Week 16- Focus on Portrait

 This week's task was very challenging. I am not that experienced with charcoal, even more so regarding portraits, Thankfully, Teodora was there to guide me through the steps. 

Charcoal is a very soft material, which applies to the paper quite easily, and also rubs away just as easily. One big difference that I have noticed is that you definitely can not start with the details, or work on specific areas alone. The best way to approach it is to work on the entire image as a whole. Applying charcoal to the mid-tones, the to the darkest parts, and after erasing the highlights, if they haven't been left white from the get-go.  The details should be applied later.

Another big challenge was retaining the dark skin tone in my drawing, which meant having a darker tonal value present from the get-go. 

This material allowed me to work quite fast, even with the frustrations that appeared at the start of the session. I was actually able to finish most of it, which meant huge progress. 

After having that done, and with some further feedback from my teacher I decided to add a dark background to the right side of the drawing, which gave more definition to the contour of the face and also made the highlights pop more. I also used some charcoal pencils to get the smaller details.  

I am really pleased with the result.  still have a long way to go regarding using charcoal, but for my first attempt, I am quite happy that I was able to pull it off. 

For this task, I used charcoal sticks and charcoal pencils.