Just before watching the demo. I was quite scared of proportions, which in the end were not the main issue. Shading a larger area is pretty difficult and also I seem to press too much, 6B almost never makes a difference anymore and then I tend to make the light colors too light? Either way, as I see myself as a complete noob this turned out slightly better than expected while exposing areas that I need to work on! (consistent shading, lighting, proportions) Any other critique / areas of improvement that you spot that I should look into?

I feel I made definite improvements over the previous attempt.

First pear was before the demo, other two pears after the demo. Two major problems I had were proportions (some areas were very off and overall shape was sometimes much thicker than the original) and uniform shading. Also finding the right (and consistent) level of simplification wasn't easy sometimes.