The Beginning of Charcoal Drawings

In my beginning drawing class we've used charcoal and powdered graphite for most of our assignments. I think it's kind of difficult, and very messy as well. By the end of class my hands are covered in black. But it's interesting to use a media I'm not used to. Below are some of the things our teacher has asked us to draw in the past weeks. None of them are finished of course, these are just the foundations. Oh, and keep in mind...I'm not posting these to brag or anything. I am well aware that I'm not that good (yet.) In fact I'm probably the worst in my class. I just wanted to show what kinds of things we had been working on.

We started with chairs. He set them up all over the room and then we drew them from the angles we were sitting at. Simple enough? I thought it was kind of hard to be honest.

Rough sketches

After we drew chairs for a week or so, our teacher brought in these plastic animals (dog, pig, cougar) and let the overhead lights shine down to cause some shadows. He wanted us to use "sighting and vectoring" techniques that he tried teaching us, but for the life of me I couldn't figure it out. I just draw what I see.

You can see on this second dog where my teacher was instructing me on the whole sighting and vectoring business, but for some reason I just couldn't get the hang of it. So I drew the dang dog as I saw it.

After 2 weeks of drawing plastic animal replicas, we moved on to plastic heads. These heads had angles all over them in order to show us light and shadow when the overhead lights were turned on. To draw this, I basically took a stick of charcoal and rubbed it all over the paper and then rubbed a paper towel all over it to smudge it and make it smooth. Then I used my eraser to "draw" the light and dark areas.

After the odd looking angled heads, we moved on to heads of real looking people, like this Greek god here. Same technique as the last one. Frontal view.

More head statues. This one had big, fluffy hair. I wasn't a huge fan. Profile view.