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Charcoal Portrait Process Profile Beard Vine Expressive Drawing Toned by Kai Lun Qu

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Charcoal Portrait Process

🖤 Bring the timeless—and the tactile—into your figure drawing. In this 1+ hour demo, Kai Lun Qu guides you through rendering a portrait in vine charcoal, showing how to build form, mood, and presence through value, edge, and confident mark-making.

You’ll learn how to:
🎯 Use vine charcoal to lock in strong value structure early and control your shadow-lights
✏️ Sculpt the face via edge work—knowing which lines to keep, which to soften
🧠 Read the head in space and turn form convincingly, giving life and volume to the portrait
💡 Move from drawing to expression—using texture, contrast, and gesture, not just detail

Perfect for artists who want to deepen their understanding of portraiture in a fundamental medium—especially those seeking to train their eye, hand, and process for stronger figure work. 🕒 Runtime: 1+ hour

  • Kai Lun Qu

    Instructor

  • Fundamental

    Difficulty
Meet your instructor

Kai Lun Qu

Kai Lun Qu is know for his alla prima paintings filled with expression and painterly strokes that evoke deep emotions. His unique blend of traditional style with a contemporary twist is a result of two extremes: a formal training in China’s most prestigious art academy, China Central Academy of Fine Arts and intense studies with renown contemporary painters like Daniel Keys, Tim Rees and Michelle Dunaway in the United States. 
In 2018, He was featured in Southwest Art Magazine, 21 under 31: Young Artists to Watch. 

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