To Have Fun With Charcoal

Today at the 4Cats Studio we did a charcoal sketching of ourselves on painted canvas. We painted the canvas brownish yellow so that it would look "aged" and "old ". We are sketch in the Michelangelo style with charcoal. I have never handled charcoal before, so I was really excited to use it. Charcoal is really thin and easy to break, so I was being really careful not to break it. The color is beautiful. It looks better than pencil, and what's more, it is more smudgy so I can create various kind of shadows for my portrait. But then I exhaled and blew away some of the charcoal color on my canvas. Hmm. It was like dust... I was drawing with a stick made out of dark dust-------this was weird. When I had finished my portrait the charcoal sketching looked awesome. It looked so realistic and cool. You may think that I haven't erased a single bit while I was sketching with charcoal, but I did. You see, charcoal is very erasable. That's another cool fact. I love sketching with charcoal.