The Mighty Zeus and Why Students Should Learn to Draw With Charcoal

At the college-level, studio art students learn to draw and paint from life using human models. At Carlsbad Art Farm, we use farm animals as our models and each year we acquire new animals for this purpose. We strive for a variety, and when possible, we like to rescue animals.

My first goat, a Nubian mix, was bought for $20 at the local humane society. We now have alpacas, a mini-mule, a variety of chickens, two dogs, and others. Here is our most recent arrival, a baby Nigerian Dwarf Goat named Zeus. Zeus came to us at less than a week old as a bottle baby (for some reason his mom wasn't letting him nurse), requiring six bottle feedings daily, each bottle containing 2-ounces of milk.

Zeus is now six-weeks old and drinks four bottles of 8-ounces daily, supplemented with goat feed, orchard hay, and alfalfa. He is full of himself. He loves playing with our rescue shepherd, going for walks on a leash, and practicing his head butting on our ankles. He has already started modeling for students.

Wolf in charcoal by Rose, Age 11

One of the challenges for students drawing animals from life is that animals move, unlike human art models who are paid to pose absolutely still. It's an interesting challenge. So what do you do? Well, animal artists develop visual memories of the animals they draw. Once the initial gesture line is committed to paper, and if they have an understanding of the animal's anatomy and how it moves, then they work from both the living model and memory. Additionally, they can use photographs as visual aides. Most animal artists have a library of books on animal anatomy. As with any discipline, the more you practice, the better you get.

The wolf drawing above (be sure to click on images to get their full effect), by Rose, Grade 5, started out as a drawing from a black-and-white photograph of a wolf. She then used our German Shepherd as a live model (alas, we do not have an actual wolf at Art Farm), as a source for more realistic hair texturing, rendering of volume, and rendering of detail in the eyes, muzzle, and so on. The animal really lifts off the page.

So why not just work off of photographs exclusively and skip the problems inherent in drawing an animal from life? For one, photographs flatten 3-dimensional objects and this shows in drawings made exclusively from photos. Also, the drawings look static, as if you were drawing something with no life in it. This is fine for buildings, but undesirable in an animal drawing where the goal is to render a flesh-and-blood creature. Obviously not everyone has a farm full of animal models, so working from photos is certainly a good option. But almost everyone has access to a dog, or cat, or zoo. My daughter, 12, and I have visited the zoo for years just to park in front of an animal and draw. She gets lots of compliments from passersby, and this encourages her as an artist.

Wolf Head in charcoal by Brian, Age 9

In my experience teaching children, the best medium for learning to draw animals is charcoal. It is fun to use, very forgiving, and "painterly." It gets students away from working in sharpie and pencil, which are not "loose" mediums. A good animal drawing avoids being wooden and instead captures a sense of the animal's movement, making it appear more life-like.

Charcoal is an excellent medium for doing precisely this. It encourages experimentation with texture, smudges, and line quality. It is great for creating atmosphere around the animals. Smudges and lines can be used to create a sense that the animal is in a woods, or that the time of day is early morning or dusk, without literally drawing a coloring book-style tree next to the animal with a cartoon-ish sun in the sky. These effects can be used to create perspective to great effect.

Rabbit in charcoal by Samantha, Age 9

Like no other medium, charcoal is very helpful for teaching the concept of value in drawing and painting. Understanding value and it's uses is the gateway to more sophisticated drawing and painting

For example, the bunny at left has a sense of volume, created by how the charcoal is laid down on the paper. The shifts in value are subtle in the dark and light areas of the animals body, but those shifts are why the animal seems three dimensional. Also, the animal's form is not completely encased in a hard, dark line all around the contours of the body. The line width and value alters, sometimes disappears, and this is what makes the image exciting to look at. Also, the shadow thrown by the bunny's ear lets the viewer know there is a sun in the sky, slightly off center of the animal, without drawing a distracting circle with squiggly lines depicting rays of light. While this is wonderful in a preschool or early primary school drawing, it is empowering for a developing young artist to tap into more complex "artist's tricks."

Moose Walking, Charcoal, by Canadian Artist Geordie Millar

At right is an outstanding example of an animal rendered in charcoal by Canadian artist and art professor Geordie Millar.

The drawing, from a series titled "Moose Walking", is huge (76X60). The image beautifully showcases the artist's understanding of the animal he was drawing, from life, in the Canadian wilderness. It also showcases the great versatility of charcoal as a medium: the velvety textures juxtaposed against hard lines to suggest the softness of the animal's fur while clearly showing the hard lines of its underlying anatomy; the smudging to create atmosphere and a sense that the animal is moving through space; the rich blacks that pencil cannot match; and again, the "painterly" quality of the image. This moose, to me, looks like a living, breathing, entity. When I view the student charcoal drawings above, I can see they are starting to pick-up on the concepts that Millar, as a mature artist, exhibits so masterfully. Imagine what might happen if these young students kept at it!

The "Moose Walking" series, and an equally breathtaking study of two horses by Millar titled "Procession", are nicely presented as a slide show on Millar's website.

Carlsbad Art Farm is now enrolling for summer camp 2011. Visit our website today for information and enrollment forms. And while your visiting our website, click our Facebook Page icon, and then click "like" to become a fan of our Facebook Page. As a fan, you will receive notifications of classes, seminars, discounts,  Art Farm BBQs, and such. We don't post all that much (we, at Art Farm, are too busy taking care of all the critters to post too much and, when we do, we usually include cute pictures of animal models - like Zeus!)

For questions about Art Farm, send us an email and we will get back to you shortly.