This isn’t any ordinary charcoal – it’s a new way of working with an ancient medium. Schmincke Liquid Charcoal is a clean, dust-free process for painting, drawing, and underpainting with charcoal.
Utilising a normally waste product from the food industry, Schmincke have created three different black tones from charring grape seeds, cherry pits and peach stones. This pigment is mixed with high quality Gum Arabic to produce a gouache-like paint that can be diluted with water so that different shades, structures and layer thicknesses can be achieved on both paper and canvas.
On paper, Schmincke Liquid Charcoal behaves like gouache, granulates like watercolour, and looks like charcoal. It works particularly well on Hot Press and surface-sized papers, such as Harmony and Fabriano Artistico. It’s gouache-like consistency is suited to the da Vinci Cosmotop-Mix brushes, with their absorbent yet coarse structure.
Charcoal drawings/paintings of great subtlety can be achieved without the dust and mess of dry charcoal. The large tube size allows large areas to be covered quickly.
Colour can be easily removed with a wet brush, rather than an eraser, and very gentle graduations can be made playing with wet and dry brush applications.
Schmincke Liquid Charcoal is extremely concentrated, providing the widest tonal range possible. Grape Seed is a blue-tone black (left), Cherry Pit is warm-toned (middle), and Peach Stone is more neutral (right).
When applied thinly as an underpainting on canvas, subsequent layers of paint become less dirty than when using conventional charcoal, due to the high adhesion of the pigment to the substrate.
Schmincke Liquid Charcoal is ideally sealed with Schmincke Aero Spray B72, without affecting the appearance or surface sheen.
Schmincke Liquid Charcoal Grape Seed Black SC18755009