Simple upper body drawing tutorial with work in progress(WIP) pictures(charcoal)

Hi,
Welcome to my page, this is basic tutorial for figure drawing lovers, sculptors etc… this is a very easy and simple/basic sketch in which I'll try to explain the process of figure (upper body) drawing in charcoal from scratch (stick figure/manikin) using some very basic things and techniques. I apologize for the quality of pics, these have been taken in low light with my cell phone camera.

First of all let us see the material that we require to draw this
1) A4 size paper(simple Xerox Copying paper will do)….
2) Hard pencil (~4H)…
3)Fine(soft) charcoal stick(this can be bought from any reasonable stationary or art shop, In India they sell it under the Brand name "Camel".. Camel doesn’t ay me for this trust me!!!:P:P:P it is worth mentioning here that fine charcoal is not a big deal it can be made at home by burning softwood stick(not to ashes though:P) on your cooking gas stove.

Apart from the above mentioned things I use almost all of my right hand fingers for smudging.. (sounds pretty untidy...:P… doesn’t it)

Lets get going now… !!!

1)Pose: In this sketch we will go for semi-side pose with one of the arms of the subject twisted, so that reasonable part (front portion) of body is exposed. Refer to pic-2 [Draw the stick figure pose with 4H pencil (this one is edited in MSPAINT to focus on stick figure lines as actual lines were very light because of usage of hard pencil)


2)Outline: Now we need to build the mass outline around the stick-figure according to the anatomy(for this some basic idea of anatomy is necessary)


3) Erase the stick figure after above step.


4)Charcoal: now we will rub some charcoal to the outline according to the imaginary light source (I assume very simple lighting and shading for this sketch) refer to pic below for light directions.


5)Smudging..(black fingers…:P) :this is a pretty tricky technique, we need to create kind of gradient, sometimes from dark to light and sometimes from light to dark.. purely depending upon what our purpose is…. If you want some dark shade use high pressure in smudging and do not spread the applied charcoal over a big area, A Sketch generally needs few rounds of charcoal application and smudging.


6)Result after first smudge:……


7)More charcoal:…


8)More smudging:…


9)Adding some final dark details with charcoal:….



10)After final smudging(fiishing touch):…


Hope you find it useful..
I'll be updating this site with more WIP..s
cheers!!!
Abbas

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