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.