I'm just about finished my painting "Hummingbird At The Feeder and I've started my next piece, which is going to be a graphite portrait.

This week I made videos about what it's like to work on clear primed linen, why "social media artists" are real artists, and the different types of erasers one might use when drawing.

I have a review of the Progresso Woodless Graphite Pencils from Koh-I-Noor in the works. Spoiler Alert:So far I'm loving them! I'm also seriously considering making a video about the concept of learning to enjoy art when it becomes your job or you start trying to make it your job.

I started on the color on my painting "Hummingbird At The Feeder". The next time I work on it, I'll put the first layer of color down on the feeder itself. I talk a bit about the process I'm using the paint the hummingbird at the end of my video about the airbrush.

This week I uploaded a tutorial on how I paint a mouth in acrylics, and unboxings of my new easel and airbrush.

In the coming weeks, I would like to document the process of me learning to use my new airbrush, which I show you in the last video I have linked in this post. Of course, my plans discussed last week, including demonstrating painting on clear primed linen and painting Oz Blackaller still stand.

I decided to make a digest post that included my three most recent videos. They include one with tips on using color to create depth when painting mountains in acrylics, one about how toxic people can hinder your creativity and one about what I've learned from Lisa Clough of Lachri Fine Art.

In this post, I'm going to be discussing charcoal and carbon and helping you decide which one you'd rather use to get black shades in your drawings.

Charcoal is very soft. Because of this, it spreads easily and can used to fill in areas solidly super quick. Carbon, on the other hand is very slow and requires many layers to fill something in as solidly as charcoal.

Charcoal's softness and spreadability also makes it so that it smears very easily. Compressed charcoal also has no wood casing, so your fingers are always touching the charcoal itself, which means your fingers would get stained. Carbon is slightly harder and the pencils have a wood casing, so your fingers aren't actually making contact with the carbon itself.

If you like things fast and don't mind things a bit messy, use charcoal. If you hate mess, but don't mind going over something many times to get something filled in solidly, use carbon.