Charcoal Portraits

 

Class 2: Guidelines

In the second step, you continue the work of using the grid to set boundaries for the shapes of the features.

These are called guidelines.

The goal for this step is to fine on the reference material the guidelines for the top, bottom, and sides of each feature of the face, and then translate those guidelines to the drawing paper.

Once you have done this, you can easily (at least, more easily) sketch the shapes of the features within their respective guidelines, referring to the photograph constantly for information on the shapes, angles, and tone of the shapes you’re drawing.

Work very lightly in this phase, because once the guidelines are all marked and the features are sketched in place, you’re going to erase the guidelines completely and re-draw the features with more care and accuracy.

You can’t erase those guidelines, however, unless you’ve drawn them with a light touch, so be mindful of that.

This is the step that takes the longest in the drawing, so take breaks as you need them to avoid rushing through to the next phase.

You don’t want to move forward in the drawing until all of the features are correct, the hair is in the right place, the neck and shoulders look right, and so on.

Once the tone is down, it will be a lot harder to make any adjustments to the main shapes, so get them right in this phase.

Class 3: Base Tone

When all of the features are sketched in accurately and all the guidelines are erased, you can start laying down the base tone in the skin.

The base tone is the color of the skin itself, not the shadows on the skin, so you need to put it down everywhere that skin is visible in the portrait, even if it’s light-struck.

Hold your soft graphite or charcoal pencil on the very end so that you can access the side of the pencil, and so you can’t bear down on the page at all.

For this step to work, you need to avoid “biting” into the paper with the pencil. Just let the weight of the pencil itself skip over the surface of the paper lightly and evenly.

Use smooth, back-and-forth strokes that go with the contours of the face, and when you’ve covered all the skin, use a clean chamois cloth wrapped around your finger and use small circle strokes to blend all the tone into a beautiful, even layer.

This step can get smeary, so after you’re done blending, clean up around the outside of the face with a kneaded eraser to avoid smudges.

If the features got washed out, lightly go over the darkest parts of the lines to bring them out again.

Don’t outline the features, because you don’t want the drawing to look like a coloring book, but you will need to bring a bit more definition out if you can’t see the shapes clearly.

Class 4: Eyes

To finish up work in the eyes, use a sharp, soft pencil to fill in the pupils of both eyes, avoiding the white specks of highlights that you often see there.

The easiest way to keep the highlights bright and white is to avoid getting tone on them from the beginning, so if you do get some tone on the highlights, erase it out right away.

Outline the iris of both eyes darkly, and add spokes to the interior of the iris.

Then, blend the spokes and the pupil with a small stomp or tortillon.

You’ll need a variety of sizes of stomps and tortillons, so that you can always use the largest size possible for the area you’re blending, which will give you the smoothest look.

Add tone to the upper lids of the eyes, and use a blending stomp with some medium on it to add some subtle shading to the whites of the eyes.

You’ll want to add shadows in the corners, as well as some shadows from the eyelashes being cast on the eyeball’s surface.

Darken the line of the upper eyelid and blend it to reduce the appearance of the line, then blot out a light highlight at the top of each eyelid with the kneaded eraser.

Add eyelashes with a sharp, soft pencil, using one quick upward stroke in the direction of growth.

Make each eyelash with a single line, and stop before you think you have enough. It’s easy to go overboard on the eyelashes.

There are also lower eyelashes visible, though they are usually lighter, shorter, and more sparse.

Be attentive when you’re drawing them to make them match the reference.

Finally, add the eyebrows in a similar way, using a sharp pencil to first outline the basic shape of the eyebrows, and then to fill in the body of each brow with individual hairs.

You may want to blend over the top to fill in and darken each eyebrow a bit, and you can use a kneaded eraser smashed into a blade shape to carve out some fine white lines in the eyebrows if needed.

Class 5: Nose and Mouth

Add dark tone to the inside of each nostril, as well as around the outside of the nostril, but then immediately blend those lines out to one side, to reduce the appearance of lines.

The name of the game in the nose and mouth is subtlety.

You don’t want to draw either feature with definite, heavy lines; rather, suggest the lines and contours with blending and shading.

In both features, begin with a base tone of the shadow shapes that fall on the features and connect the two together.

After adding that tone, blend it smooth with a large stomp or tortillon.

Then, pull out a line of reflected light using the kneaded eraser smashed into a blade.

The reflected light can be found at the bottom of a curving surface, right before it shifts to the darkest part of the shadow.

You can see reflected light in a portrait on the bottom of the nose, outside of the nostrils, and around the edges of the lips.

Next, add small details to the nose and mouth using a very sharp, dark pencil.

You can see small pucker lines in the lips, a dark line between the lips, and darkness in the corners of the mouth.

There is also shading on one or both sides of the bridge of the nose, which is very important for making it look like the nose stands out from the face.

The shadow by the bridge combines into a shadow beside both eyes, and often spills into further shading beside the nostrils and under the tip of the nose.

Use the kneaded eraser to pluck out highlights in the tip of the nose, the highest point of the bridge, and along the thick, fleshy part of the lower lip.

You can also pull out fine lines beside the drawn pucker lines in the lips if they are very prominent.

Class 6: Hair and Ears

Begin work in the hair by indenting the paper in places where you want there to be white, flyaway hairs crossing the hairstyle or showing up bright against dark backgrounds.

You need something fine and hard but not too sharp for this step, so you don’t tear the paper.

A stylus works well, or a fine dip-pen for calligraphy (without the ink, of course), or even a palette knife.

When you’re done indenting hairs, start laying in the tone of the hair in the direction of the the hair growth, following the pattern of the hair style that you see in the reference.

For example, it’s clear from the direction that the hair moves that it is being tucked behind the ears.

Draw it the same way, using a soft pencil on the side to develop smooth, bold lines.

Next, blend over the top of the hairstyle with a large blending tool, once again in the same direction of the hair growth.

There should be some light strands and dark strands.

Accent the dark strands with a few darker lines, and pull out a few bright highlights in the lighter strands with the kneaded eraser.

You should see the indented lines popping out, even when you bear down very hard over the top with your pencil.

If you don’t, you may not have pressed hard enough when you were indenting the paper.

Practice the technique on a piece of scratch paper and try again.

Flyaway hairs that are visible around the outside of the paper can be put in with either a very sharp, hard charcoal pencil or a graphite pencil.

You may find, though, that you have the best results for that step with the graphite, since it it lighter and can make finer hairs.

Class 7: Clothing

The clothing is very simple in this class, but the same steps will apply no matter what you’re drawing for clothes.

First, if the hair is falling over the clothing, make sure you have plenty of hairs indented into the paper before you start adding tone.

Then, put down a base tone for the color of the shirt.

You may want to tape the upper edges of the shirt to make the line as clean and crisp as possible.

If you do, blue “curve tape” is a handy tool to make use of.

It’s very thin, so you can bend it into very fine spirals and curves.

If you don’t have any, you can make do with a thin piece of painter’s tape. Just tear or cut it to about 1/8th inch width, then tamp it down with your finger very hard before adding the tone.

After putting down the base tone in the clothes, blend with a blending tool.

Make sure to go all the way up to the tape, so that line will stand out very clearly.

If you want the shirt to be even darker, you can add a second pass of charcoal after blending once.

Bear down fairly hard with this second pass, making small circles to disguise any lines.

Then, blend over the top by pressing hard and smudging it with your finger.

The charcoal will be compressed into the paper, and will get very black indeed (as will your finger, but you can wash it off later).

As you add the second pass of tone, leave a line in the shirt collar of the lighter tone, so you can differentiate between the shirt body and the collar.

You can use the same technique to show wrinkles, hems, and highlights as needed.

Add tone as close to the hair as you can, then use a sharp pencil to break into the bottom of the hair with short, broken strokes that will make the hair stand off from the shirt clearly.

Class 8: Finishing Touches

The last step includes everything that needs to be cleaned up, touched up, and re-worked, so it can take awhile!

Start in the areas that didn’t get a lot of attention in the other classes, such as the chin, neck, cheeks, and forehead.

In all of these areas, you may need to add additional tone and refine with blending, using the largest blending tool you can for the area, or switching back to a chamois cloth wrapped around your finger.

It’s often at this stage that you stand back and notice flaws that didn’t show up before; the neck might be at the wrong angle, the eyelashes may need to be brought closer to the pupils, and so on.

Also, after adding the darks to the clothing and hair, you may need to punch up the contrasts again in the darkest parts of the face to make the contrasts pop.

You may need extra darks in the pupils, corners of the mouth, nostrils, and hair.

Also, use the time in this stage to really bring out the reflected lights in the nose, mouth, and around the chin.

The reflected light will make the portrait jump off the page and look very realistic.

Take your time in this phase, making just a few adjustments at a time, then standing back and looking at the portrait from a distance.

You’ll be surprised what some time away from the studio will give you in terms of fresh perspective!

So take lots of breaks, clean it up little by little, and when you’re done, remove the tape from the margins, and spray the drawing with some fixative to keep it from smearing.