Pencil again

I've still been trying to improve my facial features, as my daughter is due soon and I really want to be able to draw her well while she's still an infant.  Although I'm getting more and more pleased with eyes and mouths, I find that hair is still a big problem for me.  It's tough to figure out how to represent this mass of fibers appropriately.  As a side project, I've been doing a sketch of the burn building where we train on my fire department.  This kind of drawing is much easier, nice straight lines with easy perspective.  However, you never get better without challenging yourself, so I try not to spend too much time on the easy ones.

A foray into Charcoal

I've primarily been using graphite so far, because I find it really easy to control and it's cheap to use, but I have friends who keep pushing me to try charcoal to learn about pressure and shading.  Here's one of my first attempts, and it's rough:

I feel like everything I draw with the charcoal stick is loose, cartoony. None of the lines come out straight, everything feels smudgy.  I'm sure this is just due to lack of experience, it's tough to move from something you're comfortable with to something you aren't.  Hopefully I'll be doing a lot more with charcoal in the future, and I'll be sharing anything else I produce as it comes up.

Anyone with tips about the learning curve from graphite to charcoal, I'd love to hear about it.

Faces and Features

I've been working a lot on just faces, recently.  The reason, of course, being that this is one of the hardest things for an aspiring artist to get right.  Facial features aren't as forgiving as static objects; if anything is out of place or proportion, things just look not quite right. Here are a few of my better pieces, but I still have a long way to go:

 

  

That last one is a self-portrait based on a picture my wife took.  As you can see, you can tell each one of these is a face without a problem, but I feel like my shading is what's really deficient.  Anyone with advice on how to really make these faces come to life, I'd love to hear it in the comments.