Composition with Charcoal

I wanted to share what we did in our Tuesday evening abstract art class last night.  Taking a break from painting, we practiced using charcoal on huge A2 paper.  The focus was on composition, and we were asked to make four different drawings with a choice of these themes:  chaos, calm, symmetry, repetition, static, dynamic and depth.  It’s been quite some time since I’ve used charcoal mainly because I find it rather messy and smudgy to use but last night was a good chance to go free and crazy again!  So here were my four drawings.

Chaos

Made me feel like a four-year old again!  Just aimlessly doodling around and scribbling randomly with no structure.  But I thought a few flowers and smiley faces would give the piece a bit of cuteness!

Static

Initially was going to be “depth”, ie three-dimensional but I wasn’t satisfied with it so I changed my vision and made it more static.  Just blobs not doing much but blobbing around.

Depth

Here I wanted to make use of perspective and create some blobs and spheres heading to the corner.  It’s not my best shot but the point is to show my understanding of depth and dimension.

Calm

I thought I’d finish off with calm to end the evening.  So I decided on an ocean theme and added some cute corals which then turned out to be more blobs!  The other students, though, advised me to turn the paper upside down with the blobs dripping downwards for a more winding down effect.  And they were right!

Now this was a lot of fun!  I didn’t realise how easy and free-feeling it would be to use a charcoal.  The charcoals I have at home are actually charcoal pencils which may not give much flexibility like the loose charcoal sticks we had used do.  And now… we had some time at the end to use some colours in those drawings using soft pastels or oil pastels.  This will follow in my next blog!