Charcoal
The charcoal consists of charred wooden sticks or pressed charcoal powder .
It is a frequently used tool in art because it is cheap or easy to make yourself and allows for good correction options. They can also be used linear and pointed, as well as wide, blurred and painterly. It is very dusty and easily smudged, which means that fixing is necessary.
Manufacturing
Different types of wood are used, such as vines, willow, linden, fruit trees and others. It is important that the wood has grown evenly. The charcoal must not be too soft, but also not too hard, it smears or splinters otherwise, and it must blacken well. The cut sticks are wrapped in clay as a bundle or placed in a closed clay pot. After that, they are slowly baked in an oven. More recently, charcoal powder has also been pressed into bars, which allows different degrees of hardness.
Usage history
Charred wood has been used for drawing since ancient times, as evidenced by many cave drawings . Until the Middle Ages, however, it was more of an aid, for example for preliminary drawings or for exercise. It was only with the higher appreciation of hand drawing in general and the development of suitable fixing methods from the 15th century that works were created using this technique that were the final goal and not a preliminary stage. From then on it was fixed either by placing it in a glue bath or by spreading it with glue. The best method was to apply glue to the sheet before drawing, to apply the charcoal after it had dried, and then to soften the glue in steam to fix the drawing. Another possibility was developed in Italy in the mid-16th century, where the coal was soaked in oil just before processing. The line becomes richer and can hardly be smudged, which also prevents a correction. The oil also turns yellow and leaves traces. The charcoal drawing is up to the present use, the fixing possibilities have been extended by sprays. Charcoal can also be combined very well with gray chalks , whereby the gray palette can be increased without losing the typical line character.
