Lessons

Lesson Info

Visceral Charcoal Drawing/Object Lessons

I like to call this lesson "Object Lessons" because in this abstract drawing exercise, I'm actually gonna be using significant objects, objects that have meaning to me. And I invite you to maybe look around your house, and if you're looking for something to draw or to work with in this way, maybe choose a few things that have nostalgic value or that you just happen to have an affection for. I have these three objects. I have this cow that is a really, really old little sculpture that is from India. I have this crab claw, which reminds me of my childhood growing up on the beach, and I really love the shape and feel of it. And then I also have these, this is actually a cowbell, which has a sound to it. (cowbell tinkling) It's a cowbell that I got when I lived in Thailand, and I love the shape, and I love the sound. So these are the three objects that I'm gonna be drawing from. And in this lesson, we're gonna be working with four sheets of paper. Each one should be a square. So initially,...

they're gonna be just four separate pieces of paper, square shaped so that we can piece them with themselves. You're gonna need a small paint brush of some kind, some charcoal, some kind of eraser, a shammy cloth like this, or a piece of fabric, like a a scrap from an old T-shirt, some tape, maybe a little bit of white paint and then a little bit of water to wash your brush with when you're done. So it's multimedia, it's gonna be drawing, maybe a little bit of painting, a little bit of a erasure. So when I'm working in the way that I'm about to show you, it's like you're building up a drawing, but then you're knocking it down. So there's this idea of creation and destruction, this idea of adding and subtracting, and it becomes this dance that you'll see. And it's actually very liberating because it allows you to let go of certain things and pull new things in, constantly inventing and reinventing, which I feel, if you can adopt that attitude in drawing, abstraction becomes a much more fluid process. Just to be able to add in, take out, move things around, like a puzzle. So let's get started with this. I'm gonna bring my water out of the way, just put it on this side. The paint also is something we're gonna work with a little later on in the drawing. My objects, my muses are gonna be on the side for now. And what I'm gonna do first is I'm gonna take these four pieces of paper and I'm just gonna join them together very loosely in the back. And you can see that because I'm working with squares, they more or less fit pretty well together. So I'm gonna place them in a grid of four. I'm gonna take some tape and I'm just going to tape the backs. Just along the seam. Doesn't have to be perfect. You're just trying to kind of secure them together so that, ultimately, when we flip this, it's gonna kind of have the illusion of one piece of paper, but we actually know that it's four, so I'm gonna put this down here, just to hold these guys together. Yeah. Then I'm gonna flip it. Oh, there's a sticker. That would be an interesting element, but I'm gonna take it away. All right, I'm gonna flip it over. So I have these four sheets of paper. This is probably a remnant of an old drawing, but that's not really gonna matter. All right, so then I'm gonna take my objects and I'm going to actually draw them large on this whole page. I'm gonna draw them large. I'm gonna draw them with a compressed charcoal, and I'm going to set them up in a certain way. It doesn't really matter. You could almost just throw things down, but I'm gonna set them up so that they're relating to each other in a certain way. Something like that to start with, then I'm gonna take my charcoal, and I'm going to just start, again, using this very loose style of contour drawing to create just a linear version of them. So I'm looking at the cow. I'm gonna go over and just make a really loose rendition of the cow. I'm not super concerned about a high sense of realism. I might put in a little bit of the decoration on the cow, but there's the cow. And then my eye from the cow comes over to this crab claw, which has a little teeth on it. I'm gonna put in the crab claw. (charcoal scraping) And then from the crab claw, amy eye comes down to this little cowbell, and you see I'm just pretending, in a way, that there aren't four different pieces of paper. I'm just drawing right over them. I like the string on this, how that kind of comes off to the side. There's that, and then this one comes down here. And then this little one there. All right, so there's my first drawing. I'm going to move these aside for a moment. I'm gonna take my shammy cloth and I'm just gonna obliterate it. I'm just gonna rub it down, and you might think, "Oh no, wait you just made that drawing. And now you're kind of destroying it. You're getting rid of it," but this is the obliteration. This is the letting things go part. All right, now I'm going to turn this a quarter turn and I'm going to configure my object slightly differently this time, and notice I'm not spending a lot of time, like, "Oh, it's gotta be a certain way." They're just laid down there and I'm gonna start again. I'm gonna go ahead and trace around the basic shape of this yellow cow. (charcoal scraping) And it might overlap the other bits. That's fine. And then from here, I've that kind of wonderful rope shape, that oval shape coming into the bell here. Down to this bell. And then I have the crab claw, again, I know I'm drawing over the old drawing, but this layered aspect, it actually starts to create density and beauty and actually gets more pigment down, which I'm interested in right now. So there's my second one. I'm gonna do another quarter turn. Let's see what happens. Let's organize these differently. So you might find yourself getting a little caught up with like, "Oh, it's gotta be just so," but honestly, doesn't matter. So this way I'm going to be working now with the bell again. (charcoal scraping) And you see, I'm drawing very loosely. You could even do this with your eyes closed, if you wanna work with just looking at the objects, not really with your eyes closed, but working just looking at the objects, not looking at the page, just to kind of loosen it up. Another little cow here. All right, we're gonna do two more rub-outs here. There's one, and I like what's starting to happen with some of the density of the charcoal. Some areas are kind of open, some areas are dense, and let's do one more arrangement here. And this area's sort of empty. So I'm interested in maybe activating that a little bit. Yeah, there we go. So here's my claw. (charcoal scraping) I'm mostly interested in getting marks down. I'm mostly interested in just tracking the shapes. I'm not obsessing about things being super accurate. I'm just trying to get some pigment down and using these objects as a vehicle for these lines and a vehicle for these shapes. All right. There's my fourth one. We've kind of turned this all the way around and round. And at this point, what I like to start to do, because this is quite abstract now and it's got a fair amount of pigment on it, is I like to take my eraser. And so we've built it. We've built it. We've added more pigment. We've wiped it out. We've added more pigment still. And what can be really beautiful to try is to take an eraser or even take a shammy cloth, so this is pretty dirty at this point, but you can take a shammy cloth and use this to start to wipe away some of the pigment. It's a subtle effect, but I actually like to take the eraser and actually come in and start wiping away and erasing out, reducing the amount of charcoal that are in certain areas, finding shapes that I like, finding interesting shapes like little enclosures, look at how brilliant that is against the dark ground. You can start to find, what's another nice little shape, little shapes that you can start to pull out and start to create a bit of a dance with all of these different abstract moments as you go. It starts to kind of glow as you start to take away. And I'm choosing shapes based on just a feeling really. I'm not really trying to make it look like any particular thing, but I'm choosing shapes based on a feeling, based on a flow. And now, what can be really exciting to do, and you almost don't even need your objects anymore. Because these are squares, if you get to a point where you're like, "I'm not a 100% sure what I really wanna do next, you can take the squares and you can tape them with themselves again, right? There's one, let's try this one. And I'm using a kind of tape that sometimes the paper will kind of stick to it, but I'm just trying to take it without ripping it too much. There we go. And I'm gonna move this this way. So now we have almost a new situation to draw into, you know, maybe I'll do one more drawing on top of the whole thing and see what happens. So I'm gonna just take the charcoal one more time. I'm gonna come in with my bell shape here. The nice thing about having a rope shape is that it can start to work to unify and combine and connect the pieces. So I'm enjoying that possibility here and how we can connect the pieces, how we can start to fill some of these empty spaces that were really produced by the fact that I moved this thing. (charcoal scraping) And then I can come in and I can do a little bit more smudging and erasure, maybe come in with just... I really do love (laughs) making these sparkly bits happen with the eraser. This is one way to produce a sense of light... It's almost like when you create lights like this you start to create a rhythm for the eye that can take you around the image. So you can definitely do that with a hardy eraser like this, and I'm gonna show you one other way. And this is like a physical, this is pretty visceral, physical way of working. My hands are dirty. I'm moving things around. I'm even maybe like turning this in certain ways to see if I can find little avenues through. And then at a certain point, you might arrive at a composition or a configuration that you like, and you could take a brush, you could take really any color paint, if you wanted, and you could add a little bit of opaque paint to the situation. And when you do that, let's just see what happens, this big shape is kind of interesting, wondering what would happen if I started to paint that in. So you start to paint around and through because you're using charcoal, the charcoal gets picked up a little bit by the paint. and I wouldn't really think too much about it. I wouldn't be too caught up in, "Oh, it doesn't look like a cow anymore" "Or where's that cowbell again?" I'm mostly just interested in finding beautiful shapes, like the back half of the cow here, I think is beautiful and cool. And then I can turn it again. And every time you turn it, you see it in a slightly new way. So I really enjoy and I really encourage you to consistently and constantly turn it on its side and see it in a new way, which really is what so much of abstraction is about, right? Seeing something in a new way, turning it and having a different kind of view, taking a chance, taking a risk. And you might say, "Oh, I don't really know where to put the white paint." Just put it down and see what happens. It's very forgiving. And once all of this dries, you can take it apart and put it together again, you can create new configurations, really working in a grid. It really becomes like a series of images to work with. And so this is, I think, a really fun way to move into abstraction working with significant objects, working with charcoal, working with multiple pieces of paper that can be pulled up, that can be turned, that can be turned in space, that can be added to, that can be smudged, that can be erased. This is like the dance, the give and take, the creation, the destruction, and the recreation that really can get you into the beauty of abstraction.