Gordaen's Blog

For my second foray into charcoal drawing, I opted to do an extreme close-up. I figured that I couldn’t get a whole lot of detail drawing portraits at my typical scale, so why not just zoom in? I actually did this one immediately after the previous sketch on the 6th of November, because I was having so much fun.

The interesting thing about charcoal is that it starts to force you to break the habit we all seem to develop of drawing outlines. As soon as you can pick up a pencil/marker/crayon, you learn to draw the perimeter of shapes. If your doodles develop beyond stick-men, they tend to progress into blended geometric shapes with some shading. It takes a long time to get to the point where you don’t draw outlines at all, but I think that’s a worthwhile goal and charcoal is helping me get there.