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Description
Here's the beginning of my study of the leftmost target, roughly halfway done after about 4 hours of work. First I laid out the major shapes and outlines, using the vine charcoal - I'd never used vine charcoal before, but it is extremely forgiving i.e. it can be readily and completely erased, as long as you don't go bananas grinding it into the paper. Some of those outlines are going to fade to near-white in the final version. Then, I laid in the major dark area at right, making a crisp jagged edge for the paper edge, and started to lay in triangles of various degrees of grayness. The guide lines between them have to be either lightened or darkened until they become part of the gray tone, so there's no "line" left to distract from the shape. Those light grays are made from a few gentle stripes of vine charcoal, spread out and blurred into a shaped area, and the edges touched up with a stroke of vine for dark or a press of the kneaded eraser for light.

The vine charcoal sits on the surface, so it's easily spread with a finger or paper towel or chamois cloth. Unlike a charcoal pencil, the vine doesn't turn five shades darker when you smudge it, and even after spreading it still will erase if you're careful. A paper smudge stick, such as I've used to blend pencil lines for shading, did not work well with the vine as it just ground the light lines into the paper and actually *picked up* the dark lines and made them faint.

I've been using my fingertip, which apparently isn't ideal as skin oils can stick the charcoal down where you don't want it; but somewhere along the line I developed the habit of wiping my dedicated smudging-finger on my pants all the time, so it's clean. Note to self: always wear black pants when working with charcoal.

Description
Here's the beginning of my study of the leftmost target, roughly halfway done after about 4 hours of work. First I laid out the major shapes and outlines, using the vine charcoal - I'd never used vine charcoal before, but it is extremely forgiving i.e. it can be readily and completely erased, as long as you don't go bananas grinding it into the paper. Some of those outlines are going to fade to near-white in the final version. Then, I laid in the major dark area at right, making a crisp jagged edge for the paper edge, and started to lay in triangles of various degrees of grayness. The guide lines between them have to be either lightened or darkened until they become part of the gray tone, so there's no "line" left to distract from the shape. Those light grays are made from a few gentle stripes of vine charcoal, spread out and blurred into a shaped area, and the edges touched up with a stroke of vine for dark or a press of the kneaded eraser for light.

The vine charcoal sits on the surface, so it's easily spread with a finger or paper towel or chamois cloth. Unlike a charcoal pencil, the vine doesn't turn five shades darker when you smudge it, and even after spreading it still will erase if you're careful. A paper smudge stick, such as I've used to blend pencil lines for shading, did not work well with the vine as it just ground the light lines into the paper and actually *picked up* the dark lines and made them faint.

I've been using my fingertip, which apparently isn't ideal as skin oils can stick the charcoal down where you don't want it; but somewhere along the line I developed the habit of wiping my dedicated smudging-finger on my pants all the time, so it's clean. Note to self: always wear black pants when working with charcoal.