Suggestions

 I really do love the way these vine charcoal drawings look, and the way the artists use suggestion rather than detail. I've used it before, and its the most terrifying and frustrating thing I've ever drawn with. If you so much as breathe a little too hard you mess up the drawing. Notice how careful they are around it—they never lay a hand on the paper. It must require nerves of steel and learning how to draw with only the most minimal touches until it looks perfect. Then I have no idea how you store them. If you put fixative on it you totally change it in unpredictable ways. And you can't put it in a stack of drawings or in a portfolio—when you pull it out later it'll be all smudged up and parts of it will just be gone. 

I suppose it works if you take a good photo and then that becomes the finished piece. Otherwise I think you'd have to frame it and put glass over it, or at least matt it and lay tissue paper over it with a thick matte in between so it doesn't touch the paper. You can't do that with all your drawings unless you have a lot of storage space.

Pencils allow you to totally state everything in clean crisp line, to utterly control everything, and to put in as much detail as you want. You can get something like the loose suggested look of a charcoal drawing in pencil, espcially if you use some nice big chunky leads and do a lot of smudging and erasing. I think I need to mess around with that a little. 

Gettin' Inspired

 

Another video by Jeff Haines. You get to see him drawing here, and it's a joy. I got so excited about it I dug out my old charcoal pencil kit and did a sketch. It looks real nice, but I'm really more of a graphite artist than charcoal. If I were going to use charcoal pencils I'd have to draw really big, and that brings a whole set of logistical problems. I can get very similar effects in a soft enough pencil. I used to draw in the softest pencils I could get, all the way up to 9B, as well as General's Layout pencils, Design Ebony, and Derwent water-solubles. That was in the 90's when I was drawing really dark. I loved it, but it creates a solidity and opaqueness that's very limiting. Right now my favorite drawing tool is the Staedtler 2mm lead holder (has been for many years). I keep some fairly hard lead in it, I think it's HB or maybe 2B. That's soft enough to get really dark if you want to. But I used to be able to get a lot more expressive just using wooden pencils back in the day. I might need to lose the gadgetitis and get back to basics. The wooden 6B used to be my standard, at least in those dark days. More often though it would be the 2B, which allows extreme darkness and also a very delicate light touch. That's the one I used to call the Poetic Pencil, because when I was getting ready to draw I'd always ask myself "2B, or not 2B? That is the question." 

Practicing Portrait Drawing

I like the advice to do a lot more beginnings than detailed finishes. I believe he's right about that. 

Blocking in Color in Light and Shadow

 

Some good stuff here. I like this approach—get the line drawing, block in carefully, and then refine and render. He does what I do—add in each new color on its own layer so you can fiddle around with it until it looks right, then paste it down.