Those practice gifts really did help me become familiar with pastels! Here's the result, referenced from some chick on DA (I printed the ref from a campus computerlab and didn't save the link anywhere). It was much easier making this, where I didn't really care if it looked identical to the person, than it was to do the pencil drawing (which was supposed to look like vombatiformes).

So yeah, I guess I sort of do like pastels after all :)