charcoal drawings

I felt like experimenting a bit with charcoal on acrylic paint background today in my art journal.

The drawing of the girl with the heart was inspired by one of Jaya Suberg’s amazing mixed-media photographs.

I was going to just do the profile on this page, but decided to give her big hair that extends across both pages. I then used a thin coat of yellow to mute out the background a bit, leaving her hair a bright mishmash of orange and other colors.

I used both white and black soft charcoal for these pages, which makes it quite messy.  I used a dry and wet paint brush to move the charcoal around a bit.   An eraser works well to pick up some unwanted marks, which normally doesn’t work well on plain paper, but with an acrylic paint background, it worked quite nicely. Lastly, I used a fixative to keep everything from smudging. .  Really fun!