I have found a wonderful book: The Organic Artist: Make Your Own Paint, Paper, Pigments, Prints, and More from Nature by Nick Neddo. This is right up my alley! I haven’t read it all yet, but we had the opportunity to try making our own charcoal for drawing when I needed to make some wood ash for the dust bath for the chickens.

I had a grape vine wreath that I made over a year ago. It has been aging in the woods for awhile but was readily available for a new purpose. I also had a steel container that I used with my kiln that was a great shape for making charcoal (and it was already seasoned!) My eldest and I used pocket knifes to scrape the bark off sections of grapevine, and then we packed the container with the sticks and closed it securely with twists of wire.

We used the bark shavings as tinder, and built the fire around the steel box. I love it when I can light a fire with one match (it helped that I also used a bacon grease soaked paper towel with the bark shavings). We let the fire burn down, then cool before we checked the box. The charcoal sticks were perfect! Solid black all the way through and a nice texture for drawing.

I just had to try drawing with it, so I did a quick sketch of some grapes on the concrete (Nick Neddo makes drawings of the source of his art materials, so it seemed appropriate).