Reddit mentions of Grumbacher Final Fixative Gloss Spray, 11-3/4-Ounce Can, #543

I love charcoal but it takes a bit to understand how to utilize it correctly. In my opinion though, it goes so much faster than full pencil drawings and it gets much more impressive and dramatic results.

One of the easiest techniques is to actually work 'backwards' from a traditional graphite drawing. You may want to pick up some 'Vine' / 'Willow' Charcoal sticks These are very soft but lightly toned pieces of charcoal. You'll scrub one over the entire piece of paper and use a tissue to smooth it resulting in a gray toned background. Here you won't be starting with a pure white sheet of paper.

From there you'll make a gesture drawing of what you'd like to draw with a lighter charcoal pencil (2H or the gray pencil farthest to the right in your drawing tin). After, you'll go in with an eraser and erase out the light areas to almost bring back the white of your paper (those pink rectangle erasers you use/used in school are great for this). After that, you can actually dive in and start shading. You'll start by shading with your lightest charcoal pencils and work your way up to the darkest shades (in your tin work right to left with the gray pencils) Your lightest highlights you can achieve by using a piece of chalk or a white charcoal pencil These will be the absolute lightest parts of the image, so don't go overboard.

From there, just darken and lighten areas until you're satisfied with it.

Some stuff you might want to pick up =
Workable Fixatif - This will help keep the mess to a minimum. You'd spray this after every day that you work on the drawing. (But don't spray it until you've erased out all of the highlight areas!) As the name suggests, it is workable so you can still erase out some of it, but it won't be as forgiving.
Final Fixative
This is the stuff you spray on the final drawing. You're done and you don't want to change anything anymore. You can also use really cheap aerosol hairspray if you want to save money or you don't need a UV-safe protective coating. I've used this in the past - Horrible Hairspray-Great cheap Fixative

Those brown colored pencils and sticks are Conte crayon. They're very similar to charcoal but are made from clay usually. (These are awesome for doing gesture drawings or faces!) I work with these more similar to a graphite pencil rather than charcoal. You can also buy brown toned paper/newsprint to use with them.

Also, I want to add, be careful when you sharpen any of these pencils. Go slowly and be soft with them or you can crack the charcoal inside and it'll just fall out. I've found these work better than other pencil sharpeners when it comes to charcoal. You can also simply scrape the pencil end with an Exacto blade - I've never broken a pencil doing it this way.

Fixative info & Tutorial

Very Basic Charcoal Tutorial - this gives a visual of what I was talking about. The guy does everything in a different order than I usually do, but whatever you find works easiest, just go with that.

More Tutorials Several other tutorials to help you get started.

Sorry for the wall of text, but I hope you enjoy the new media! Give your mom a big hug! Charcoal is great!