the deepest black.  I want to get to that point, so will have to practice.

I’m not sure how useful this exercise was – I’ve used a lot of charcoal lines in the mark making studies so far, so I’m not sure what this was supposed to add.  Maybe I’ve missed the point – distinctly possible.

Ooh – but rubbers (erasers for any US readers!)!  I do like the fact that with charcoal you can create big swathes of black, shaded tone, and then draw into it with a rubber, creating a “negative” image, or work with negative space by rubbing out the bit’s that aren’t there.  The shaded band on each of my test squares (stencilled again!) have four rectangles rubbed out on them, one is putty rubber, one a new toy – an electric eraser, one a piece of bread and then my more usual implement, a plastic eraser.

I’m not a fan of putty erasers, they never seem to get back to the white of the paper.  I guess they could be useful for taking a dark shading back to a lighter shade, still darker than the paper surface, but I’m not yet used to thinking in terms of “subtracting out” as a general technique rather than as a specific exercise.

You know what part of this (and forthcoming excercise) got me worked up?  The squares.  I was getting freaked out that my squares wouldn’t be uniform, regular and evenly distributed on the page.  Does this matter, absolutely not.  Did it bug me, absolutely.  Solution: a template.  Squares arranged on an A4 sheet in Illustrator, printed on to card and used as a stencil.  Voila, problem solved.

And on to the actual exercise.  What I did was try to duplicate the same marks – a variety of them in different squares with different materials.  In that way I can refer to this as a “dictionary” looking at the best tool to make a certain type of mark.

I still have issues with graded shadings – I can only manage about 4 “levels” of tone.  Hopefully that will come with practice.

But hey – nice neat squares! I like the “C” shapes.  I was also trying to get different density of tone using the same “pressure” of mark – again reducing the variables, so what is seen is the difference in the materials.

I then did a page of colour.  Same marks, same pressure, but using different colours in the same shading area to try and get an “optical mixing” effect.  Yellow and Blue make Green and look, there it is on the page.  It works better the further “out” you are from the drawing, but only blue and yellow pencils were used here.

Hmmm. Interesting. I don’t doodle normally and so approached this exercise not knowing how I was going to do it or where I was going to end up. I made a couple of choices. Firstly I was only going to work in black on white paper. Even in media where I had colour options – felt pens, pencils, pastels, I chose to stick to the single colour. Secondly I decided to do most of the work on A2 sheets. This followed on from the first exercise where I found my gestures and mark making was more free when given a larger surface to work with.

Once I started just letting the marks happen, and just went with whatever they were suggesting, I found it quite a liberating experience and a lot easier than I thought it would be.

When working with just a thin line – pencil, graphite – nothing much seemed to happen. Squiggles, no inclination to follow a particular shape to develop it into something. When I switched to charcoal, using it on it’s edge, the Bow-tie type shapes I had made turned into flowers without really thinking about it. I like the ribbon form – again charcoal on i’s side, but the extra emphasis obtained by going around the edges with a strong line makes this a very interesting form.

I’d started off with a portrait sheet so then swapped to landscape. The felt pen doodles took on suggestive shapes quite easily – perhaps a set of net curtains or prison bars at the top, perhaps a bunch of roses viewed from above below. Having worked with lines and circles/spirals, I went with triangles and ended up with an ‘origami” girl! The stuff in the middle is chalk pastel which I smudged out with my fingers. Surrounding these linear forms with simple geometric shapes added balance to a “composition”. I really like this. The oil pastels… I’m not sure about. It’s not a medium that feels “right” to me. I’m not sure if it’s the waxiness or the fact that even lines (as opposed to shading) seems to pick up the texture of the table underneath the paper, even though there’s a tablecloth. One shape did morph into a cartoon dog, though!

I then started thinking about buildings. Thinking of skyscrapers, I went with portrait paper, long lines with supporting horizontals. Thinking of New York, the grey splodge in the middle was originally a patch of grass in my mind, but then I started putting a lid on it, thinking of St Paul’s in London. The circle came next – originally a random shape, but then reminded me of Rose windows of medieval cathedrals and having recently been reading Gombrich’s History of Art I added a portico and then some fanciful flying buttresses. I didn’t feel drawn to put anything below the nominal ground surface below the buildings, but again going with thoughts of New York I put in a shoreline with some hints of reflections in some water. OK this went a little beyond the brief, but it did start from doodles and I followed it to its conclusion. I’m actually really happy with this!

So onto thinking about water and a shift back to landscape format. I tried to go with rounder, curving flowing forms. Starting with the round forms, they became reminiscent of stones in a river and I tried following that train of thought, but I don’t think it was very successful.

Just to prove a point I did a couple of pages in my sketchbook to deliberately restrict the movements I could make. Of the first page I was still thinking about water and flowing lines, but stronger straight lines took over and you can kindof see a landscape in there.

Starting the last page co-incided with the start of a new album on iTunes. I found myself following the staccato notes of the piano with my pencil drawing lost and lots of dashes. I kept going for the whole track, putting stronger lines in where I felt stronger phrases in the piece and wiggles where there were turns of notes. Placement of the marks started out random, but as the piece progressed I became more deliberate in their placement to try and create some sort of balance.

I got a lot more out of this than I thought I would, and have one thing – the skyline – which I really like. I’m not sure if I’d chose to use this method as the basis for starting a “work” but it’s a good exercise.

So here’s my collection of mark making stuff – pens, pencils, pastels, graphite, charcoal and so on and so forth. I started off by trying them out in my sketchbook, varying the pressure of the line, and the position where I was holding the “implement”.

It’s all to do with control and so I drew a couple of “bowl forms” to see if I could control the shading – something I’ve always had a problem with. I’m pretty pleased with the second one – done with a 6B graphite pencil.

After working with some sepia and sanguine pencils (the sepia pencil was horrible to use – scratchy and sticky) I added a bit of colour in, using a green colour as well as the black for chalk pastels, oil pastels and felt tip pens – just to differentiate them from the other tools as much as anything – the chalk pastel especially looks quite like the charcoal. I was surprised to find that the felt tip pen mark didn’t vary to any significant degree whatever pressure I used.

I then moved on to a big A1 sheet of paper and drew big gestures with the 6B graphite pencil which was my favourite of the implements. I again tried a graduated shading one of the random shapes created. It’s not too even; I’ve still got some work to do there!