Step by Step - Charcoal demo of a landscape during an art workshop

 "I have been impressed with the urgency of doing. Knowing is not enough; we must apply. Being willing is not enough; we must do." Leonardo Da Vinci

During one of my "Two days Charcoal workshop" I created a 12" X 16" quick charcoal sketching on cartridge paper. The reference photograph has been taken from"Geotripper" with prior permission from Garry Hayes ( Geologist ). I love the blog as it has some of the most inspiring photographs of nature and the posts are very very informative.

Charcoal landscape drawing

Demo work on cartridge sheet

Size 12" X 16"

Step 1

Using willow charcoal, blocked in the major shapes.

The sky was kept very light using my blending tool ( Cloth )

Step 2

Blending the willow charcoal

and adding strokes using pencil to show crevices.

Foliage was created using willow charcoal

and pencils.

This kind of a demo takes about forty to forty five minutes. The time is not enough to do the details but the demo helps in understanding the steps involved in creating a charcoal landscape painting and the techniques involved in creating it.

CLICK HERE to read through another post in which I posted about my step by step creating of charcoal art in my sketch book.

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Thanks for visiting my blog and would love to read comments from you.

Seascape - A demo work created during Soft pastel art workshop

"Painting is just another way of keeping a diary." Pablo Picasso

I conduct art workshops from time to time. It is my way of meeting art enthusiasts who share a passion for art just like me. During these art workshops I get to give live demo's of my techniques that I use to create landscapes, seascapes and other subjects as requested by the participants.

The soft pastel painting as below is a quick demo work of a seascape created during a recent two days soft pastel workshop for a participant who wanted to understand the steps involved in creating sky, some bushes, grasses and sea. So we decided to work on a morning scene at the beach, bright and breezy with white sandy seashore.

Seashore ( Demo work created during art workshop)

Soft pastel painting on Canson paper

Size 6" X 8"

My next Soft pastel workshop is coming up on 17th and 18th of September. The pastel brands that the participants get to use during the workshop are Mungyo, Gallery, Camlin and Koh-I-Noor. Camlin is pretty reasonable to start with but I normally recommend the soft pastel set of Koh-I-Noor which has 48 different bright colours. 

Unlike water colours and acrylics, colour mixing is not easy in soft pastels. Mixing more than two shades leads to muddy effect. Hence it is advisable to have different individual shades. I started with a single set of Mungyo ( 48 colours ) and then over a period of time went on to collect many different brands. While working it gets difficult to open up all the different boxes and that's the reason why I went on to create a small soft pastel palette which has all different brands mixed together. 

Soft Pastel Palette

I posted about "Organising my soft pastel palette" some time back and also wrote a post on how I go about "Cleaning my pastels" when it gathers dust on its side.

Soft Pastel Workshop - Matheran Landscape

The soft pastel painting below is a demo work that I did recently in my Two Days Soft Pastel workshop. It is with reference to my photograph from Matheran Hill station which has been a quick getaway for us on many different occasions. 

The muddy pathway

Soft pastel painting on Canson paper

Size 6" X 8"

When I do a demo work like the one above my aim is to simplify the scene by looking at the general shapes of elements and the colours. The foliage is painted as one big mass and then a few leaves are added to give a suggestion of leaves. The basic idea is to get the participants started with a complicated forest painting and to understand the step by step procedure that I follow.

If it were not for the demo I would have spent a minimum of three hours on this work, getting to the fine details in the foreground. I have used the same photograph to create a charcoal painting in one of my Two Days Charcoal Workshop. Will be posting the image soon.