How to Draw a Deer in Charcoal

Hello and welcome to my channel. In this one I'm going to show you how to draw a deer in charcoal. Let's take a look. I'm going to use Febriano sketching paper for this one and some Masterstouch woodless charcoal pencils. Now as for the antlers on this deer, they're probably going to be the most complex part of the drawing because they kind of grow every which way. You have one growing to one side, then one to the other and then some of them are kind of growing, protruding towards us. So they're a very three-dimensional part of the body and they remind me of branches on a tree. So I'm going to need to find a way to convey this to the viewer using value, contrast and edges to value. So let's see how that's going to go. Now let's get on with the sketch. For the sketch I'm going to use a graphite pencil and then I'm going to switch to charcoal. This is a 2B Faber-Castell graphite pencil. I'm going to start with the tail and then kind of draw the shape of the back and then the legs and I'll get to the antlers a bit later. In terms of the shape of the body, I guess a deer is similar to a horse, a muscular body with thin, slender legs, except for the fact that this is a fallow deer which I suppose is quite a bit smaller than a horse. I actually saw a very large deer once. It was some kind of a mini zoo and what was separating was a very thin fence and the thing charged at us and it was huge. I don't know what kind of deer it was but it was larger than a horse. So I'm not an expert. There are probably many species of deer but this one was huge. I mean the shape of the body was similar. Now I'm going to switch to charcoal pencil. I'm going to use two grades of woodless charcoal pencils, medium and soft. I normally do most of the drawing with a medium charcoal pencil because I can make fairly clean lines with it. The soft charcoal pencil is a bit darker and also a bit more crumbly but it's easier to move around, easier to blend I think. Here I'm going to do most of the work with a medium charcoal pencil. I'm just going to draw a little bit around the outline here and then I'm going to switch to a soft charcoal pencil to indicate where some of the darker shadow areas are. One of the good things to do whenever you're starting the shading process is defining those larger shadow areas if you can and that will help you later because you can focus on smaller and smaller details if you establish those darker bits first. Now here with this one I don't really have very large dark shadow areas. For example one of the previous drawings when I did a drawing of a bear I had some very large shadow areas that I could almost connect into a single dark shape. Here I can't really do that. It's mostly not just the position of the body and the light source but also the type of the body and these slender legs. But the shadow is mostly going to be on the lower side of the body because the light source is coming from above and a little bit around the neck in this transition between the chest and the neck area and of course this part of the head which is bending down because the animal is grazing here in this picture is also going to be darker. I'm also going to need to have enough value behind those antlers to make the lighter parts of the antlers stand out so I'm going to try to create as much contrast as possible to emphasize or explain the shape of those antlers because the shape is pretty complex. They are both large and complex in terms of shape and these are the ears here. Those are also facing down so the bottom side is going to be a little bit darker. So right now like I said I'm just sort of defining the shadow areas. I used a darker soft charcoal pencil first and then I switched back to a medium charcoal pencil because I needed a little more precision for some of those smaller bits but you'll see that once I establish those darker areas it'll be easier for me to move on to doing smaller details such as defining some of the edges and refining some of the textures on the fur and things like that. I'm going to push in some of the charcoal in those darker areas using a tooteline. I normally use homemade tootelines. With the darker areas on a drawing I often like to use my finger when I can but with smaller drawings such as this one and with drawings that have smaller finer details I can't really use my finger because it's not precise enough, not accurate enough, so I need to use a tooteline. But a tooteline will do because when it picks up some charcoal it allows me to push it in to create those really dark areas. Now this part of the drawing process is going to look a little bit like I'm ruining everything but don't worry. I'm just going to use this charcoal residue that's sitting on top of the paper and just move it around a little bit and I'm moving it around gently with a soft brush. The reason why I'm doing that is because I'm going to want to create some contrast with the background with some of the lighter parts of the deer's body. So in order for me to be able to create that contrast, by erasing of course, I will need to have something to work with. I will need to have a darker background because I can't create contrast without enough value. I added a touch of willow charcoal to some parts of the drawing where I just couldn't get enough value by moving the charcoal around. And later I'm going to make the background a bit smoother and refine it a little bit and then I'm going to focus on the details. So I know it looks a little bit messy and ugly right now but the thing is that with charcoal you just have to embrace the messiness because the messiness is just one of the properties of charcoal but it's also one of the advantages of charcoal because it's so easily moved around and it's so easy to shade and cover large areas. It's much much quicker than graphite. So every single drawing or nearly every drawing that I can think of that you can do in graphite would actually be much faster in charcoal, whether you're drawing landscape or things like this. With subjects like these which are a little bit more detailed and require a bit more precision maybe graphite would have its advantages obviously but with other types of drawings such as landscapes I think that charcoal is really considerably faster. Anyway we're working in charcoal now and it's doing a good job. I'm drawing the fur now on this on these hind legs and the backside area and notice how I left one part of the of the backside there lighter by erasing. Now when drawing fur as always you need to pay attention to the length of the fur and the direction of the fur, the direction in which the hair grows. So you need to try to match the length and the direction of the fur with the length and the strokes and here because we mostly have very short fur the strokes will need to be thinner and shorter. I'm doing a little bit of erasing here with a Tombow Mono Zero eraser to make the legs stand out against the background and I also did some blending with a brush. Now the brush doesn't ruin the texture that I lay down with a pencil. It doesn't blend it completely, it just softens it a little bit but some of the lines are still there. You can still tell in which direction the hair grows. So that's important because it's important to pick the appropriate blending tool. If you use the Totillian maybe that would blend too much and all that hard work that you put in by trying to create the proper texture of the fur would be lost but with a brush it just softens those strokes a little bit and makes the fur look a lot more realistic actually while at the same time retaining the texture you laid down. It does make it a little bit darker but if it turns out to be too dark you can always take away a bit of value. Here I added a bit of grass at the bottom because under the animal there's going to be a little bit of shadow and there's especially going to be some shadow around the legs and near the mouth area because the animal is grazing the grass. I'm just adding some finer details like veins and muscles and sinews and things like that on the legs on the hind legs and just adding a little bit more texture to this fur here and creating a better transition between the darkest areas and those lighter areas. I'm going to be adding some more of that texture of the fur here now in the midsection or the belly area. Again I'm paying attention to the length of the fur and the direction of the fur just sort of working patiently and making those very short marks. At first it looks kind of ugly but when you put down enough of them and once you blend a little bit it actually starts to look like real fur. But you have to be patient and like I said it's important to pay attention to the length of the strokes because if you just drag your pencil back and forth you'll create something that doesn't really look like animal's fur or at least it doesn't look like the fur of the animal you're trying to draw. And of course for the shading and for a realistic looking animal those larger relationships between the lighter and darker areas are more important but if you want to make it even more realistic then you need to pay attention to the texture and the length of the fur things like that as well. Now I'm gonna do a little bit of blending with this harder bristle brush and that seems to be doing an even better job than the soft one because it removes less of those lines. It actually blends a little bit less for some reason. And that allows me to retain a lot of that texture that I laid down with my medium charcoal pencil. So as you can see I'm making progress with the deer's body and the fur and this is a process that takes a little bit of time and patience. Some of it can be a little bit repetitive because this is a fallow deer that I believe they have some of these lighter patches of almost like spots on the top of the back area. So I'm going to put those in using a kneaded eraser and now I'm going to do a little bit of erasing around these antlers to define the light side and hopefully they will stand out against the background. These are some really fine lines and I'm using a Tombow Mono Zero eraser for this but because I have a rectangular one I often can't get very small marks. They are better with lines but when I need smaller touches like dots and things like that maybe a kneaded eraser would be a little bit better here. So I'm trying to reshape and knead my eraser into a teardrop shape so that I could be able to add those fine touches of lighter value. I'm just sort of lifting up a bit of charcoal and switching back and forth between Tombow Mono Zero eraser and the kneaded eraser just trying to see what works best but I usually use a combination of a couple of different types of erasers. And now I'm back to working on the texture of the fur just laying down those lines short marks very short marks to imitate the short fur on the deer's body and you want to vary the angle and the direction ever so slightly so that it doesn't look too uniform. And of course you want to add more in those areas where there is more shadow on the animal's body. Here on the neck the one part of the neck is going to be a little bit lighter but I need to make sure that I have enough value behind those antlers so that the lighter part of the antlers would stand out. And like I said the antlers themselves are very complex in terms of shape so lots of small details to define there. Now this left side of the head which is facing down it's going to be catching some light at the bottom but I'm going to get to that later. Right now I'm just adding a bit more of that hair a little bit more of that short fur texture because the fur gets shorter on the head itself. It's a little bit longer in the neck and chest and belly area I think and shorter on the legs and and the head itself. I'm doing a bit of softening again with the brush to make that fur look a bit more realistic a bit more dense because you can't draw every single hair so blending tools help with that because they add volume. Now I'm back to using a kneaded eraser to lift up a little bit of charcoal on this part of the head which is catching some light and I'm making sure that I get a clean edge or a fairly clean edge between those antlers and the neck and the head and the background because you need a clean edge to show where one object ends and the background begins or the other object begins. I'm also cleaning up the edge in some other areas where I messed it up by moving the charcoal around with my brush so those clean edges are very important if you want to define the shape properly. I think that now the head really stands out nicely against the background and the antlers are also starting to stand out or protrude forward against the background and against the rest of the deer's body, the neck and the rest of the body. I'm just putting in some lighter details using the Tombow Mono Zero eraser like on the back on the neck and just refining the appearance of the fur as well as the shape of the body. Now I'm going to draw a little bit of the grass here at the bottom using that eraser just to add some lighter marks. My drawing is a vignette so I'm not going to draw all the way to the edge of the paper but I did create a little bit of background for the animal and a bit of shadow under it just to give it some context I suppose. I'm adding some blades of grass here in the foreground and now I'm going to do the same thing with these antlers on the right side. Just define the lighter shapes, the lighter side of them and make sure that I get clean edges so that they stand out against the background. I'm going to do a little bit of refining with a sharp charcoal pencil and one of the things I like about these pencils is that they can be sharpened pretty well. I don't really care too much about the brands of charcoal pencils but I do like when I can sharpen them with ease. I'm just cleaning up a little bit around the antlers and around the animal's body just to get some cleaner edges and some better defined shapes but I think I've established some very nice contrasts between the lighter areas and shadow areas and you can see now why the slightly darker background was needed. Here I'm back to using the charcoal pencil to add a little bit more texture to the fur to refine the appearance of the fur in some areas and also to at the same time to add a bit of value to some of the portions of the fur which I felt needed to be just a little bit darker and to add a little bit of variation to the fur. During the blending and erasing process I lost a bit of texture so I'm putting that back in by using this charcoal pencil because I love textures, they create this lovely illusion of detail that fascinates and captures and entertains the eye of the viewer, captures their focus and makes them think that they're looking at something real and very detailed. But a drawing like this isn't too complex I think, it doesn't take that long to do. I'm just putting down some finishing touches, adding a little bit of shadow here between the hips and the rest of the body and some other areas. I'm gonna put my signature in the lower right corner here and just dab a little bit here with a brush. So now the drawing is done, if you like it don't forget to subscribe and give me a like and comment and check out my videos and if you want to see more content and longer videos check out my Patreon. Thank you for watching, I'm going to see you in the next one. Bye for now!