Do you want to start drawing with charcoal? Here are my best charcoal drawing tips and techniques to help you start well and then develop your drawing in this medium in your own style…

Charcoal is a drawing medium that I’ve always loved to use, and I find I get quite a different, looser, style to my drawings when I use charcoal.

Understand where you are in your own artistic adventure and start to make more meaningful art…

The aim of this page is to help you start to understand your own artistic journey.

This is important as an awareness of what you like, or don’t like, what attracts you, what you’re curious about can help you to make the right decision about what to focus on in your art…

So that you’re not wasting time drawing stuff that you’re not interested in, or developing techniques that don’t do it for you.
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This will also make your art more enjoyable for you, more meaningful, and more fulfilling. 

​Perhaps there are particular subject matters, themes, or questions that you want to explore, things you’re curious about...

Learning to make better art by loosening up, not worrying, getting curious... and playing!

Art isn’t about doing it ‘properly’ or doing it the ‘right’ way.

True creativity is about curiosity, exploration and play so that you can create great drawings in your own way…

The objective of this drawing lesson is to start to develop a creative mindset with a light-hearted (playful) and curious attitude towards your art-making

(…and today, that actually doesn’t involve ANY drawing!).

This is important because it really helps you not to take your art too seriously!

This allows you to disengage yourself with the end-result and enjoy the process – feeling free to experiment and have fun.
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This is far more enjoyable for you and it also creates innovative and fresh art and helps you to develop your own unique style when you do get back to your drawing...
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Easy multimedia drawing techniques for a drawing with lots of texture, interest and depth...

Our personal drawing techniques always evolve and refine as we develop as artists and as our styles and tastes change!

​I wanted to share the multimedia drawing techniques that I've been using recently to let you know how you can play about a bit with your materials, experiment and just have a go with something and see how it looks... that's how I came up with this particular technique!

For this multimedia drawing style I'll be using:

• pencil for sketching
• black fineliner pen for the initial drawing
• alcohol marker pens
• coloured pencils
• paint markers

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You get used to putting down a bold mark, and it really allows your own personal, expressive drawing style to filter through.

I choose to draw with fineliner pens (often just called ‘drawing pens’ or ‘artist pens’) but there are other pen types that might suit your personal drawing style better…

So we’ll look briefly, together, at a few different options.
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And then take a look at the different techniques you might use for drawing in pen and how drawing with a pen differs from drawing with pencils…

In this drawing lesson, we’ll start to explore how the marks you make on your page when drawing will create the texture and form of your subject.

This is important as it helps you to show something about the qualities of what you’re drawing – to describe the details and also the texture and the form itself.
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In this lesson:

• we’ll first take a look at why the marks we make as we draw are so important
• we’ll look at how to use the direction of our marks to give information about the form of what we’re drawing
• we’ll look at drawing close up details
• we’ll look at drawing textures
• we’ll put it all together in a still-life drawing practice