This drawing has changed my entire art journey

Hey everyone, welcome back to my channel. Thank you for joining my drawing process. This is probably the most difficult drawing I've ever done. It's the first time I've created a large realistic or hyper-realistic drawing like this. And not just that, it's also my first attempt of drawing a hyper-realistic drawing using charcoal primarily. If you've been following my work for some time, you might know I create small realistic drawings using graphite pencils. I've been using a charcoal since I was a little girl but I've always been a little afraid of using it in realistic drawings simply because I felt like I have less control over it and I thought it's too smudgy for this this kind of drawing. So I've been using this medium only for simple sketches. By this time I decided to overcome my fear to step out of my comfort zone and to create something large with the medium I've been using in a different way so far. I love the process because it had a different dynamics than just sitting and being focused on a very small area and trying to capture a lot of small details in the drawings I usually do. So it was a very nice refreshing feeling. It took a lot of time to complete this work, about 100 hours approximately. I had to get into the larger size to get used to the new proportions. I wanted to dive into the medium and to figure out everything about the charcoal itself, how the grades work, all the ways how to apply it, sharpen it, blend it and you find the ways that work best for me. I tried several brands. I wanted to learn about all the differences between the natural and compressed charcoal in a pencil or stick form for various proposals or stages of the drawing of the work. It took me some time to achieve a sense of depth and substance using many layers of shading and creating the texture all over again. The charcoal is really smudgy so I was shading the area all over again a few times until I achieved the rich effect, the density and some kind of realness I wanted to create. It's a portrait of my mother. She always wears this hairstyle, this upper bun. I took a photograph of her when we were on vacation together. We were enjoying a beautiful morning in the beginning of this July together and I just knew I wanted to draw this scene and I wanted to give it an appropriate meaning so this is how I realized I need to create a larger piece. I love the contrast between the elegance, softness and the casualness and ease of the drawing represented by the messy loose hair around. The messy hair was the favorite part for me and I tried to capture their lightness and significance at the same time. That's why I paid a lot of attention to this fraction. In case you would like to learn more about my drawing techniques, especially when using graphite pencils, please check out my Patreon. There are already almost 300 videos full of real-time processes, tips and narrated tutorials. It would be great if you consider becoming part of my Patreon family and it would be also a great support for me as well. And also thank you for any kind of your support not only on my Patreon but also on my YouTube and my Instagram account. Learning new things is always hard and there were quite few new aspects in this process for me. On the other hand, I was surprised how intuitive the process was when I forgot about my insecurities and self-doubts. When I look at it now and the hardest part was the move itself, stopped thinking why I should not start creating the larger piece right now and just put it off for later as I was doing it for about the last two years. But I know I will also continue creating the smaller graphite pencil drawings because it has its own magic. So this is the result, I hope you like it, I hope you enjoyed the video. If you did, please give it a thumbs up, also share it with your friends and make sure to subscribe to my channel because many new videos are coming soon. See you next time, bye!