Another self portrait tonight. Nobody will know how awesome this self portrait was before I destroyed it.
I was loving this self portrait tonight but at some point I decided to experiment with a different stick of charcoal that I had purchased a couple days ago. I really liked these cheap compressed sticks because I knew how dark they could get. What I didn’t know is that they would be so dark that the rest of the charcoal would seam pale in comparison. Soon after adding it to the drawing I knew that it could be a problem, and I even thought about taking a picture before I jumped off the deep end, but I didn’t.
In the end, the compressed stick rained down over the vine charcoal, sticking to it like glue and totally killing all the subtle transitions that I had in my face. I tried to recover from it but alas the drawing was lost. I was a little upset, but I destroy my work all the time, so it just took me a few minutes to get over it. Most of the work that I destroy has been sitting out for a couple of days and I’m completely detached from it, but this was ruined while in progress. I feel like I need to get used to this though, I will always experamint with materials and techniques and there are bound to be failures.
After a few minutes I decided to vacuum all of the charcoal dust off my taboret and while doing that I wondered what would happen if I vacuumed my drawing. It was pretty interesting, I used the brush attachment on our vacuum and it sucked all of the loose charcoal off the drawing, leaving only the deeper marks set into the paper.
Here I also took a picture of the super dark compressed charcoal. Now I know that if I’m going to use this stuff that I should be prepared for it.
