Taking on charcoal my first thought was, perhaps typically, to pick a banana for my subject. What a great fruit; very tasty, easy to eat and fun to draw! Anyway I scooped one out of the fruit bowl and placed on a neutral background (in this case a manilla envelope) for its moment in the spotlight:
In line with the loose, forgiving nature of charcoal I elected to skip any preparatory outlines or contours and to dive straight into the drawing. This comes with certain risks of course (mainly involving setting out a drawing which looks nothing like the real thing) but the aim here is to gain experience of charcoal and so off we go. For a start it's important to get used to thicker lines and less precision with this stuff; I managed to roughly lay out the shape I was going for but really this was no more than a guideline from which I could begin smudging:
What I did like was the ability to draw lines in charcoal and then to spread the material around to create something like a wash; even the strongest marks could be deconstructed in this manner. Hence I used my finger to spread out the very darkest shadow before taking what was left on my finger to fill in the lighter areas; very useful. Then the kneaded eraser came into its own when I wanted to bring out highlights and tidy up the many rough edges. It can't work miracles but it's surprising how much you can manipulate the overall effect by dabbing away in key areas.