I am taking this series of classes to improve a couple of my skills - I do a lot of animal drawings and paintings (freehand), and I need to improve my measuring and proportion. I am also still working on developing my charcoal skills - I have been taking some classes in charcoal and studying Jamie Booth's classes on how to build up tone using graphite, and I am trying to work out the differences in technique between the two mediums and how they lend themselves to different subjects.
I started with a study of the giraffe in graphite pencil and newsprint, then drew the under-sketch with a B pencil on Mi -teintes paper. Unlike in the tutorial, I didn’t have a blending brush, so I made do with blending stumps to build tones - deviating from the tutorial, I built up a base layer across the giraffe using the blending stumps and ground vine charcoal before building up textures with medium and hard Createcolour Charcoal Pencils and Derwent Medium for the darkest areas.
There were some areas I struggled with - I wasn’t able to bring as much detail to the mouth and nostrils, perhaps because I lacked really fine control over the charcoal. There was also some loss of proportion between the ears and ossicones, which will take more practice to correct.
But I was able to build up layers of dark using different layers of charcoal, and manipulation and blending did help give the drawing a 3D feel. 
For my next project, I will pick up some blending brushes (I’ve just finished my dive master training and have a lot of pelagic subjects that I plan to work on) and try building some of the darker under-layers using ground compressed charcoal (which wasn’t available for this project).