Drawing Class - Week Six: Ben & Francesca, reading, against reflections in the window

Same materials as always: 2B graphite pencil, oilstick, junky oil pastels, and 23x18 paper folded into quadrants. The drawing is still shape-based, but the color is supposed to be realistic.

This was the best drawing of the night; it had a nice rhythm. You'll just have to trust me on that because I obliterated the nice parts (her head, the pattern of her hair and ponytail, the reflections to her immediate left) with the pastels.
Now I wish I'd used other colors to build up the black instead of using the black stick.

The oil pastels are making me a little crazy. With the way I handle them & the results I'm getting, I might as well be drawing with Crayolas. I'm having trouble making the colors blend and mix into each other. I know it's possible for the finished surface to look luminous instead of caked-on, but I can't manage it myself. Am I not pressing hard enough? How do I make the colors slide into each other instead of stacking up or clogging up the works? If anybody out there knows what I'm missing, please advise.

I do not love drawing bottles. I don't have enough physical coordination to make the two sides of the bottles match each other. I was going to disguise my slip-ups with oil pastel. Well, I lay my efforts naked before you.
I liked drawing Ben. He has an interesting face--very thin, long features--and he holds his head very, very still.
This was Francesca's first night as an artist's model. At first, I wanted to fire her because she doesn't hold the same pose for more than 3 minutes. She just about made me crazy with moving her head around while I was making the first drawing, but I decided I was ready to try drawing her again for the final panel. Good practice, right? (For what, I don't know.)
The sketchy lines underneath the darker sketch are a kind of panicky, scribbled rough draft I marked just in case she never rotated back to the same position. The pose finally represented above isn't the one I started drawing (her head was pointed the other way). I had to modify even my light sketchy draft 4 or 5 times in the same number of minutes. Red. Rum. Well, it was the end of the night--I'm sure she was tired and restless. She's not fired.