An anecdote about technique

And why every work needs some experimentation

Today a fairly new student came into the studio who had been told in an online video by an artist influencer, "never sketch in pencil if you're going to paint, only use charcoal".

Anyone will tell you that I'm a big fan of charcoal, and usually push students to use it more. But... "never use a pencil"? Yikes. It reminds me of a former teacher who told one of my students to "never use an eraser". Double yikes.

This new student took the online artist's edict about pencils to heart. She is eager to learn, but is impatient with the process and hard on herself. She was struggling with learning how to do shading, but even when I said she should switch to pencil, she didn't do it. The internet had told her, "charcoal".

The charcoal we use is compressed, which is quite dark. Some artists have a hard time making it look subtle. Their work can get very dark without any mid-tones and looks more expressive than realistic. My student was drawing too small for charcoal, and was unable to make mid-tones. I could see that a pencil would solve her problem, giving her a more controlled process.

The online video Artist was correct in the idea that working with charcoal is actually more like working with paint than a pencil is. However, that only relates to movement technique. What is the difference between movement technique and shading? Many people don't make a distinction between movement and visual technique. The texture of a surface, the friction of a medium upon it, your tools, and most of all, movement, combine to become movement technique.

Shading involves movement technique, but it's also very much about visual technique - knowing where the shading should be. It's about using a wide range of values to mimic reality. Movement and visual methods are usually lumped together into a broad category of simply, technique. But I find it helpful to make more distinctions.

Not knowing where tones should be and not being able to create mid-tones was frustrating for the student. She needed a medium with more control and range. It didn't matter right then that a pencil was less like paint than charcoal, because movement was not the current problem.

Dancing is a good analogy for technique, because it involves movement and physics, as well as knowledge, planning, and practice. Choreography uses knowledge, and is a plan for the movement. Figuring out the values of lights and darks, and where they should be drawn, is like choreography.

A pencil is better for this.

I finally told the student to put away the charcoal and get a 2B pencil and new clean paper. She had already been shown specific tips, and by drawing it many times, had learned a lot about the subject.

And then she drew the pear in pencil. She shaded it so well, that a more advanced student walked by and said, "wow that looks good. I need to learn how to do better shading like that!" It made her day.

Moral of the story is that art is very complex, and you need to figure out each subject and each new artwork every time you approach it. Experimentation is vital. Don't keep doing the same thing if you're frustrated. What works for one thing may not work for something else.

And don't believe everything you hear on the internet.