Charcoal as an artistic medium dates back over 28,000 years. Before beginning this course, I want students to understand that when we as artists work in charcoal, we are inherently using history and tradition to communicate our own ideas and how we view the world. In this course I offer an introduction into how to use charcoal to do just this. We will work mostly in vine and compressed charcoal, though we can expand into other adjacent mediums, such as graphite, depending on your own individual interests. We will begin by exploring the medium together and building a sense of how different charcoal can be used to make different marks and tones on a page. The first half of a student's desired sessions will be dedicated to drawing still life and landscape as our primary subjects. In the second half, we will focus on figure drawing.