This course introduces a contemporary, exploratory approach to charcoal landscape drawing. It emphasizes charcoal on paper as a living, flexible medium—one capable of atmosphere, gesture, and emotional depth, and invites you to treat landscape not as something to copy, but as something to interpret, reshape, and respond to.

You’ll move through a series of demonstrations that show how loose mark-making can create landscapes that feel both grounded and imaginative. Rather than following a rigid, step‑by‑step formula, the course encourages an open, investigative mindset.

Key themes include:

• Experimentation — using charcoal in unconventional ways to discover new visual possibilities.

• Personal interpretation — developing a landscape style that reflects your own sensibility rather than imitating a fixed method.

• Process over perfection — embracing the drawing as a living process rather than a polished, predetermined outcome.

By the end, you’ll have a toolkit of techniques and a more confident, intuitive relationship with charcoal. The goal is not to produce identical results, but to help you cultivate a landscape language that feels distinctly your own.

We’ll look at abstraction, minimalism, and using imagination rather than photographic references to create charcoal landscape drawings. The materials I mainly use and demonstrate in the course are willow charcoal, kneadable erasers, Kleenex for smudging, and sketching paper as the drawing surface.