Media Choices

Graphite + Charcoal Pencil

Vine Charcoal

Throughout this semester I've been really trying to pin down one choice of black dry media that works for me. I've regularly been cycling through vine charcoal both hard and soft, charcoal pencils, compressed charcoal, graphite and occasionally black pastels. After a few sketches the pastels were out of the question. While they may have the most intense and deep black they also are almost impossible to erase and that quickly became too imposing. Vine charcoal has been the standard for gesture drawing for me so after using a few sticks I had started to get reacquainted with its tendencies. It can give you a nice soft line and cover lots of space relatively quickly but what makes it stand out can also be its downfall. The soft lines were good for gesture drawing and nice for laying out the spines, rib cages and pelvises that would go underneath everything. In fact it worked perfectly for this the charcoal was forgiving and easily erased. Consequently it had an adverse effect when trying to make anything significantly more detailed or bold. It really couldn't get dark enough to stand out from previous lines and often lost its tip due to its soft nature and required to be resharpened many times. Similarly I found later on that a light graphite like HB was a good middle/light weight media to use as a base. The pencil gave a much more sketchy feel due to its smaller diameter but also allowed for more precise underlay. I decided to then try the compressed charcoal again having witnessed that that was solely what Liz was using next to me. It worked all right and presented a solution in between the pastels and vine charcoal but something was quite right. I just felt I couldn't get the right movement. Finally I decided to try the one charcoal pencil I had laying around and right away I knew that was the answer. It was similar to the compressed charcoal in every attribute but line control and variation were easier.