Inverted approach to charcoal

My busy season has once again come to a close so here I am, drawing and trying out more techniques just to keep me from getting bored with all the extra time I have 😅

So you guys may have noticed that I've mostly been doing charcoal. Well... I've missed it since it's been 2-3 years since I last used the medium and i remember being fairly good at it.
I wasn't even friends with my current bf when I used charcoal so when he saw the comparison of my skills then and now, he was really proud of the development I've had since I stopped and came back. I don't work as fast though but I work on more details now which consume so much time so you can understand why 😅

this is one I did recently where I painted a page with ink to make it black then I just worked the detail in with white charcoal. i remember doing this technique with my Sketchtember monster for mummy but I just wanted to see if it would go good with charcoal too.

Duration: 4.5 hours
materials: white and black charcoal, black ink

this one isn't as detailed as I had hoped for, but what I did focus on was the depth of the shadows and the contrast of black, white and gray. I've never attempted to do such a portrait with this much depth before and I really loved the end result 💕

i don't have a photo of my starting sketch because... how would you guys see my light af pencil sketching when I could barely see it XD
As soon as I finished at least the blocking for the face shape and feature positioning, i went straight to the blurry details just so I can see what I'm doing

then I realised that I couldn't actually fill the page so I made a portion just to write on at the bottom. I didn't write much but it did save me the charcoal cuz imagine if I filled the entire page, I wouldn't have much of a pencil left XD

This was about 3 hours in where I was using a combination of black and white charcoal to make a sharper contrast than it had, and also to give it a bit more mystique than I had hoped for, because it's so pleasing to the eyes to have that mysterious effect.
Basically, the remaining 1.5 hours just literally went to giving it sharper contrasts and making the tiniest details that I know would go unnoticed 🤣 but I still did them anyways because of my perfectionist ways 🤣

This ends my random drawing process. I'm currently working on a different charcoal drawing, also in low light, but the anatomy os killing my brain cells so idk when I'll get to finish this one 🥲
That's all from me today! Thank you for visiting my little writing for today! see you guys on another day