Hello fellow charcoal-challenged deviant! I dont normally use charcoal for drawings (Heres my frst attempt from a few weeks ago [link] ) but I may be able to help...
Mistakes: a normal pencil eraser gets rid of most of the offencive bits and/or you can normally smudge it out-great for blending too. An eraser is also usefull for making highlights
As for the rest of your problems, maybe it is the wrong type of charcoal for your needs... Like everything in life, it pays to experiment.

I'm no expert in charcoal but I hope that helps you with your rather messy situation!

Yay for charcoals! And good for you for experimenting with a new media, sometimes that can seem rather daunting.
A kneaded eraser works well for me for pastels and charcoal, lifts colors up well. and it lasts a good while.

As for the dust, you can blow it off as you go or you can work on a slant and that will help it to come off as well while you are working. It's a bit of a messy medium, you just have to prepare yourself for it and learn to work with it.

I'm not sure what type of charcoal you are using, vine, stick, paper wraps etc, but there are differences in them that will give you a darker/lighter effect when you shade with them, I like to use the 4 or 6B type (or the paper wrapped) for shades etc. while using a harder grade for finer details.
Another possibility is your paper, a good grade with lots of tooth or grab will hold more of the charcoal and give you a good range of shadings and textures to work with as well.
I hope that helps and wasn't too awfully long winded!
thanks for sharing your piece and being brave enough to ask for help.
And a quick, in a pinch, inexpensive fixative I use frequently is Aqua Net aerosol type hairspray.

if you got them at the craft store and they are really light, then they are probably vine charcoal. if you want really black black charcoal, go for compressed charcoal.

and to prevent smudging, make sure you spray fix them... you can even use hairspray to do that if you don't have workable fixative.

good luck with your future charcoal endevors!

--
In art there are no correct answers.

Thanks for the advice guys.

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"Let's value our lives." ~ L

.::Visit my anime gallery::.


Orochimaru fangirl

I haven't used charcoal for about 10 years but for what it's worth here's my advice:

Anything that touches the paper will smudge your drawing so keep fingers etc away until you're ready to smudge deliberately to get some tone and shading. When you've completely finished you can use hairspray to fix it, but make sure you hold the spray can far enough back.

I don't really think of charcoal as a good medium for pieces which require large areas of flat colour (for example, if you wanted to draw something which was simply areas of white and areas of black) as it's hard to maintain the same tone across the area you're colouring. I think charcoal works much better if you use it to suggest shape and depth through shadows, although once you're really confident using it like that you can start trying new techniques. Of course if you want to do pieces with large areas of black you could try working on black paper.

I found that using charcoal with chalk to create highlights worked really well, this is a really good example [link]

Good luck, keep practicing, and Go You for trying something new

Okay I think Ive got everything worked out now. XD I bought a spray that prevents smudging and Ive used it on my pastel and pencil drawings and it works so it should work on my charcoals. Now I realized something else about the first charcoal I did. I drew it on printer paper. So that may be another reason why it didnt work. I have perfectly good sketching paper I have no idea why I didnt use it. XD Alright Im off to try it again! Thanks again for the advice

--
"Let's value our lives." ~ L

.::Visit my anime gallery::.


Orochimaru fangirl

hi you,

there are different types of charcoal, natural and compressed ones. As I can see (and what I read) you used the natural type (which looks like a little rounded piece of wood which was burned). With this type of media you'll have some troubles to really darken a certain surface. My advice would be to use the compressed type. These are square sticks and darker than the original form. In additon, as beeing squared, you can use the flat surfaces to fill the paper or the edges to draw lines.

As for the technique, use the coal as you would use a ink or a colour. Do not attempt to directly fill the surface with the most dark tone. You should better work in layers, as it gives us more a impression of a *breathening paper*. For the little dust problem, just blow, its like a miracle . And if you need to use a eraser, there are some types which are like plastic. They can be shaped and are not hard. In fact they are like bread, but more effective.

As a example I could show you one of my works: [link] .

So keep going, and do not despair, it'll come soon or later

P.S. Whoever finds mistakes can keep them

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Art is necessary~~