Charcoal Drawing Quotes

As far as I can recall, the initial shiver of inspiration [for Lolita] was somehow prompted by a newspaper story about an ape in the Jardin des Plantes, who, after months of coaxing by a scientist, produced the first drawing ever charcoaled by an animal: this sketch showed the bars of the poor creature's cage.

A single note, held in an amber suspension of time, like a charcoal drawing of Icarus falling. It was sad and fierce all at once, alive with a lonely purity. It went on and on, until my own lungs were burning. “What bird are you calling?” I asked finally, when I couldn’t stand it any longer. The Bird Man stopped whistling. He grinned, so that I could see all his pebbly teeth. “You.

Listen, it is not the charcoal that draws the picture. It is you. It is your hand, which is attached to your body, and in that body is a beating heart...

She will grow out of it, her parents say - but instead, Adeline feels herself growing in, holding tighter to the stubborn hope of something more. The world should be getting larger. Instead, she feels it shrinking, tightening like chains around her limbs as the flat lines of her own body begin to curve out against it, and suddenly the charcoal beneath her nails is unbecoming, as is the idea that she would choose her own company over Arnaud's or George'sm or any man who might have her. She is at odds with everything, she does not fit, an insult to her sex, a stubborn child in a woman's form, her head bowed and arms wrapped tight around her drawing pad as if it were a door.

When I write... I am in the fond arms of a childhood friend upon whose colorful heart I can hang the charcoal drawings of my woes.

want to draw you,” I said. “As my birthday present to me.” His smile was positively feline. I added, flipping open my sketchbook and turning to the first page, “You said once that nude would be best.” Rhys’s eyes glowed, and a whisper of his power through the room had the curtains parting, flooding the space with midmorning sunshine. Showing every glorious naked inch of him sprawled across the bed, illuminating the faint reds and golds of his wings. “Do your worst, Cursebreaker.” My very blood sparking, I pulled out a piece of charcoal and began.

I was reading about animals a while back and there was this motherfucking scientist in France back in the thirties or forties or whenever the motherfuck it was and he was trying to get apes to draw these pictures, to make art pictures like the kinds of pictures in serious motherfucking paintings that you see in museums and shit. So the scientist keeps showing the apes these paintings and giving them charcoal pencils to draw with and then one day one of the apes finally draws something but it’s not the art pictures that it draws. What it draws is the bars of its own motherfucking cage. Its own motherfucking cage! Man, that's the truth, ain't it?

The shape of the city stood in the grayness like a charcoal drawing sketched across the waste.

Now I contradict myself. Picasso he do too. He say pull out your brain, yes, he also say, 'Painting is a blind man's profession' and 'To draw you must close your eyes and sing'. And Michelangelo, he say he sculpts with his brains, not his eyes. Yes. Everything is true at once. Life is contradiction, we take in every lesson we find what works. Okay, now pick up the charcoal and draw.

For the first time in what seems like eons, my body doesn't feel so clenched, so hot. And suddenly, I realize that the dot out there on my horizon line--the same dot everything in my world points to, like in the one-point perspective sketches Mom taught me how to draw--it's not any old spot, you know. It's not some charcoal smudge. It's peace.

All girls are prone to dreaming. She will grow out of it, her parents say—but instead, Adeline feels herself growing in, holding tighter to the stubborn hope of something more. The world should be getting larger. Instead, she feels it shrinking, tightening like chains around her limbs as the flat lines of her own body begin to curve out against it, and suddenly the charcoal beneath her nails is unbecoming, as is the idea that she would choose her own company over Arnaud’s or George’s, or any man who might have her. She is at odds with everything, she does not fit, an insult to her sex, a stubborn child in a woman’s form, her head bowed and arms wrapped tight around her drawing pad as if it were a door.

an ape in the Jardin des Plantes, who, after months of coaxing by a scientist, produced the first drawing ever charcoaled by an animal: this sketch showed the bars of the poor creature’s cage.

I knew she was drawing my legs when her charcoal would scratch heavily on the paper. It was quieter when she drew the details of my face, and that was when her breathing would break down into tiny, shallow bursts of air, in and out. And I knew she was drawing my half-hard cock when she stopped breathing - so nervous, but so eager to practice.

Everything is true at once. Life is contradiction. We take in every lesson. We find what works. Okay, now pick up the charcoal and draw.” After a few minutes,

He looked like a charcoal drawing of a man. In death, he was blacks and whites.

No I contradict myself. Picasso he do too. He say pull out your brain, yes, he also say, 'Painting is a blind man's profession' and 'To draw you must close your eyes and sing.' And Michelangelo, he say he sculpts with his brains, not his eyes. Yes. Everything ia true at once. Life is contradiction. We take in every lesson. We find what works. Okay, now pick up the charcoal and draw.

On the last page was a drawing, done in charcoal, of a girl with large pale eyes... you could tell she was beautiful. Her skin was infused with light, her lips parted in a secret smile. 'She's beautiful,' I whispered to Karl. 'Of course she's beautiful,' He brought his face close to mine. 'She's you.

What could she possibly have done that was so heinous as to earn her a lifetime of self-mortification? No one short of a tyrant deserved such unremitting agony. I cried there with her, for her, for Eve, for sorrows past, for sorrows yet to come. I put my pencil away. It was wrong to draw live pain. If there had been an artist at Bethany, it would have been wrong to intrude his chalk or charcoal on Mary Magdalene’s weeping as she washed Jesus’ feet. Some things were too raw for art until time dulled their sharpness.

I glanced over his shoulder to get a look at his latest drawing. A wolf and a coyote stood side by side beneath a dual sky, sun and moon shining at the same time. "They're brothers," Rafael said. He laid his charcoal on the grass. "Wolf is wise and judicious. Coyote's a trickster. They're the two faces of God. Everything in the world is dual-natured. Even God isn't all good or all bad." He told me about how the sun used to be married to the moon before they quarreled and parted ways, leaving the sun to rule the world at day and the moon at night. He told me how the Wolf had sewn us all out of seeds and put us in a cloth bag to keep us safe, but the Coyote had clawed the bag open and everyone had spilled out, landing and taking root in different parts of the world. He told me about the girl with Two Faces, one half of her face devastatingly beautiful, the other half impossibly ugly, and the man who lover her anyway. He told me about the days when death lacked permanence and ten different generations lived together beneath the same stars. He talked, as he always talked, without any real purpose, clearing his head of the cluttering thoughts that had gathered and built up until he could pour them into me.

I do not consider myself a great artist, though she made me wish I was. I could not have known at this first meeting how many times I would fail to capture her, in charcoal and in life. The brazen declaration of her; the pride in that upturned chin, the pointed nose, and the tidy carelessness that put her above the opinions of lesser men. There's little sign of her wit-so close to cruelty-in any of the drawings I made of her, and this poor prose cannot contain her beauty, body or soul. They are only echoes, as is this.

This one is bigger than the other by at least a quarter,” he said. “That’s perspective,” Will replied stubbornly. “The left one is closer, so it looks bigger.” “If it’s perspective, and it’s that much bigger, your handcart would have to be about five meters wide,” Horace told him. “Is that what you’re planning?” Again, Will studied the drawing critically. “No. I thought maybe two meters. And three meters long.” He quickly sketched in a smaller version of the left wheel, scrubbing over the first attempt as he did so. “Is that better?” “Could be rounder,” Horace said. “You’d never get a wheel that shape to roll. It’s sort of pointy at one end.” Will’s temper flared as he decided his friend was simply being obtuse for the sake of it. He slammed the charcoal down on the table. “Well, you try drawing a perfect circle freehand!” he said angrily. “See how well you do! This is a concept drawing, that’s all. It doesn’t have to be perfect!” Malcolm chose that moment to enter the room. He had been outside, checking on MacHaddish, making sure the general was still securely fastened to the massive log that held him prisoner. He glanced now at the sketch as he passed by the table. “What’s that?” he asked. “It’s a walking cart,” Horace told him. “You get under it, so the spears won’t hit you, and go for a walk.” Will glared at Horace and decided to ignore him. He turned his attention to Malcolm. “Do you think some of your people could build me something like this?” he asked. The healer frowned thoughtfully. “Might be tricky,” he said. “We’ve got a few cart wheels, but they’re all the same size. Did you want this one so much bigger than the other?” Now Will switched his glare to Malcolm. Horace put a hand up to his face to cover the grin that was breaking out there. “It’s perspective. Good artists draw using perspective,” Will said, enunciating very clearly. “Oh. Is it? Well, if you say so.” Malcolm studied the sketch for a few more seconds. “And did you want them this squashed-up shape? Our wheels tend to be sort of round. I don’t think these ones would roll too easily, if at all.” Truth be told, Malcolm had been listening outside the house for several minutes and knew what the two friends had been discussing. Horace gave vent to a huge, indelicate snort that set his nose running. His shoulders were shaking, and Malcolm couldn’t maintain his own straight face any longer. He joined in, and the two of them laughed uncontrollably. Will eyed them coldly. “Oh, yes. Extremely amusing,” he said.

When it comes to creativity, no effort is ever wasted. Ever. Every unfinished manuscript, sunk business, crumpled charcoal drawing, or abandoned musical instrument represents another step forward. Once you understand that your entire creative journey—every clueless mistake, every stinging failure—is an essential part of your path, you will see that there is nothing to lose by taking the next step, no matter where it leads.

Melissa popped open the clattery little Rotring tin. Pencils, putty rubber, scalpel. She sharpened a 3B, letting the curly shavings fall into the wicker bin, then paused for a few seconds, finding a little place of stillness before starting to draw the flowers. Art didn't count at school because it didn't get you into law or banking or medicine. It was just a fluffy thing stuck to the side of Design and Technology, a free A level for kids who could do it, like a second language, but she loved charcoal and really good gouache, she loved rolling sticky black ink on to a lino plate and heaving on the big black arm of the Cope press, the quiet and those big white walls.

If the point of drawing was to bring your work into the world so that other people could see it and sense what you’d meant to convey, then, no, Gil should not keep giving it a whirl: he should never draw anything again. No whirls. It should be illegal for Gil Wolf to possess charcoal sticks. But if the point was something else, expression or release, or a way to give private meaning to the loss of your son, your child, your boy, then yes, he should draw and draw.

The song she heard from the meadow was the same tune as the bird's call.She looked up in the trees.For a moment she thought she'd lost the bird, and she nearly cried out for him, but he fluttered down,landed right at her feet, and grew into a man." "Oh." Meg sighed.She'd always liked that part. "He whistled the tune once more, then the fey man said, 'My lady,will you dance?" "'I will.' She crossed the bridge to the meadow,and danced with the whistler." "Tell us they married," Meg said. "The story doesn't go like that," Poppy reminded. "It should." Meg stroked Tom's blood-clotted hair. I fumbled with the charcoal in my blackened fingers. As the story went, the girl danced through the seasons, but when she wandered home at last and reached her cottage door, she was a shriveled-up old women, for a hundred years had passed while she danced with the whistler,and everyone she'd known in her former life had died. Meg knew how it went.But when our eyes locked, I saw tonight she couldn't bear it. I found another bit of charcoal. "That very spring when the meadow was in bloom,the whistler, who had fey power to transform into a bird and sing any girl he wished to into the wood, chose the one girl who'd followed him so bravely and so far to be his wife. And she lived with him and the fey folk deep in Dragonswood in DunGarrow Castle, a place that blends into the mountainside and cannot be seen with human eyes unless the fairies will it so." I drew the couple hand in hand, rouch sketches on the cave wall; the stone wasn't smooth by any means. "She lived free among the fey folk and never wanted to return to her old life that had been full of hunger and sorrow under her father's roof." I sketched what came next before I could think of it. "A dragon came to their wedding," I said, drawing his right wing so large, I had to use the ceiling. "He lit a bonfire to celebrate their union." I drew the left wing spanning over the couple in the meadow. "And they lived all their lives content in Dragonswood.

Sometimes Leonardo used a pen on such face-hunting excursions, and when that was not practical in an outdoor setting he used a stylus. The sharp silverpoint of the stylus made lines on paper that had been coated with ground chicken bones, soot, or other chalky powders, sometimes colored with pulverized minerals. The metal point oxidized this coating, producing silvery gray lines. He also occasionally used chalk, charcoal, or lead. As was his nature, he was constantly experimenting with drawing methods. 23

As there is no appearance of daylight, what is to be done during the night? It occurred to me that I would arise and examine, by my lamp, the wails of my cell. They are covered with writings, with drawings, fantastic figures, and names which mix with and efface each other. It would appear that each prisoner had wished to leave behind him some trace here at least. Pencil, chalk, charcoal, — black, white, grey letters; sometimes deep carvings upon the stone. If my mind were at ease, I could take an interest in this strange book, which  is developed page by page, to my eyes, on each stone of this dungeon. I should like to recompose these fragments of thought; to trace a character for each name; to give sense and life to these mutilated inscriptions, — these dismembered phrases.

Two men enter the room, one old and mustached and the other young and tawny-headed, wearing sweats and a worn T-shirt. He looks like Silas, actually—god, what am I, obsessed? But there really is something of the woodsman in the younger man’s face, with his full lips, his slightly curled hair that turns like tendrils around his ears . . . I look away before studying him too closely. “All right, ladies, are we ready?” the older man says enthusiastically. There’s a loud rustling of paper as well flip the enormous sketchbooks on our easels until we find blank sheets. I draw a few soft lines on my page, unsure what— Non-Silas rips off his T-shirt, revealing lightly defined muscles on his pale chest. I raise an eyebrow just as he tugs at the waist of the sweatpants. They drop to the floor in a fluid, sweeping motion. There’s nothing underneath them. At all. My charcoal slips through my suddenly sweaty fingers. Non-Silas steps out of the puddle of his clothes and moves to the center of the room, fluorescent lights reflecting off his slick abdomen. He’s smiling as though he isn’t naked, smiling as though I didn’t somehow manage to get the seat closest to him. As if I can’t see . . . um . . . everything only a few feet from my face, making my mind clumsily spiral. I squeeze my eyes shut for a moment; he looks like Silas in the face, and because of that I keep wondering if he looks akin to Silas everywhere else. “All right, ladies, this will be a seven-minute pose. Ready?” the older man says, positioning himself behind the other empty easel. The roomful of housewives nod in one hungry motion. I quiver. “Go!” the older man says, starting the stopwatch. Non-Silas poses, something reminiscent of Michelangelo’s David, only instead of marble eyes looking into nothingness, non-Silas is staring almost straight at me. Draw. I’m supposed to be drawing. I grab a new piece of charcoal from the bottom of the easel and begin hastily making lines in my sketchbook. I can’t not look at him, or he’ll think I’m not drawing him. I glance hurriedly, trying to avoid the region my eyes continuously return to. I start to feel fluttery. How long has it been? Surely it’s been seven minutes. I try to add some tone to my drawing’s chest. I wonder what Silas’s chest looks like . . . Stop! Stop stop stop stop stop—” “Right, then!” the older man says as his stopwatch beeps loudly and the scratchy sound of charcoal on paper ends. Thank you, sir, thank you—” “Annnnd next pose!” Non-Silas turns his head away, till all I can see is his wren-colored hair and his side, including a side view of . . . how many times am I going to have to draw this man’s area? What’s worse is that he looks even more like Silas now that I can’t see his eyes. Just like Silas, I bet. My eyes linger longer than necessary now that non-Silas isn’t staring straight at me. By the end of class, I’ve drawn eight mediocre pictures of him, each one with a large white void in the crotch area. The housewives compare drawings with ravenous looks in their eyes as non-Silas tugs his pants back on and leaves the room, nodding politely. I picture him naked again. I sprint from the class, abandoning my sketches—how could I explain them to Scarlett or Silas? Stop thinking of Silas, stop thinking of Silas.

She took out a charcoal stick and began to sketch-- on the workbench itself. Of course the moon wouldn't come to her in songs or poems or crystals or whatever... she felt the most centered, the most tranquil, when she was painting or drawing. Lost in her own world or in new ones she imagined. She shouldn't have made a chart; she should have drawn a circle, with the moons going from waxing to waning all the way around... She hummed to herself a little, the way she always did when she painted. Her hair began to glow. A little shading here, a few light strokes in the middle of the full moon for the face that Rapunzel saw there... Circles and shadows and crosshatching... She worked extra hard on the profile of the fatter waxing crescent, where the moon would be now. She knew what it looked like as she felt her hand shape it. Her power surged; her hair began to sparkle. She looked around frantically for something to release her magic on. The first thing she saw was her tea, so she grabbed the red clay cup and wrapped the end of a braid around it. Just like with Pascal, sparks sprayed off her hair and over the object. When they faded they revealed... ... a heavy, crude clay cup. Rapunzel started to slump in disappointment-- and then noticed something. Where the hair had touched the sides, the cup was now shiny black, like onyx or obsidian.

There’s a joke I heard years ago, about an Irishman who ends up on a desert island with Claudia Schiffer, after a plane crash. There’s just the two of them, sitting on the sand. After a few days of this, she moves closer to him. ‘Do you wish to ride me, Dermot?’ she says. ‘Jesus, Claudia,’ he says. ‘Like – are you sure?’ ‘Yes,’ she says. ‘We will be here for quite some time, I think. And the days are quite long – yes?’ So, they start riding. All day. And Claudia falls hopelessly in love with him. This goes on for months until one day, the Irishman stands up and moves down the beach a bit and sits by himself. Claudia gets up and follows him. ‘Dermot?’ she says. ‘Is something the matter?’ ‘Ah, sure,’ he says. ‘I’m just a bit down in the dumps.’ ‘Is there something I can do to help?’ she asks him. ‘Well,’ he says. ‘This might sound mad. But would you mind if I called you Des?’ She looks at him, then says, ‘Alright. I will permit this.’ ‘Great,’ he says. ‘Brilliant, thanks.’ He’s holding a piece of charcoal that he found on the beach. He shows it to Claudia and he says, ‘And, like – would you mind if I drew a moustache on you?’ And she looks at him again, and says, ‘Alright, Dermot. This, too, I will permit.’ ‘Ah, great – thanks.’ He draws a rough moustache on her, then stands back. Then he grabs her shoulders, shakes her, and says, ‘Des! Des! You won’t believe who I’ve been riding for the last three months!

Even here, it is only the evening that I love. The dawn gladdens me for a moment; I fancy I could fell the charm of it if the day that is to follow were not bound to be so long! I certainly have a free domain to wander in, but it is not wild and impressive enough. its features are tame, its rocks small and uninteresting, the vegetation as a rule lacks the luxuriance and profusion I like to see; one never catches here the murmur of a torrent far down in the depths; it is a land of plains. Nothing burdens me here; nothing satisfies me. I fancy, if anything, my boredom increases; simply because I have not enough to suffer. I am happier then, you think? Not a bit of it; to suffer and to be unhappy are not at all the same thing, no more than enjoyment is identical with happiness. I am delightfully circumstanced, and yet I live a melancholy life. I could not be better off than I am here: free, undistracted, well in health, unyoked from business, unconcerned about a future from which I expect nothing, and leaving behind without regret a past I have not enjoyed. But here is within me a persistent unrest, a yearning I cannot define, imperative and absorbing, which takes me out of the sphere of perishable creatures... No, it is not the yearning to love; you are mistaken there, as I once was mistaken myself. The interval is wide enough between the emptiness of my heart and the love it has so eagerly desired, but the distance between what I am and what I want to be is infinite. I do not want to enjoy possession; I want hope, I should like to know. I need limitless illusions, receding before me to keep me always under their spell. What use to me is anything that can end? The hour which will arrive in sixty years' time is already close at hand. I have no liking for anything that takes its rise, draws near, arrives and is no more. I want a good, a dream, in fact a hope that is ever in advance, ever beyond me, greater than my expectation itself, greater than the things which pass away. I would like to be pure intelligence, I would like the eternal order of the world... And yet, thirty years ago, that order was, and I had no existence. worthless and accidental creature of a day, I used not to exist, and soon I shall exist no more. I discover with surprise that my thought is greater than my being, and when I consider that my life is absurd in my own eyes, I lose my way in hopeless darkness. Truly, happier is he who fells trees and burns charcoal, and flies to holy water when the thunder peals. He lives like the brute. Nay; for he sings at his work. I shall never know his peace, and yet I shall pass like him. His life will glide along with time, but mine is led astray and hurried on by excitement and unrest, and by the phantoms of an unknown greatness.

Switching on the ground-floor lights, she checked the gas jet and the main gas plug and poured water over the smoldering, half-buried charcoal in the brazier. She stood before the upright mirror in the four-and-a-half-mat room and held up her skirts. The bloodstains made it seem as if a bold, vivid pattern was printed across the lower half of her white kimono. When she sat down before the mirror, she was conscious of the dampness and coldness of her husband’s blood in the region of her thighs, and she shivered. Then, for a long while, she lingered over her toilet preparations. She applied the rouge generously to her cheeks, and her lips too she painted heavily. This was no longer make-up to please her husband. It was make-up for the world which she would leave behind, and there was a touch of the magnificent and the spectacular in her brushwork. When she rose, the mat before the mirror was wet with blood. Reiko was not concerned about this. (...) The lieutenant was lying on his face in a sea of blood. The point protruding from his neck seemed to have grown even more prominent than before. Reiko walked heedlessly across the blood. Sitting beside the lieutenant’s corpse, she stared intently at the face, which lay on one cheek on the mat. The eyes were opened wide, as if the lieutenant’s attention had been attracted by something. She raised the head, folding it in her sleeve, wiped the blood from the lips, and bestowed a last kiss. (...) Reiko sat herself on a spot about one foot distant from the lieutenant’s body. Drawing the dagger from her sash, she examined its dully gleaming blade intently, and held it to her tongue. The taste of the polished steel was slightly sweet. Reiko did not linger. When she thought how the pain which had previously opened such a gulf between herself and her dying husband was now to become a part of her own experience, she saw before her only the joy of herself entering a realm her husband had already made his own. In her husband’s agonized face there had been something inexplicable which she was seeing for the first time. Now she would solve that riddle. Reiko sensed that at last she too would be able to taste the true bitterness and sweetness of that great moral principle in which her husband believed. What had until now been tasted only faintly through her husband’s example she was about to savor directly with her own tongue. Reiko rested the point of the blade against the base of her throat. She thrust hard. The wound was only shallow. Her head blazed, and her hands shook uncontrollably. She gave the blade a strong pull sideways. A warm substance flooded into her mouth, and everything before her eyes reddened, in a vision of spouting blood. She gathered her strength and plunged the point of the blade deep into her throat.

CHARCOAL-BURNER carried on his trade in his own house. One day he met a friend, a Fuller, and entreated him to come and live with him, saying that they should be far better neighbors and that their housekeeping expenses would be lessened. The Fuller replied, “The arrangement is impossible as far as I am concerned, for whatever I should whiten, you would immediately blacken again with your charcoal.” Like will draw like.

I do not consider myself a great artict, though she made me wish I was. I could not have known at this first meeting how many times I would fail to capture her, in charcoal and in life. The brazen declaration of her; the pride in that upturned chin, the pointed nose, and the tidy carelessness that put her above the opinions of lesser men. There's little sign of her wit-so close to cruelty-ain any of the drawings I made of her, and this poor prose cannot contain her beauty, body or soul. They are only echoes, as is this.

She stared at the charcoal drawing of Baz pinned up behind her laptop. He was sitting on a carved black throne, one leg draped over its arm, his head tilted forward in languid challenge. The artist had written along the bottom of the page in perfect calligraphy: “Who would you be without me, Snow? A blue-eyed virgin who’d never thrown a punch.

He remembered the awe of his first desert night, the dazzling web so clear and bright. He had never seen such a sky when he lived in Paris. The lights of the city were too bright. The lights, such lights .. it was six long years since he'd last seen them. Or was it seven now, or even eight? The years ran together and time lost its urgency and sometimes he didn't notice its passage at all. But surely it was a lifetime since Paris. He was happy in the desert yet sometimes longed to be back in the city, to see what it was like now. His memories of it were fond, the bad parts seeming not so bad, the good parts seeming better than they were. But the more time passed, the harder it became to remember at all. No matter how he tried to hold on, the treasures of his past no longer burned so brightly in his memory. The details dimmed and the people grew fuzzy, and he couldn't remember what some of them looked like. He closed his eyes and tried to bring them up, Paul and Gascon and Aunt Elisabeth, but sometimes he couldn't do it. It worried him terribly when it happened. It seemed as if he didn't care. He DID care, he told himself. He didn't want to be unfaithful. He didn't want to lose his other life completely. He asked the marabout for paper and drew pictures of his father with scraps of charcoal. The pictures were crude, but they helped him remember. He promised himself a thousand times that no matter what pron happened to the other faces and places in his mind, he would never let himself forget his father's face. He folded the papers carefully and put them in a leather pouch that hung from his neck, and at night by the fire took them out to look. After he had folded and unfolded them many times the pictures would smear, and he would draw new ones.

And then, suddenly, when the sun is beginning to warm my face, I'm there. In the zone where everything is perfect, and I'm drawing. Fingers, hand and charcoal pencil, even thought, are one and what I am, what I see, or part of it, is skimming across the page, darker here, lighter on the left, a smudging—deliberate—and feathering with spit. While inside, the crimson glow is burning, that bubble I carry within me where I store everything that happens, good or bad, where I can think about it when I'm alone, at night or on the street, waiting for the chance for cash and an easy screw. As the glow burns, it travels through my limbs, blood and bone, and into my head where something explodes like an electric shock, so I’m shivering, retching even as my hand still moves over paper, tasting vomit in my mouth but refusing to let it go, swallowing down the bitterness. And still I draw, sweat sticky on my forehead and under my arms, but the only part of me touching what I’m doing is my hand with its instrument for line and block and shadow. Nothing can harm me now.

I do not consider myself a great artist, though she made me wish I was. I could not have known at this first meeting how many times I would fail to capture her, in charcoal and in life. The brazen declaration of her: the pride in that upturned chin, the pointed nose, and the tidy carelessness that put her above the opinions of lesser men. There’s little sign of her wit—so close to cruelty—in any of the drawings I made of her, and this poor prose cannot contain her beauty, body or soul. Even holographs fail. They are only echoes, as is this.

But in the same way that close reading allows the reader to absorb, to synthesize the truth of what he reads, drawing allows the artist to capture the soul of a thing. The artist sees things not in terms of what is or might be, but in terms of what must be. Of what our world must become. This is why a portrait will—to the human observer—always defeat the photograph. It is why we turn to religion even when science objects and why the least scholiast might outperform a machine. The photograph captures Creation as it is; it captures fact. Facts bore me in my old age. It is the truth that interests me, and the truth is in charcoal—or in the vermilion by whose properties I record this account. Not in data or laser light. Truth lies not in rote but in the small and subtle imperfections, the mistakes that define art and humanity both. Beauty, the poet wrote, is truth. Truth, beauty. He was wrong. They are not the same.

But he wasn’t procrastinating because he didn’t want to work on the friar’s painting. No. A masterpiece did not pop immediately to mind. He had to knead the problems like dough: how could the Virgin’s face fulfill classical expectations of beauty, yet surprise the viewer with the unexpected; how could each of the figures maintain their separate identities, yet intertwine into a single whole; how could he transform a few scratches of lines on paper into a living, breathing, complex organism? Creating new life took time. Now that his first year was almost up, Leonardo needed to convince the friars to let him stay. He had barely made any progress on human flight. Relocating now would interrupt his experiments. He had to prove that he was not only working on the altarpiece, but that a painting by him would be worth the wait. So, for the last two weeks, he had been displaying his design to the public, and now he had invited the friars up to witness the spectacle. As the song came to an end, Leonardo stepped onto a raised platform next to a large panel covered in a piece of black velvet. He raised his hand with a flourish, and Salaì yanked off the cloth. His cartoon, the life-sized preparatory drawing for the altarpiece, was displayed on a gilded pedestal. Candlelight illuminated the charcoal and chalk sketch on thin, tinted paper. The picture was of St. Anne, the Virgin Mary, John the Baptist, and baby Jesus, all interconnected in a surging, pyramidal composition. The four figures were vibrant, their faces the ideal of classical beauty. He’d spent months dreaming up that image before putting it down on paper, so when he’d finally started sketching, the lines seemed to appear in a flash. Like his performance that night, it was all part of his show. Let the people think the design had arrived complete and perfect, as if sent by God himself.

The hot bright afternoon and the gleaning birds and the mowing men and this beautiful boy, paused in front of his sketch, rolling a cigarette, his charcoal-covered fingertips blackening the paper, and he licked across the edge of the cigarette paper with his bright tongue and put the cigarette between what Bridget noticed with a slight rush of breath were his full lips and took a kitchen match from the back pocket of his pants and struck it against the little wooden box he kept his charcoal sticks in and touched it to the end of the cigarette and deeply inhaled smoke into his lungs and held it and crossed his arms and stood back from the drawing and contemplated it and let the smoke from his lungs in a sustained relaxed torrent that made a matted blue cloud in the sunlight and smelled sweet and made her want to smoke. This boy before her, smoking his cigarette and looking at the sketch deciding it was done, seemed like a ghost, not because he was otherworldly or like a hallucination but because Bridget knew that she would remember this moment for however long she lived in its perfect entirety—the grass, the sunlight, the blue cloud of smoke, the tedder and the windrows and the mowing men, this boy she found more and more beautiful—and she could already feel what it was going to be like to look back on it and remember the young girl she’d once been and the young boy who’d stood right in front of her and whisked a stick of charcoal around and nearly miraculously rendered the grass, the light, the mowers, the windrows, the huge, heavy, volumed, shadowed, sunny, swarming, monolithic stacks of hay— everything she saw and anticipated remembering—onto a white pane of paper exactly as it looked to her own eyes.

When he was little, she'd stay late in his room, drawing pictures of him as he slept. She had fat pads filled with closeup sketches of his growing muscles, hands, and teeth, roughly rendered in black ink and charcoal. She wasn't trained or ambitious when it came to art; she was simply fascinated by her creation—not the drawings, the person. "This is mine," she'd say, checking Henry's pulse, looking into his nostrils, "This is me." She once counted his eyelashes with a magnifying glass and drew each one to scale.

The day before Christmas came. Mama made her clove apple and began baking pies. Papa brought in a fresh pine tree and they decorated it with the beautiful apples. But to Katrina it just didn’t feel like Christmas. Even when she went to bed on Christmas Eve, Papa was still sawing away at the apple tree. On Christmas morning their stocking were filled with oranges, wild hickory nuts, black walnuts, and peppermint sticks. Josie gave Papa and Mama their scarves, and Katrina gave Mama the pincushion. But it still didn’t feel like Christmas to Katrina. Then Papa said, “Now my little ones, turn around and close your eyes. No peeking.” First Katrina heard Papa ask Mama to help him. Then she heard him hammering something to the beam, then he dragged something across the floor. “All right, you can look now,” said Mama. They whirled around. There, hanging from the beam, was Josie’s swing, the very same vine swing from the apple tree. Sitting on the swing was a little rag doll that Mama had made. Near the swing was a drawing board made from the very same limb that had been Katrina’s studio. On the drawing board were real charcoal paper and three sticks of willow charcoal. Katrina softly touched the drawing board. She wanted to say, How wise and wonderful you are, Papa and Thank you, Papa and I’ll always love you, Papa. But all she could say was, “Oh, Papa.” Papa didn’t say anything either. He just handed her the three sticks of charcoal. Josie began to swing with her doll and Katrina started to draw. Now she could see how beautiful Mama’s clove apple looked on the white tablecloth and how shiny red the apples were on the Christmas tree. Now she could smell the fresh winter pine tree and the warm apple pies. Now it felt like Christmas. Katrina gave her first drawing to Papa. It was a picture of the day when Papa picked the apples and Mama made apple butter and Katrina and Josie sorted the apples. In the corner Papa wrote: This picture was drawn by Katrina Ansterburg on Christmas Day 1881. Then he hung it in his woodshop and there it stayed for many long years.

Cal opens a drawer, pulls out a sketch pad and charcoal and sets them down on a drafting table. 'Let's draw.' I smile the way I did as a child when receiving a fresh box of 64 Crayola crayons, unabashedly showing all my teeth. I remember how much I used to love to draw, and I wonder why I don't do it anymore. I write, I guess. I draw with words, but when I see Cal's pad and charcoal, I'm overwhelmed with the feeling that it's not the same. I use my words, my artist's charcoal to describe what I'm thinking. He draws with an imperfect fluidity, pausing only occasionally to shade the drawing with his thumb or brush the paper with the back of his hands. He listens and nods and doesn't interrupt. And when I'm done speaking he looks at the drawing, and his eyes get really big. Slowly, he turns his pad around for me to see. My heart stops and then starts. 'Yes,' I say. It's perfect. Alive with added detail and beautiful Inuit soulfulness I couldn't have even imagined sitting outside in my car. My fear is gone. There's a tingling in my skin, like I can feel the thousand needle pricks to come. I am alive.

Leonardo was renowned as a painter, and Michelangelo (thanks to his Battle of the Centaurs and the David) was known for portraying male warriors. It took them over a year just to prepare their concepts and designs. Each fresco was to be more than 1,400 square feet. In 1504 gigantic sheets of paper (a very expensive commodity in the sixteenth century) were bought and prepared for the full-sized cartoni, or “cartoons,” the charcoal drawings used for transferring the outlines of the figures onto the fresh plaster of the fresco. Both artists got carried away by their special interests: Leonardo concentrated on the anatomy of the horses in the battle, while Michelangelo—as you might have guessed—filled his scene with muscular male nudes in every possible position. Copy by Aristotile da Sangallo of a detail from Michelangelo’s cartoon for the Battle of Cascina, c.

THE OLD TESTAMENT begins with darkness, and the last of the Gospels ends with it. “Darkness was upon the face of the deep,” Genesis says. Darkness was where it all started. Before darkness, there had never been anything other than darkness, void and without form. At the end of John, the disciples go out fishing on the Sea of Tiberias. It is night. They have no luck. Their nets are empty. Then they spot somebody standing on the beach. At first they don’t see who it is in the darkness. It is Jesus. The darkness of Genesis is broken by God in great majesty speaking the word of creation. “Let there be light!” That’s all it took. The darkness of John is broken by the flicker of a charcoal fire on the sand. Jesus has made it. He cooks some fish on it for his old friends’ breakfast. On the horizon there are the first pale traces of the sun getting ready to rise. All the genius and glory of God are somehow represented by these two scenes, not to mention what Saint Paul calls God’s foolishness. The original creation of light itself is almost too extraordinary to take in. The little cook-out on the beach is almost too ordinary to take seriously. Yet if Scripture is to be believed, enormous stakes were involved in them both and still are. Only a saint or a visionary can begin to understand God setting the very sun on fire in the heavens, and therefore God takes another tack. By sheltering a spark with a pair of cupped hands and blowing on it, the Light of the World gets enough of a fire going to make breakfast. It’s not apt to be your interest in cosmology or even in theology that draws you to it so much as it’s the empty feeling in your stomach. You don’t have to understand anything very complicated. All you’re asked is to take a step or two forward through the darkness and start digging in.

Cold press papers are usually used for watercolor, pastel, and charcoal. This is the most popular paper choice used for creating texture in an image.

I drew anything. Everything. Doodles at first. But I had a knack for reproducing what I saw, and soon my paper and pencil — and then later, my paints and charcoals — formed a strong, protective wall around me. They stood between me and everyone else in the world. I liked it that way. I liked being quiet, letting no one know what I thought, or how ferocious those thoughts were.

He stands alone in a wasteland of black sand, a realm of charcoal graveyards.  The black mountain stands in the distance, impossibly tall, a rip in the sky.  The forest lies at its feet, subjugated by the peak’s brutal size.  The stink of crumbled empires and the breath of ghosts drift on the ice wind breeze. There is nothing beyond the glade and the mountain.  They are adrift, an island in a sea of nothing.  Black sands run to infinity.  He feels the icy cold of the open desert, and he gazes up to a bloody red sky filled with swirling steel clouds.  Dead air whips along the ground, and it draws sand up into a black storm that takes to the sky like a predatory flock.

When she drew, she didn’t feel as if she worked with only charcoal and paper. In drawing a portrait, her medium was the soul itself.

But for me, there's nothing better than feeling the firm surface of a sketchpad under my hand, hearing the scrape of a pencil or the rasp of charcoal moving across the page. Drawing on paper and painting on canvas is so ingrained in me that I can't imagine ever relying solely on technology. I'm sure eventually museums will display only digital screens instead of canvases, and maybe it makes me a dinosaur, but that notion is a real bummer to me.

Eventually, she held up the page, satisfied. It depicted Yalb and the porter in detail, with hints of the busy city behind. She’d gotten their eyes right. That was the most important. Each of the Ten Essences had an analogous part of the human body—blood for liquid, hair for wood, and so forth. The eyes were associated with crystal and glass. The windows into a person’s mind and spirit. She set the page aside. Some men collected trophies. Others collected weapons or shields. Many collected spheres. Shallan collected people. People, and interesting creatures. Perhaps it was because she’d spent so much of her youth in a virtual prison. She’d developed the habit of memorizing faces, then drawing them later, after her father had discovered her sketching the gardeners. His daughter? Drawing pictures of darkeyes? He’d been furious with her—one of the infrequent times he’d directed his infamous temper at his daughter. After that, she’d done drawings of people only when in private, instead using her open drawing times to sketch the insects, crustaceans, and plants of the manor gardens. Her father hadn’t minded this—zoology and botany were proper feminine pursuits—and had encouraged her to choose natural history as her Calling. She took out a third blank sheet. It seemed to beg her to fill it. A blank page was nothing but potential, pointless until it was used. Like a fully infused sphere cloistered inside a pouch, prevented from making its light useful. Fill me. The creationspren gathered around the page. They were still, as if curious, anticipatory. Shallan closed her eyes and imagined Jasnah Kholin, standing before the blocked door, the Soulcaster glowing on her hand. The hallway hushed, save for a child’s sniffles. Attendants holding their breath. An anxious king. A still reverence. Shallan opened her eyes and began to draw with vigor, intentionally losing herself. The less she was in the now and the more she was in the then, the better the sketch would be. The other two pictures had been warm-ups; this was the day’s masterpiece. With the paper bound onto the board—safehand holding that—her freehand flew across the page, occasionally switching to other pencils. Soft charcoal for deep, thick blackness, like Jasnah’s beautiful hair. Hard charcoal for light greys, like the powerful waves of light coming from the Soulcaster’s gems. For a few extended moments, Shallan was back in that hallway again, watching something that should not be: a heretic wielding one of the most sacred powers in all the world. The power of change itself, the power by which the Almighty had created Roshar. He had another name, allowed to pass only the lips of ardents. Elithanathile. He Who Transforms. Shallan could smell the musty hallway. She could hear the child whimpering. She could feel her own heart beating in anticipation. The boulder would soon change. Sucking away the Stormlight in Jasnah’s gemstone, it would give up its essence, becoming something new. Shallan’s breath caught in her throat. And then the memory faded, returning her to the quiet, dim alcove. The page now held a perfect rendition of the scene, worked in blacks and greys. The princess’s proud figure regarded the fallen stone, demanding that it give way before her will. It was her. Shallan knew, with the intuitive certainty of an artist, that this was one of the finest pieces she had ever done. In a very small way, she had captured Jasnah Kholin, something the devotaries had never managed. That gave her a euphoric thrill. Even if this woman rejected Shallan again, one fact would not change. Jasnah Kholin had joined Shallan’s collection.

I’ve discovered over the past few weeks that drawing or painting is the only thing in the world that can completely absorb me. It distracts me from any outside worries. When the art studio door closes, when I’m inside with paint or pastels or charcoal and a subject to focus on, I’m vacuum-sealed. The world beyond disappears. I feel beyond lucky to have discovered this. Kendra has it with her physical exercise and sports, I think; Paige doesn’t need it, she never seems to have a care in the world. And Kelly? I don’t know if she’s found hers yet.

They’d heard it all, the dead: crying children, wailing widows, confessions, condemnations, questions that they could never answer; Halloween dares, raving drunks—invoking the ghosts or just apologizing for drawing breath; would-be witches, chanting at indifferent spirits, tourists rubbing the old tombstones with paper and charcoal like curious dogs scratching at the grave to get in. Funerals, confirmations, communions, weddings, square dances, heart attacks, junior-high hand jobs, wakes gone awry, vandalism, Handel’s Messiah, a birth, a murder, eighty-three Passion plays, eighty-five Christmas pageants, a dozen brides barking over tombstones like taffeta sea lions as the best man gave it to them dog style, and now and again, couples who needed something dark and smelling of damp earth to give their sex life a jolt: the dead had heard it.