Have you joined the Drawing/Sketching forum yet? Our community has really grown over recent months and you'll find many lively discussions going on. It's a terrific opportunity to post drawings for feedback. Please indicate whether you are looking for critical advice - often when artists are proud of a recent work, critique can seem negative even though it is meant constructively.

Recent Forum Discussions:
Wildlife Sketches - Check out these amazing wildlife drawings, with variations created using digital media.
Naked Modeling - Artist and model Edo started a lively discussion about modeling.
Tonal Studies - 'Another Portrait' by Novicee uses the newspaper shading exercise to practice matching tones.
Mixing Mediums - Mike has a query about how to combine other mediums with charcoal.

Charcoal is one of my favorite mediums. I love the rich matte darks that you can achieve with charcoal. I find it lends itself to moody, expressive work that I can't really match with pencil. I know a lot of artists extract an amazing range of tone and expression from graphite, but nothing beats charcoal as far as I'm concerned. Mess is always a bit of a problem with charcoal - it's a dry, crumbly medium that tends to create a bit of dust. You have to be prepared to clean up as you go, and vacuum often. A damp cloth is handy for cleaning fingers (keep one in a ziploc bag when traveling). I'm about to dedicate a wall of my office to a large-scale charcoal drawing. Fortunately for me, it's my own house, so I can tape the drawing straight to the wall, and I'll put a dropsheet beneath to catch the worst of the particles, so they aren't trodden into the carpet.

Charcoal Drawing Articles:
Charcoal Drawing FAQ
Charcoal Exercise - Soft Volume
How to Apply Spray Fixative
Charcoal for Drawing - Top Picks

I love 'hands on' activities for teaching Art History. The fabulous teachers at our primary school do a great job of letting the kids re-interpret modern artists, using all sorts of mediums from cut-out paper to drawing to clay to recycled found objects. Coloring pages are great, too - especially if you're not a confident drawer. You can think about the artist's color and composition as you work, or use your own color scheme. Shelley Esaak has just added a coloring page of Vincent van Gogh's 'Starry Night' to her small but growing collection of Fine Art coloring pages. You can read about the painting and create your own version. You could probably print it onto printable canvas, and DIY 'paint by numbers', too.

Image: M Esaak, licensed to About.com

Here's a fun way to waste an hour. I just love text - my own artwork is full of words. As an art student I would enlarge poetry on a photocopier, cut out the words and re-arrange them. Wordle is a java applet created by Jonathan Feinberg. You can paste in some text, enter a blog URL (or any site with an RSS feed), or put in your del.icio.us username. Wordle then creates a random pattern from the text. You can experiment with font, size, color and layout. Have fun!... Go to Wordle

(Parental advisory: Wordle includes user-generated text artworks which may contain inappropriate language and content. Supervision of children is recommended.)

Image: Text by H South, image generated by 'Wordle' (c) J Feinberg