A framed charcoal still life resting on a dark leather chair, surrounded by white tissue paper

Charcoal
Studies

Still life, charcoal on paper

Three drawings from observation. Bottles, cloth and fruit lit hard from one side, worked from the darkest black the paper will hold back up to bare white.

Type

Coursework, observational drawing

Medium

Charcoal on paper

Year

2025

Artist

Katrina Dodds

Process

Drawing the light,
not the object.

Each setup is lit hard from one side, which is the whole reason for the exercise. A single strong source turns familiar objects into flat shapes of value, and once you are drawing the shapes rather than the bottle you already know is there, the proportions stop lying to you. The cast shadows are treated as objects in their own right. In the first study the biggest, blackest shape on the page is a shadow rather than anything on the table, and it is drawn with the same crisp edge as the glass in front of it, which is exactly the confusion the exercise is after.

The subjects were chosen for range rather than for looks. Glass, glazed ceramic, dry cloth and fruit skin all take the same light and return it completely differently, so a group that looks arbitrary is really a set of surface problems. Charcoal suits that: it goes to a genuinely dense black, lifts back to paper white with an eraser, and everything in between is a matter of pressure and blending rather than a different tool.

The drawings

Three setups,
one light.

Click a drawing to move to the next one, use the arrows, or swipe. Two crowded arrangements with drapery, then a stripped-back third that trades the cloth for flat planes.

Charcoal still life: drapery swagged across the top, a tall corked bottle at left and a stoppered flask at right, a mug and a lemon in front, and a large bottle-shaped cast shadow filling the centre
NO. 01 Drapery, bottles, a mug and a lemon. The largest black shape here is not an object at all: it is a cast shadow, given the same weight and the same crisp edge as the glass standing in front of it.
Charcoal still life: a faceted bottle and a round-shouldered bottle against folded cloth, with an apple, a teacup and a dark bowl
NO. 02 Cloth fills the entire background, so the two bottles are separated by edge quality rather than by contrast. The one true black is the dish sitting under the right-hand bottle.
Charcoal still life: a faceted decanter with a round ball stopper standing on a shallow open box, a sphere resting in the box beside it, the stopper throwing a soft round shadow on the wall behind
NO. 03 Cloth swapped for geometry. A faceted decanter, a box and a sphere, so most edges turn hard and most of the drawing is flat tone. It is also the lightest of the three: the only deep black is the shadow inside the box.

STUDY 01 / 03

Value

No color,
so no hiding.

The only two things on the page are compressed charcoal and the paper it sits on. Every form, edge and shadow has to be built out of the distance between them.

01

Charcoal

ROLE
Darkest value
USE
Cast shadow, silhouette
TOOL
Compressed stick
02

Paper

ROLE
Lightest value
USE
Highlight, rim light
TOOL
Kneaded eraser

Framed

Off the board,
onto a wall.

All three framed simply and shot in warm daylight. A thin black or oak edge and nothing else, because a mount with any personality of its own would start competing with the drawing.

The decanter study in a slim black frame, hung on a warm plaster wall
The drapery study in an oak frame, leaning on a sideboard beside a pale ceramic vase
The two-bottle study in a black frame, leaning against a wall on a wooden floor beside a stack of books
← All work