Pastel Plans

My next project is going to be my series of three in pastel. I spent Friday practicing different techniques and decided that I definitely want to use soft pastels rather than the hard ones. I've also decided that I want to do at least one landscape in my series. I can't decide if I want to do all of them landscapes or if I want to practice some architectural drawings for some of them. I saw a really pretty pastel online of a hay bail in a field. It had this amazing blue shadow on the left side of the hay bail. I definitely want to practice shadows with my pastels. I know for my landscape I'm going to use a photograph I took near my house last summer for my photography class. It was taken right before they mowed the field and there's a sundry of beautiful shades of the grass, violet weeds, and also the longer grass that's almost yellow. The main focus of the picture is the beautiful tree but the sky also commands a good portion of the viewer's attention.

Photography

These are more photographs I've taken through my photography class.

Hands Sketch

My very first project this year is the pencil sketch of the married couple holding hands. I originally came up with this idea in my photography class last semester. The assignment was to take pictures of hands and I knew I wanted to start with the classic frame of holding hands. The people I used for the photo aren't even married- in fact they are brother and sister.
When starting on the sketch rendition of this photograph, I first used the grid technique to get the proportion right. I then started with my lighter shades and slowly moved to the darker shades. It took me a while to effectively use the darkest shade, but I eventually came pretty close to it. I'm not very comfortable with how boxy the fingers look compared to in the photo. I feel like it makes the sketch unrealistic, but I am unsure how to fix it.
Overall I feel this sketch went very well. I accomplished my goal that I started with: to effectively portray emotion through a pencil sketch. Although parts of the sketch are unrealistic, I feel it's a good start to this semester.
I have attached my reference photograph and a video of the final sketch.