Adventures in Graphite

I attended a drawing class yesterday at The Lightbox gallery in Woking.  We had to pick something in the gallery to draw, and were encouraged to be quite loose with our work.  I was a little nervous to be honest, as loosening up is something that I struggle with.  I tend to be quite precise and detailed and rarely draw on anything larger than an A4 sheet of paper.  I picked a chunk of graphite and some conté sticks from the selection of tools we were offered and set off around the gallery.  I chose a bust of a woman, who had a long neck and wavy hair which I thought would be interesting to draw.  Here's what I came up with -

I think if I post my efforts here, it will encourage me to keep practising.  I was full of excitement on the way home from the class - I stopped off at the art shop to buy my own block of graphite, and straight away drew the owl above.  Yesterday evening however, my excitement had waned and I wanted to go back to what I know - precise and small, not loose and large.  I feel like I've been developing a kind of style of my own with my ink drawings, but with these new pictures my style has gone.  But how will I ever learn anything new if I don't push myself to experiment?  

My encounters with trying out looser sketching styles in the past have been brief as I normally give up two or three drawings in and go back to Photoshop.  Lately I've been using ink, but still colouring digitally.  There's a little voice inside me telling me to try something new - step one was drawing in a public gallery yesterday;  step two is to keep at it.

Finally, two things to mention - the owl I drew was based on an amazing photo which my friend Tursan took at a fair we visited together recently - there was a falconry show, and the huge owl looked straight at her whilst ruffling it's feathers!
And lastly, The Lighbox is a really cool gallery and local history museum and well worth a look if you're in that area of the UK.  I'd definitely visit again.  I discovered many new artists, including Melvyn Evans who produces beautiful lino-prints.  I'm attending a relief-printing course next week, so his work is most inspiring!