Fridays 3:45-5:45pm, Jan 28 – Apr 8. Open to high school students. Charcoal drawing combines the precision of pencil with the looseness and blending qualities of paint, perfect for tackling your most complex art ideas. This course begins with traditional exercises on the fundamentals of line, texture, and highlighting and shading techniques. Students will draw with vine and compressed charcoal, charcoal pencils, white charcoal, tortillon and chamois blending tools, and kneaded and hard erasers. You will learn to create the illusion of volume, dimension, and scattered light, and will experiment with smudging and erasing as drawing tools. After solidifying technical skills, students will storytell through the strengths of the medium, particularly achieving the illusion of 3-dimensionality and mysterious atmospheric effects. Students will develop and communicate their own conceptual ideas through their new armory of technical drawing skills, completing a finished charcoal artwork to take home. This individualized class meets your personal goals, whether you’re inspired to try charcoal drawing for the first time, or you want to push your existing drawing skills to a new technical and conceptual level. Your final art will be included in a public exhibition at The Norwalk Art Space in the Spring! It will also make a perfect portfolio piece.