Brushing charcoal

Trying something new on this plate: rather than blending with a stump or a chamois, I’m using a hogshair brush to blend the strokes of charcoal. It’s a gentler process and it’s a bit easier to control than a chamois and less destructive than a stump, but it does take immense patience. It takes a LOT of brushing to smooth strokes out. This close-up shows the before-and-after of the process.

Doing this does seem to darken the overall value somehow, so I’m having to backtrack and do some light erasing afterwards. A chamois cut to a diamond tip seems to be a better way to do this than an eraser, which is also quite destructive to the tooth and surface of the paper.

After going over the whole drawing this way – which is going to take a while, especially at the foot where there’s a lot of tone – I’ll need to go back and make overall value adjustments, and then add some hatching lines back in over it in key places to emphasize anatomy and make sure it still looks like a drawing at the end. Got a ways still to go here.