Working with Pastels and Charcoal

| cathmary1030

I’ve been taking Rebecca de Mondenca’s pastel classes on arttutor.com, and this is some of my initial work from her class “A Beginner’s Guide to Pastels”.

I find I don’t care for the pastel paper that has the honeycomb look, although it can hold more pastel layering, given the “tooth” of the paper.

Most of these are from using the Dick Blick Artist’s Pastels (60 set), but the (finger) blended blues are Sennelier Landscape (30 set) pastels.

Mark Making in Charcoal

| cathmary1030

Now that I’ve completed “Drawing Essentials”, I am browsing through ArtTutor for more classes, and am interested in trying out charcoal. (I have memories of using charcoal pencils in grade-school art.) In any case, in this image, I tested out charcoal pencils (upper left), Comte pencils (upper right), vine charcoal (lower left) and compressed charcoal (lower right). The white –except for the Comte pencil example — is my General’s white “charcoal” pencil. The paper used is gray-toned Strathmore.

Some of my work from the “Drawing Essentials” class

| cathmary1030

So the first course I took on arttutor.com was Drawing Essentials, taught by Phil Davies. Excellent course; I loved it. And I think what I most liked about it was having the video and the ability to watch the expert do something and then it started clicking for me.. whereas reading in drawing fundamentals books doesn’t always translate to my beginner mind.

The above images came from reference drawings provided in the Drawing Essentials course. I had never drawn a horse before, nor had I come anywhere close to successfully drawing draped fabric, as with the towel above.

Practice Sketches from Lee Hammond’s How to Draw Lifelike Portraits

| cathmary1030

Portraits and the human figure are what interest me the most in drawing, and I love the way Lee Hammond shades her drawing. The blending is so much smoother and looks like paint, compared to, say, cross-hatching.

So, I am following along in her book and doing a few exercises in between working on my ArtTutor.com class.

These are just a few of the images/exercises I’ve done, focusing primarily on clothing and draped fabric.