Charcoal: A Story of Its History and Use by Artists for Over 26,000 Years

You just got back from a mammoth hunt. No luck today. You saw a bison in the distance, but a mammoth never appeared. You and your clan are a little discouraged when you return home. Rather than take it out on a clansman, you decide to go to the cave and sulk a bit. You walk past a smoldering fire that has been burning all day and pick up a piece of a limb that is still burning at the end. This will light your way for a while, you think. At the same time, he sees a smaller piece of wood that is completely charred, but now cooled. You pick it up too. You look closely. Something deep in your primitive brain is intrigued by this very black stick. With the “torch” in one hand and the burning stick in the other, you enter the cave. As you do so, you drag the burnt stick over a rock. Leaves a trail of soot. You drag it across the rock again, another black line.

Then something, a flash of creative impulse, a spark of “what if” runs through your brain. You reach the ceiling of the cave and make another black line. You cross that with another. Then, as if a magical force began to guide your hand, you begin to draw on the wall of the cave. A crude form emerges. It looks like the outline of an animal! And voila! The first charcoal drawing. You stare at him. Though crude, it mimics the shape of a bison you’ve seen and killed on previous hunts. Not finding that mammoth today is suddenly no longer a problem. Not only have you made your first charcoal drawing, but you have experienced the power of the arts!

Something similar happened in a Spanish, French or Australian cave about 26,000 years ago. It was not the beginning of “art”, as rock carvings date back to 70,000 BC. Some negative hand stencils on cave walls have been carbon dated to 40,000 BCE. C. and many consider them the first cave paintings. But our caveman may have been the first to make an actual charcoal drawing on a cave wall. If he only knew what he started. At the beginning of the Renaissance in the 15th century, most artists, including the Old Masters, used charcoal to create preliminary sketches for fresco paintings and panels. In the late Renaissance, in the early 16th century, artists such as Michelangelo used charcoal and chalk to draw on large paper. They would then poke holes along the drawn lines. They would place the drawing on the surface they were going to paint. Crushing the charcoal into a fine powder, they would place it in a small linen bag and throw it along the perforated and drawn lines. Charcoal dust would seep through the bag and holes transferring a dotted line reproduction of your drawing onto the surface to be painted.

Preliminary sketches for more permanent work, drawing exercises, quick studies, and other uses by artists were typical of charcoal until the 1980s. During that decade, this versatile medium finally began to be accepted as an important art medium. Today charcoal comes in several different forms for artists. There is dust, piece, block, cylinder (or cane), tablet, pencil and stick. The sticks are mainly made from carefully charred vines and willows. The main difference between vine and willow is that willow tends to be blacker than vine. Most forms of charcoal come in hard to extra smooth, giving artists a wide range of values, from light gray to black. The powdered form is used to fill in large areas which can then be manipulated using erasers or lifting with various methods. The cylinder, or rod, shape varies from 6mm to 50mm in diameter. They typically come in six-inch lengths. Nitram makes them and they are of very good quality. You can find them at better quality art supply stores. Artists use chunks and blocks to make thick, heavy lines or to fill in large areas. Compressed, which also comes in bars in various grades from soft to hard, is mixed as a powder with a binder like gum arabic or sometimes wax in less expensive brands. Compressed can give you the blackest blacks and can be used with all other shapes, but because of the binder, it’s not as versatile. It cannot be easily erased, for example. The binder makes it more difficult to remove and can also discolor paint if used to sketch out a composition before painting. This is not a problem with regular charcoal. The compressed form is also found in charcoal pencils. These come in the form of a wooden box and are sharpened like a normal pencil. They also come wrapped in pencil-shaped paper. There is string wrapped inside along with the paper and pulling on it tears the next layer so it can be unwrapped to expose the “lead”.

Charcoal is a medium that allows you to relax in your drawing. Its dusty nature makes it interesting and challenging, as well as frustrating at times, especially when it gets dirty. Drawings should be “fixed” with a workable fixer, allowing you to rework the drawing until you are satisfied that it is complete. Then a couple of final coats protect it pretty well, but it still won’t be smudge-proof. Solve that with a good frame, mat, and glass!