Foot studies and an impromptu still life

Here are some of my latest figure drawings - or rather, sketches from figure drawing sessions:
I did one entire figure (in about 20 minutes), which came out "okay", but nothing worth posting. And as I started in on the shading, I pretty much ruined it...

Speaking of shading, I guess I got a little heavy-handed with these, too, but I'm still posting them:

The pose was quite difficult for me: staring straight into the palm of the foot, in shadow. I was slightly uncomfortable with my setup, too, craning my neck around my easel and trying to avoid staring into the light. But I did the best I could, and these are the results. No excuses: an Artist has to overcome such struggles. It's the end result that matters. (Or, well, it's the learning that matters, but who doesn't like a nice end result??) As Geoff said, the foot is the hardest thing to draw (something along those lines, anyway), and it definitely was challenging for me. Fortunately, my Saturday evening, 3-days-without-coffee depression left by Sunday, and on Monday, I was feeling dandy, as I am Tuesday (today). Let's hope I can keep my spirits up. I am back to drinking coffee, albeit somewhat less, but could there be a coincidence that I haven't had a daily glass of wine since sometime last week?

And the other day, I think Saturday night, I was working on a portrait of Sherry, and after that, around 10:00, I thought, I'm just going to do a little still life painting, just because I want to, and because I have the stuff set up, and I've been working towards getting a nice still life composition, but haven't quite got it 100% figured out yet. (I did a nice little sketch as an exercise in composition, but I haven't been able to get the physical objects to co-operate...need a smaller bowl, I think, and the bowl shouldn't be white, and I just swapped out a smaller vase and it looks better....so it's coming along....Value Village, here I come!)

So this is the end result (...for now: I'm thinking of adding some cool colours (blues, basically) which are entirely absent, since I just did this with the colours that happened to be on my palette: mostly Venetian red and umber and black and white and a little yellow ochre).

David Leffel mentioned challenging yourself to do, for example, several paintings using the same limited palette, but make each painting tend towards one or other of the colours. For example, if you use Prussian blue, umber, yellow ochre, white, and Venetian red (a nice sounding limited palette if I ever heard one!), make one of the paintings favour Prussian blue, one favour yellow ochre, one umber, one Venetian red. So that's what I'm going to do, although I may add in a little orange, since the Venetian red + yellow ochre doesn't seem to yield a very orangey colour. (But I'll try that again first.) Anyway, it's a challenge I am going to give to myself in the future.