From Giraffes to Sharks and for this project, I went out in the barren wild of the small market town where my parents live and added a couple of makeup brushes to the satchel of art supplies, globe-hopping with me.

Alongside charcoal, I do watercolour paintings and graphite pencil drawings, and this shark felt like an ideal for working in charcoal - its body is largely tonal, rather than colourful, and it has a smoothness that lends itself to a blended medium. I am a dive master, and I am often inspired by the aquatic world, both creatures I have seen and those I want to.

I started with an underdrawing of the shark, then built up tones with the brushes, then put the final layers in with pencil. I didn’t include the travellis, but I did include the remora to add a little context.

This project pushed against the limits of my abilities - it was a real challenge to build up the tones and retrieve the highlights using controlled pressure, though I did try to use the ‘soft-hatching’ technique to build contour. The teeth of the shark lost some definition as I couldn’t keep a very fine point on the charcoal pencil easily, and it required some very fine hand control when using the smudger. I did go over the shark with the side of a hard pencil and blend out the bumps; I would be careful with this in the future - I think I prefer a slightly ephemeral feeling to my drawings, and I ended up having to lift a lot out of the shark to retrieve those soft values.

Overall though, I was able to apply what I have learned in drawing and painting to the fine under layer, and I have started building a vocabulary of tools to create texture in charcoal for this type of pelagic subject.

After this, I have a few ink projects I’ve been procrastinating over, and then I am moving on to a drawing of an oceanic manta, where I’ll use a blended background and many of the same techniques as the shark, so any feedback ahead of that project would be very gratefully received.