re: thinker
Thanks Jacob! Sorry to take a million years getting back to you. Charcoal has always been my very favorite medium. I love the texture, I love the physicality of it, how it breaks down and crumbles as you draw. This was some of my first work with hard charcoal (which moves and feels very different form soft charcoal), and I liked it's precision.
This particular image was drawn from a sculpture when I was in Rome, for a field trip for my school in Florence (ridiculous/awesome, yes!??!), and probably one of the hardest pieces I've ever had to recreate. So I was not able to take much artistic liberty with the drawing itself, or even with the medium, but instead (for me) this became much more about trying to mimic volume on a flat piece of paper, and all of the complexities of that. Also, took me over 4 hours to finish :).