I taped my headphones to my head and painted for 9 hours
Not a metaphor. The left can kept sliding off when I tilted my head down to work, so I put packing tape over the band. Looked insane. Stayed on.
9 hours on one piece. The same playlist on repeat the whole time, one song probably 30 times. I don't hear it after a while, it just keeps the part of my brain that second-guesses things busy so the hands can do whatever they want.
The piece is a face, close, mouth open, and I kept going back in with charcoal after the oil was already down, which is the wrong order and I know it's the wrong order and I did it anyway. Something about the way charcoal sits on top of wet oil, it goes muddy and grey and dead in a way that's kind of perfect for what I'm trying to say. My teacher would've lost their mind. I don't have a teacher. That's the whole point.
Anyway it's 2am and I still have paint on my hands and I'm not going to shower because I want to look at it one more time before I sleep and I know that's the trap, tomorrow I'll hate it. Doesn't matter. Right now it's the best thing I've made and I'm not going to ruin that by being reasonable about it.
Who else works with the same song on loop? I need to know I'm not the only one doing that.
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The tape is a good sign. When the work takes over enough that you stop caring how you look, that's usually the day it goes somewhere.
The charcoal over oil part is what interests me. It's the wrong order on paper, but oil is forgiving in ways people don't expect. A little charcoal dust dragged into wet paint can give you a dry, granular edge you can't get any other way, especially around an open mouth where the light breaks hard. The risk is that it dulls, it can sit dead on the surface and kill the depth you built up. Did you fix it, or did you leave it loose and let it mar the layers underneath? I've done this deliberately maybe three times and twice it went muddy. The third time it was the best passage in the painting, so c'est ça.
Nine hours on one face is not too long if the face is worth it. What's the size?
"A little charcoal dust dragged into wet paint", I think that's overstating what happens. Once the oil has started to skin, dust sits on top and stays dust. Granular, yes, but flat. It reads as dirt, not as drawing. What you're describing works on a tacky ground, not on paint that's already down.
I don't work in oil though, so I'll take the correction if I have it wrong. Paper behaves differently, and I've learned not to trust my instincts across materials.