Charcoal over Graphite.

[tothiel]

Does anyone know if there is a way to do this? Would spraying a workable fixative for example allow for such a thing?

[Pieter]

What do you want to achieve? Which of charcoal are you using? (Pencil, Willow, Vine...)
Don't know that much about charcoal but I'll try to help.

[tothiel]

What do you want to achieve? Which of charcoal are you using? (Pencil, Willow, Vine...)
Don't know that much about charcoal but I'll try to help.

(Type of charcoal can be either vine and/or pencil. I have both.)
Mostly I'm trying to do away with the shine of the graphite where the darkest values are. (Shadows and what not.) Beyond that, I would like to achieve true black while doing so.
 I know that graphite can get fairly dark, but after a certain point it won’t get any darker. Now I can use prisma’s black over graphite and get true black, but I still have a bit of shine. I would like to pull off both, but I guess one is better than neither if all else fails.

[Pieter]

Hmmm, I found that spraying a good layer of fixative or hairspray sometimes helps with reducing shine.
The prismacolor black should help. You can also use black crayon I think, don't think that looks very shiney.
Rubbing your darks into the paper sometimes makes them darker.

Other things that come to mind are photocopying it. Or fixating it and put a coat of transparant gesso on top, I would fixate it first because otherwise you'd smear the graphite. But I've never tried that, so you might want to test it before using it on your drawing.

[tothiel]

I never thought about the gesso, I think I'm going to give that a test run. Thanks for the idea.