It’s Day Six of the Find Your Art Style Experiment and I’m looking at my Pinterest board again. Something I like about the work of Deb Weiers is that she works intuitively, just seeing what happens and responding to the marks she makes, rather than having a big plan. She talks about it in the podcast interview we did with her.

And I have seen Christina Romeo do the same in timelapse videos. So today I decided to ditch all reference and to see what happens and to use charcoal. I haven’t used charcoal very much since college.

I have a large Conte crayon that needed sharpening but couldn’t find a sharpener and sharpening with a knife is definitely not my forte – help!

I’ve realised that I am not really copying the styles of the artists I admire. Instead, I am taking a spark of something they’ve done to try instead. Someone our Facebook Group mentioned that they would be worried that they would copy work too closely, so I guess maybe just taking something from it, like a way of working or a medium is another idea.

First drawings didn’t go well, but I relaxed for the third and fourth

The first couple of drawings didn’t work too well. But I started to feel a bit more relaxed about things on the 3rd one. The characters face looks a bit like one of the characters I have drawn before but in a much looser form. I decided to draw a couple dancing and then added a bit of brown chalk.

For the 4th drawing, I started with one face and then tried tucking another face underneath and a dog like character to the side. I didn’t know what to do with the top of the man’s head and then thought maybe it could become a tree.

I have heard of people using water with charcoal. It’s something I haven’t tried before, so I thought I would give it a try. I quite like the effect too, you can get really nice greys.

Working on these two drawings was fun, the only thing I didn’t like is how messy my hands were at the end! I need some drawing gloves.

I’m off to wash my hands before I get finger marks everywhere, but I’ll see you tomorrow.

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