True confession:
I'm starting to like charcoal.

It's very weird. I hated it for the last two weeks and always ended up being the dirtiest in my class. It's not the black dust I detested, it was the devil-may-care attitude you have to adopt while you use this material. This medium is chunky and messy and I'm used to contour lines. Not shades and and values.
My teacher would always check up on me and say that I seemed to know what I was doing and that he was impressed with how much control I had over the charcoal. I would frown and grumble when he left saying things like "he doesn't even know how much I hate this, how can he say that I know what I'm doing? All I'm doing is pushing black dusty charcoal around a paper. It doesn't even remotely resemble the still life I'm drawing."
I was extremely frustrated and bored every class period sometimes just staring at my pathetic excuse for a charcoal drawing for up to twenty minutes!
On Tuesday we started a two day charcoal project and the same feelings held me captive. But on the second day of this project, something changed.

I hit flow.
Flow is a thing I learned about in AP Psyche last year. Wiki explains some points of flow:
(the bold parts are my interjections)

1. Clear goals (expectations and rules are discernible and goals are attainable and align appropriately with one's skill set and abilities).
2. Concentrating and focusing, a high degree of concentration on a limited field of attention (a person engaged in the activity will have the opportunity to focus and to delve deeply into it).
3. A loss of the feeling of self-consciousness, the merging of action and awareness.
4. Distorted sense of time, one's subjective experience of time is altered. AKA you can be stuck in the state for hours
   
5. Direct and immediate feedback (successes and failures in the course of the activity are apparent, so that behavior can be adjusted as needed).
6. Balance between ability level and challenge (the activity is neither too easy nor too difficult).
   
7. A sense of personal control over the situation or activity. I do love control :)
   
8. The activity is intrinsically rewarding, so there is an effortlessness of action.
9. People become absorbed in their activity, and focus of awareness is narrowed down to the activity itself, you are so into it that you don't think about anything else

I love it more than anything.

It's the best when I'm working on an art project and I hit flow. It can take a little while to get into it, or sometimes you just pick up a pencil and it comes.

But anyway, I hit flow with my charcoal project today and suddenly after being frustrated for days, I knew what I was supposed to do. I refined my picture bit by bit. The teacher's tips and comments finally made sense. It took about three hours to finish, but I'm pleased with the outcome. We all turned our pictures to the center of the room to look at each other's depictions and I'm happy to say that I wasn't ashamed of my picture.

I just gotta figure out how to use fixative now...