Today I tried out a stick of compressed charcoal (the bird skeleton in the upper left) and quickly got frustrated with its scale on my 7×10 sketchbook. It might have been OK if I were just doing one sketch per page, but I like doing several together. I also tested out a graphite stick (the giraffe) but ran into the same issue. The thick, blunt end isn’t doing much for me on these exercises. The peacock is a 6B drawing pencil, and the right page is done with a 2B.

My proportions on the giraffe got wonky. I think it started when I drew the head too close to the body, because I placed the joint dots in relation to it and the neck wasn’t long enough.

I really like the bird in flight!