Dia de la Abby #35: Charcoal Skull

I've been drawing since my parents let me have a crayon and have worked with many different mediums since. I've had charcoal in all of the many different art kits that I've had, but oddly enough, I never worked with it. This is my 1st time doing anything with it. The medium seems similar to graphite pencil, but darker, which was nice for shading.

I watched two video tutorials to learn how to use charcoal. They were about using charcoal to draw a skull, which I thought was appropriate given the subject matter.
Charcoal Drawing of a Skull Part 1
Charcoal Drawing of a Skull Part 2

I used my handy skull model to draw from. It was back lit towards the left with the only lamp in my living room. I could have moved it around, but I liked the heavy shadow because it made the skull more eerie. I used a soft charcoal pencil for the outlines and shading, a white charcoal pencil for the highlights (which still ended up gray), a rolled paper smudge stick and normal smooth sketch paper. It took me about an hour to do.

Every week in the 4.0 year, I will post my own Dia de la Abby posts as well as a tutorial with instructions on how I made my piece. Hopefully you feel inspired by my posts just as I was by Noah's Skull-A-Day 1.0 daily project. Need more of me than just a weekly dose, follow me on Facebook.