I took this class to improve my charcoal skills and to try to compare and contrast detailed animal drawing with charcoal and graphite; I’ve been taking some of Jamie Boots classes on drawing detailed animals in graphite, which is its own skill, and I wanted to see how those ideas would apply to charcoal, which is a very different medium and moved on the paper in a very different way.
I am also drawing on the move, and the more charcoal drawing I do, the more fixative I use and the less weight I have alongside my suitcase, already straining under the weight of my work shirts, art supplies and diving gear.
I started with a free-hand under drawing with plenty of proportional measuring, then started building up the background layers - there were some issues at this layer as I only have vine and nitram charcoal and no way of laying hands on any strong, dark compressed charcoal, to act as a dark blending layer. The result was a background with a slightly lighter range of values,, so I aimed for a more ephemeral look in the finished piece.

When building up the texture of the head (which I found a bit odd in the photo, as it almost seems to sit on the breast rather than sit on it), I found drawing in the dots was too mechanical, so I used the side of the charcoal pencil (Creatacolour, Medium) and the grain of the paper to create the feathered texture and pulled them round to create dimensionality. I used vine, nitram, and pencil charcoal (Derwent/Soft) to blend out the textures of the wings - I didn’t make them as dark as the reference, as the tonal range was on the lighter side. I didn’t really click with the impression of motion blur in the example so instead I lifted streaks of background to give the impression of wings, and highlighting on the body (to give a full tonal range) was done with a Mono-0 eraser.