Trees in Charcoal

I drew these for Christmas presents this year.  They co-inside with an upcoming tutorial on sketching trees.  The above where started in graphite on Canson 140lb watercolor paper.
Then I add the dark and detail with Charcoal. 

In Transition

Here is a leftover from Halloween.  This was done on toned Strathmore in charcoal. This started months ago in my sketchbook and I had fun scultping this character.  Not someone I would want to meet in the dark.

-Steve

The Mummy

Happy Halloween!

In the spirit of Halloween (with no pun intended) I created Uncle Ned rising from the grave, in charcoal on toned Strathmore.

Portfolio Sketchbook

In this video I display a portfolio that I use to store my loose sheets in.  I use it as a sketch book more than it's original design.  These portfolio books come in various sizes and can be found on Amazon or in any major arts and crafts stores.

-Steve

XnView - Image Editor

This is a free open-source image editor that I have used for a long time.  It works on all the major platforms (Windows, Linux and Mac) and is very light weight consuming very little resources.  XnView will not replace Painter or Photoshop but can be used for quick editing, batch editing and converting along with many other features.

XnView can be download from http://www.xnview.com/en/

In this short tutorial I cover how I use XnView, which is mainly to browse and organize my images and copy / cut thumbnails from full page scans allowing me to keep what I like.

-Steve

Caveman

Another one from my travel sketchbook.  he started out as a doodle and morphed into a rough design sketch. As my normal workflow lately; I started this with my Pentel Mechanical pencil and then added value with Charcoal at a later date.