Life Drawing Class #5 #6 and #7

I'm so behind with keeping up to date with my posts about life drawing class. I'm still loving it and still in love with charcoal and it seems my hands get even more covered with it each week. Anyway, brief overview about the past three weeks. Week 5 was the usual routine of the different minute sketches, with this sketch being my best from the week:

a twenty minute sketch

But in week 6, things got a bit more interesting. I accidentally used the compressed charcoal instead of the usual willow charcoal. Willow charcoal is easy to use, as it is lighter and easy to smudge and use for shading, as well as being able to rub out, whereas compressed charcoal is a lot darker, harder to smudge and impossible to rub out. But you know what, I realised that compressed charcoal is a lot more fun to use. I liked how it was bolder and was really black and not the ashy grey colour of the willow and it created a new challenge. So, even though this happened because of my incompetence with the existence of different types of charcoal, week 6 became my favourite week so far. My hands by the end of it were absolutely filthy and it took me five washes and one shower to get the majority of the charcoal off. Week 6 was my experimental week (left is the twenty minute sketch, which combines the willow and the compressed, while the right is the ten minute sketch with just the compressed):

I also experimented with using pastel chalk, which I used for shading with the willow, as well as using the compressed as the main dominant lines to shape the figure. I have to say, this resulted to my favourite sketch that I have done in the whole course, partly because I used three different drawing materials, but also because I did it in five minutes and was completely winging it:

Now today (week 7) was different to all the other weeks, not only because now compressed charcoal has been introduced into my life, but also because this week was the first week we've had a male model. This posed new challenges, because the muscle definition is more prominent than a females, which meant we had to focus a lot on the shading with the darkness and light, and I think after today, my shading has improved a lot since I started the class seven weeks ago. 

ten minute sketch using willow charcoal 

The next two sketches were done in twenty minutes, using the willow charcoal initially for shading and shaping, and then later I added the compressed charcoal of the main lines and the darker shading.