What Is The History Of Charcoal Drawing

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Woman Bathing in Shallow Tub
Charcoal and Pastel Drawing
by Edgar Degas (1885).

Charcoal Drawings

Charcoal is one of the oldest drawing media - see, for instance, the aboriginal Nawarla Gabarnmang charcoal drawing (26,000 BCE) - and is unremarkably used by artists fifty-fifty today, in stick or compressed powder form. The sticks are usually made from twigs of willow (or linden wood) which are subjected to a tiresome-burning process that reduces the forest to carbon. Sticks come in varying thickness ranging from the very thick (used by scene painters), to medium and thin sticks (used for more detailed drawings). Bamboo charcoal is the main media employed past Japanese Sumi-due east artists, (notation: Sumi-e actually means charcoal cartoon).

Preparatory Sketches

Charcoal is oftentimes used past painters making preparatory drawings on the canvas, before adding pigment. This is because it is easily overpainted without affecting the color or tone of the overlaid paint. Edgar Degas, the French Impressionist, used it to develop his drawings which he then overlaid with layers of soft pastel.

An example of this is his Blue Dancers, 1899 (Moscow Pushkin Museum). Editing of drawings is performed very easily by ways of a feather, a castor, putty rubber, or even soft doughy bread.

Charcoal Effects

Charcoal's major advantage every bit a media of graphic fine art is its versatility. It tin be used to produce either a soft or stiff quality of line, which can be erased without difficulty, or it can exist dragged across the paper to produce different tonal areas, texture, and shading. However, drawings made with charcoal on paper are impermanent unless sprayed with a fixative - ordinarily a resin dissolved in alcohol.