Rocks under the water - a charcoal work

On my recent visit to Lonavala we got an opportunity to visit a small serene lake area in the Naval campus. The evening was setting in and the sunlight pretty low but I was fortunate to get some good pictures of rocks under the water at the shore line using my mobile.

This is one subject which always appeals to me. I used the charcoal medium to create this quick study sketch of the view.

Rocks under the water

Charcoal sketching on Canson ca grain paper

Size 6" x 8"

Materials used:

• Camel charcoal pencil
• Conte charcoal pencil
• Kneaded eraser
• Tortillons or blending tools
• Canson ca grain paper

I recently came across the water color works of RAMESH JHAWAR and I really loved them. If you are into water colours, you must check out his works on his BLOG. I too want to get into water colours again but a little later.

A foggy day - charcoal painting

Taking a break from soft pastel paintings. 

Created a landscape painting using Conte charcoal pencil and Camel soft charcoal pencil. This is a demo work which I did recently during my charcoal workshop. This was a good exercise to get an understanding of depth and perspective. The original photograph was edited in order to get a good composition.

Foggy day

Demo charcoal painting on Canson ca grain paper

size 4" x 5"

Discovered an old graphite work done using 6B pencil on Fabriano Academia paper.

Made a few corrections on it. As an artist we always get tempted to make changes in older works because as we keep painting our knowledge, style, technique gets evolved and we feel like applying it on previous works. This kind of experimenting is fun.

Two Bananas

Graphite sketching on Fabriano Academia paper

Size 4" x 4"

My works can also be viewed on my facebook page

www.facebook.com/charcoalspastelsandmore

Trying out willow charcoal on Canson Ca grain paper

Time to experiment with new paper. I enjoyed doing last two works on Fabriano paper, but since I am a big fan of Canson Ca grain paper I decided to check out the willow charcoal work on Canson paper too. I love to try all different papers so that in future when I am planning to create a big piece of art work then I will be able to make a choice which will be based on my experiments or rather study works now.

The photograph which I selected belongs to COORG ( Madkeri ) and my initial plan was to use this photo for a pastel work. But looking at the composition with the dark contrast of the foliage in the backgdraound and foreground I decided to create a charcoal work using it as a reference.

 For initial block in of values I used willow charcoal. Later to create the very dark values I used a variety of black soft pastels. The foliage and branches were created using charcoal pencils of different brands as shown below. Use of pastels was not in the plan but I was not satisfied by the pencils alone to create the depth, hence brought in the pastels in this work. 

A. PRIMO charcoal pencil

B. Artist Charcoal Pencil

C. Camel charcoal pencil

Right above the pencils are three small pieces of broken soft pastels in black colour.

Charcoal painting of Coorg Landscape

A Study work on Canson Ca grain paper

© Manju Panchal

I spent a little more than an hour on this work and in conclusion I like this paper and would definitely want to use it for bigger works. However would try the other side of the paper which has a fine texture as compared to the one that I have used.