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Part Two – CHARCOAL
A CONSTRUCTED TONAL DRAWING
COMPRESSED CHARCOAL
DRAWING DRAPERY
Historically drapery has been used for
centuries by artists and studied by students
and artists apprentices. One has to go no
further than the drapery studies of Leonardo
da Vinci to see it was an integral part of their
research.
There are three drapery projects that are a
fundamental to widening our visual literacy,
and compressed charcoal is the medium that
is most appropriate for this.
Many artists in the past would use drapery
as compositional device to create an
underlying structure for their work. This
process was devised to guide the viewer’s eye
through the composition.
One of these methods was to create the
idea of movement across and through the
picture plane using certain effects with
drapery to create this illusion. Nicholas
Poussin (1593-1665) and El Greco (1541-
1614) both used this process very successfully
to effect this illusion. What one must realise
here is that these effects were not by any
means being used naturalistically. Instead
they where formal visual constructions to
effect away for us to read the picture.
1/ To make a study of this type of work one
should first formally set up your drapery still
life. Do this by getting a large sheet and twist
it tightly and also loosely around a tall object
(I use an easel for this purpose). By doing this
we have given a sense of movement to the still
life. In essence, it is the type of movement you
would describe when you see and try to
explain a spiral staircase. In setting the group
up in this way, we have constructed the idea
of an upward motion.
2/ Now set up to draw with a large piece of
paper - the larger the better for this drawing.
Firstly, draw the outlines of the folds of the
drapery using your compressed charcoal.
Immediately you will see that you have
created the sense of movement up the
picture plane through the nature and
direction of the line.3/ We can now give the drapery a feeling of
volume that will also emphasise the sense of
movement up the picture plane. We do this
by adding tone in a very particular
constructed way. This process is referred to as
front or top lighting and was used by the pre-
Renaissance artists such as Cimabue, and
Duccio. In the finished drawing, the tone is
applied in the same way as you can see in the
detail. It enables us to read the simple sense
of form. It works in this way. The surface of
the drapery that appears nearest to us is left
white, and as the surface moves away from us
and into any recesses you gradually make the
tone go darker until it reaches black at what
appears to be the furthest point away see
detailed example. The illusion of a shallow
sense of depth is created. As you might have
guessed this process is very mechanical and
theoretical and at this point can be executed
without looking any further at the drapery
subject matter.