Jakar 7623 Assorted Greys Compressed Charcoal Stick (Pack of 12)

What i expected...came in one day

Excellent quality and perfect value of the gray shades

They blend well enough, but don't work well with hiding the stray marks from the vine used to graph everything out before I used these to go over and add more details and schemes of different grey tones. I did my best to make a self portrait of my "ideal self" for the class project. This was my first time using charcoal so... if anything I feel like these were a nice and affordable kit for a malnourished artist like myself to implement into the majority of the semester.As a class we didn't start working with colors until the final, I'd have to admit that I'm not the best at drawing real life human beings and this was my first time doing a self portrait as well, but even so I still ended up getting a satisfactory grade for my hard work and the student critique went well too (it took some explaining, but eventually I was able to cement it into their heads that this was a self portrait of "me" and not a portrait of anybody else. I even showed the selfie I used as a reference and at that point I even had to explain that with makeup anyone could make themselves look like a completely different person with enough time and patience).Either way the drawing class ended up being fun and I even ended up becoming friends with another student too, I'm really glad even after the previous year had been heart wrenchingly cruel in September... that I someway somehow managed to pick up my pieces and instead of rotting away in my room I choose to go back to school. I'm still unsure about the future, but for the first time in years I feel that their may be some worth to life.

These are very nice charcoal sticks, however, they arrived in a flimsy bubble Amazon branded envelope and most of them were damaged. Unfortunately, having a class I needed these for the day after their arrival, I was unable to return them for a refund.

Very hard. Behaves more like chalk than charcoal and the sticks are thick as standard chalk. Package was damaged on arrival so the black was splintered into several pieces. Probably better for a chalkboard than a toothy paper.

It was damaged first I got it, also colors are not good, all looks like similar.Definitely return it