How well do graphite and charcoal work together?

Art Medium Discussion and Questions
1

Question? wondering whether you can use Both to do a landscape.

in one of my recent landscape drawings; I attempted to put draw a base of charcoal (specifically a charcoal stick) to show value and then draw on top of that.

Epic fail!

the charcoal blended terrible and didn’t seem to play well with graphite at all!

but I wasn’t sure if it was more that, graphite and charcoal don’t mix or is it that I’m just awful at using charcoal.

what do you guys think?

do they mix? do they use the same techniques with both?

any little wisdom you guys want to impart about the differences between drawing with charcoal and graphite would be appreciated.

2

Hi tgp

I’m not sure of the answers you’ll get to this question. I might not try to use charcoal and graphite together. Mainly because the charcoal has a softer consistancy and just would not blend. If you did the graphite first, it would probably not soften up or it would look like you did a graphite drawing and tried to make it darker with the charcol. I think you should do a graphite drawing of a subject, then with the same subject with the charcoal. I think that will make you see which medium you like best - would probably love both of them, just separately.

Lenora