Life Drawing in Charcoal [Paperback]

This book also focuses on tone rather than line, this time in charcoal and without the rather anal measuring and outlining.

In fact it is far more accessible to the average life student, because the methods Graves uses can likewise be used in a life class. You don't need days and days of posing. Nor do you need the foundation drawing skills required by the other book. This is a book which can be put to immediate use.

And very valuable it is, too. Expect an improvement in your results the first time you put the lessons taught by Graves to use. You will find yourself looking at your model as a collection of tonal areas, rather than lines, and consequently your drawings will have more shape to them. They will be brought to life.

The essence of Graves' method is to work with two tools - charcoal and a chamois. Tones are built up with the charcoal, and the chamois is used to lighten them. One early exercise uses a "wash" of charcoal to create a background and then shapes are picked out with the chamois to make the drawing. Darker values such as shadows are added with more charcoal.

The book starts with the basics. Tools, media and techniques. All illustrated and described, along with exercises illustrated for the student.

Chapters are presented as exercises, each focused on a different topic. Lines and shadows, proportions, alignments, composition and so on, each building on the last. Step by step the final image is built up from broad tonal masses to detailed shapes. Construction lines are shown and at each step Graves tells us precisely what he is doing and why.

I particularly liked the illustrated explanation of the difference between lines and outlines. The body has lines, such as the creases formed when folding the elbow, and outlines, being the imaginary line where the body finishes and the background begins. Drawing body lines reflects reality, but drawing outlines imposes something that isn't there - we don't see bodies surrounded by lines - if the background and the body are the same colour they blend into each other, they don't form a line. Graves uses negative shapes to help define the outline, a much more natural and satisfactory method.

Graves shows and tells in a pleasant, consistent manner how to improve our techniques. There is something here for all levels, but this book is perhaps best used by an intermediate artist rather than a beginner or an expert. A few basic skills help to get right into it, and if you are already achieving good results you may not feel happy about changing your ways.

Having said that, Graves provides plenty of flexibility and new ideas to add to an existing skill base. This book *will* help you improve your style.

Highly recommended to anybody with an interest in drawing the nude. Especially valuable to students attending life class for the first time.

Picture this: You graduated from high school, went to college, left your high school's sweetheart behind, found a new girl, then another one, then yet another... (I could go on and on), graduated from college, got a job, and (with any luck) married one of the girls you dated in college. Twenty years had gone by, you suddenly found yourself at the high school reunion party. A glance at your old-time highschool sweetheart all of sudden brought back a world of love and hope. Whew! What gives?! You suddenly found how attractive and desirable your highschool sweetheart was! (And if fate played tricks on you, beside her was a 300-pound hairy-chested, bald-headed husband of hers...)

So what does all that have anything to do with this book, you ask?

Well, it has EVERYTHING to do with this book. As you WILL agree with me, to become an artist in any "respectable" medium (oil, watercolor, pastel, and the likes), one has to start with drawing. The most highly-disciplined practice is figure drawing. Usually, one would start with drawing the likeness, USING LINES. Then comes positive, negative spaces, mass, tone, then colors, etc.

In this book, however, the author presents an approach of drawing figures using charcoal as medium and using mass (rather than LINES) to achieve the effects.

The book is well-written and very readable. I finished the book from cover to cover at one sitting of several hours. To keep it brief and helpful, the following are what covered in the book:
1) Materials
2) Values, tonal masses
3) Figure proportions; male and female distinctions
4) Foreshortening
5) Movement and muscles
6) Different modes of charcoal rendering

In my opinion, painters at intermediate and advanced levels may enjoy the book more than beginners. The reason is mainly because "traditional" training usually have beginners learn to achieve likeness using lines (which, by the way, is already hard for a majority of beginners). In this case, the author presents seeing masses, tones, and values as a way to achieve likeness and gesture. Needless to say, this approach is rather familiar to folks who have done some painting in oil.

Now back to my "love affair": as an oil painter myself, I rarely use charcoal for "serious" work. It is a nice medium to achieve shadow, light, and dark. However, I think (and so do you), work in other mediums (oil, acrylics, watercolor, pastel, etc.) shows the maturity of the artist. After all, the boy has become "the man", college graduated, married and all.

But you could be dead wrong after reading this book. Figure drawing using charcoal presented by the author is one of the reasons that I love figure drawing (although I may use different approaches - including using lines, masses, or both). The beauty and nobleness of the female figures are breathtakingly rendered in this book. It is a 5.5-star sweet love affair; and I am glad I am involved in it.

Need I say more? Now you know why looking at your old-time highschool's sweetheart at the highschool reunion party just makes you want to be a boy of teenage age again.