Back to the Drawing Board

   It's dark, it's gritty, it blurs the lines, and you can almost count on it getting a little messy. No, I'm not talking about the new CGI-packed movie makeover of your favorite childhood superhero. I'm talking about charcoal.

    There's nothing that can replace drawing by hand with charcoal. It blends like crazy, and it gets everywhere, and you can't erase it without ruining the whole picture. Well.. at least I can't. I know there are plenty of people who are way more experienced and talented with charcoal drawings than I am, so maybe they can. Still, it's not just the end result, but the actual drawing with charcoal that makes it interesting for me. There's just no way digital drawing can ever substitute it.

I took these pictures with a digital camera. The perspective might be a wee bit skewed, because I'm not a robot, but maybe sometime I'll employ a robot to take the pictures for me and fix it.     This picture is of a Castle Library. Though it's hard to see, the statues of the angels in the background are holding books. Why is there so much floor-space? Well I like to think of the library as sort of the center of the castle- like it's not just a little room off to the side, but  also a gathering place like a dance-floor or a throne-room.

The Moon Villa was one of my favorite things to do- a city-scape. The hard part here was thinking of which buildings would be important enough to be so tall. That was the hard part of the planning, anyway. I'd say that technically the hardest part was the moon itself. I wanted the moon to be light enough to glow in the sky, but I also wanted to use enough charcoal on it so that it would have texture, as well as stand out against the clouds.