finished my charcoal project :)
reblogs are better than likes! i put a lot of work into this!
I have numerous questions, starting with “how the hell are you able to draw like that” (which I recognize probably has an answer of “lots of practice”), but I guess my specific question is “how did you keep from smudging the entire damn image, because from what I remember of charcoal it’s an annoyingly smudgeable medium, and it looks like you coloured the black background in and that implies a lot of charcoal there”. (My apologies if this is obvious to anyone who works in this medium; my last experience with charcoal was in the single art class I took in high school, and that was a long time ago.)
Secondary question of “did you use a specific photo for reference, and if so, can I see it for comparison purposes because that always makes me happy, to see the art right beside the reference”.
first of all, thank you! that really does mean a lot and makes me really happy :)
you’re right, charcoal is VERY smudgy. what i did was actually shade the moon first, then i filled in all the charcoal surrounding it, which can be seen in this photo i took about halfway through. it was quite hard not to smudge once i started filling in the charcoal, but you kinda just have to draw without dragging your wrist against the paper.
to your second question, i did use a reference photo :) i actually used one i took of the moon so i didn’t have to deal with any copyright things if i decide to add this to my college application portfolio. this is the photo i used :)
in the process photo above you can see i used a grid system to transfer the photo over, which was extremely helpful in getting it to look so realistic. (which is a bit of an answer to you question of how i was able to draw this)
thank you for the questions and compliments! they mean a lot :)
