For some reason this rather substantial bone was lying in my back garden when I returned from holiday - which is strange as we don't have a dog and it's slightly too large for our cats. Nevertheless rather than toss it in the nearest waste receptacle I could immediately see that it would make a decent subject for a sketch. As a result I arranged it to capture the light in an interesting way and set to work:
Once again I eschewed any preliminary work on the basis of this being an exploration of the medium more than anything else (so hyper-realism was never likely to be the outcome). As a result I began by roughly outlining the structure before looking for the areas of deepest shadow and expanding from there. In some ways it feels like I'm working backwards with this approach as I'm forced to add detail and structure by removing material at the end, rather than building it in from the start, but that comes with the territory I guess:
The result definitely shows some good and bad points. On a positive note the form is good, I rather like some of the shadows and I've achieved reasonable highlights from subtracting charcoal. However I don't think that the looseness of charcoal suits the subject in that lots of detail is simply washed away by the broad brush effect; I'm sure that it's possible to be more accurate with this material but I'm not working at that level. In retrospect I think that this bone would just work better in pencil and that's a lesson worth learning.