Of captured essence

There's something about femininity that buggers me. It frustrates me how hard it is to capture the feminine essence in drawings. Drawing males is a piece of cake in comparison, but a young woman? Damn you've got to master your lines, because you have to use as few as possible, as accurate and soft as you must. I've abandoned drawings for some months until a while ago, since I got my linestyle hopelessly viced on hard-edged male figures.. But I feel i'm loosening that vice. I feel like I'm doing some progress at drawing females.

This one was based on a  study from a Conceptart.org sketchbook, and although the result was unpurposely different, she still has a identity of her own, I like that. Quite a challenge to make her look believably feminine with these cartoon-like lines, don't really know how I pulled this off.

And this one looks really good actually, until one looks at the reference model. It's interesting how I'm so good at not being able to capture any of her idiosyncracies at all. Also I should work harder on hair. Hairline should be softer, for one. But the model's hair didn't help too, I must say.

And then again, I just started getting my hands dirty with drawing from references. I'm actually pleased with the progress I've made since the first one, which was a dream-shattering piece of shit. No kidding, that girl looked more like a Rancor monster with Joker makeup than anything else, I'll never show that to anybody. In fact, I should have burned that thing. Its horridness is probably drawing bad energy to my place.