Drawing with Liquid Charcoal

Stages of a Drawing

May 11, 2026

I’m not a painter, and generally I don’t like working with watercolor or paint when it comes to figure drawing. But I recently tried liquid charcoal and loved it!! In many ways it’s exactly like working with water color or ink …but to me it feels like there is a quality to the tone or mark that is entirely different.

I think this is the case mostly because liquid charcoal feels very grainy, and it creates layers of tone that I don’t ever seem to achieve with something like ink. Ink can feel very flat, and very graphic, whereas liquid charcoal has… DEPTH!!

The process I’ll share with you here is more or less the exact same process that I wrote about previously, drawing with ink, but in this instance I found that there was a tiny bit more leeway with liquid charcoal: it’s possible to re-activate a tonal area with water and sort of “move the marks around” slightly, even if you can’t erase them altogether. And, as already mentioned, if you build up the tonal marks gradually it creates a beautiful quality of depth to the marks. Plus I also found that drawing into the liquid charcoal, with a pencil, gave very interesting effects to the line work.

All of this to say that once again a drawing medium can take you through such creative pathways if you lean into, or even experiment with its particular qualities or aspects. “The medium is the message”!

We’re often told to focus on mark making, and to vary our marks as much as we can - all in the name of building up a drawing vocabulary. That sometimes doesn’t make a whole lot of sense when it comes to figure drawing, though, because there are not that many variations in tone or mark that you’d want to use when drawing the model. A line and a smudge can actually serve you quite well, in terms of describing form. But a subtle shift in that directive could be to think deeply about the drawing tool you are using and what it can offer you. That might open up marks for you in a more relevant way. So I’m just sharing this process here to show you some of the steps that I took in case you want to try this yourself. If you do - let me know.

First, as always, block in the gesture of the pose. That means the basic turn or twist through the pose. I usually focus on the torso for this kind of drawing - a standing pose - because that’s usually where the gesture is anchored. At this stage it’s just a block in, and yes some of these marks if “incorrect” will be part of the drawing by the end, and that’s up to you if that matters or not. But either way, keep the dilution really light and try to not draw details.

You can work progressively darker tones over the initial block in, and as you can see, this can give you really lovely, soft tones that allow previous marks to show through. Love that. There is not a huge amount of blending going on, so you could achieve really cool drawing with this approach alone.

Because I’m a drawer I had to grab a pencil at this stage, but you could easily resolve a drawing like this if you have more patience and control over your brush than I have - also it might help a this stage to use a smaller brush. I only had one size so that limited me when it came to adding finer details.

In the final stage I went back over some areas adding more water to work the liquid charcoal around and refine some of the areas.

I hope you found this helpful / interesting! This is for sure a medium I want to experiment with a lot more. Ive seen people making incredible landscape “paintings” with liquid charcoal and that looks like quite an involved process, so it’s next on my list. I will keep you posted.

Quick note before I sign off: Last couple of weeks to join the Gesture Drawing Masterclass! The doors are closing end of May, and I’m not sure if / when it will re-open.

You can enroll in monthly installments or a one-time payment:

👉 3 x Monthly Installments

👉 One-Time Payment

If you’re not sure what this Gesture Drawing Masterclass is all about, here’s a brief breakdown:

The Gesture Drawing Masterclass is:

• A 4-week in-depth curriculum of lessons and weekly assignments to unlock dynamic and expressive figure drawing.

• 8 weeks of access to the community forum, with daily feedback sessions, personalized critiques and assessments of your assignments, plus peer support and discussions.

• Live gesture drawing workshops, online within the community hub

You can read more about this offer here: