Hi everyone, I never realised how nervous I would be uploading my work but here goes. This is my first pear attempt prior to watching the demo, I would love your thoughts thanks

The first 4 pears are from April, then I took a break, and did the final pear (and peach from life) yesterday. I had trouble with the first batch since I was using old pencils that proved to be unsharpenable, so I felt I was constantly fighting against them and everything ended up very smudgy. Then I got a new, much better quality pencil set and tried it out on the last couple of drawings and it was a way better experience. Learned a lot from doing these! I wasn't sure how much to simplify at the beginning so I added more complexity with each drawing. The values got away from me a bit at times, but I can see a lot of improvement from the first attempt to the last. I'm glad I didn't stop at just one drawing per reference. Definitely useful to keep reiterating. Moving on to the portrait exercise next.

Portrait simplification I did after watching this critique video. It's a well known portrait of Audrey Hepburn so there's a good chance you've seen it before. In the end, it maybe wasn't the best choice as the lighting on her face is very soft but I think there were still some interesting shapes in there. I'm glad I watched the whole video before finishing this as the example on toned paper gave me the idea to use a white pencil for two of the values. Previously, I was using the colour of the toned paper for the lightest value which meant I had to squeeze four pencil values under the paper's value, thus it was much harder to control and get good contrast. I think using white pencil went a lot better but I definitely need some practice with it. Proportion wise, I've noticed I have the tendency to make faces too long. I tried to compensate by making the head bigger in the hair area but think I just ended up throwing off the positions of some of my shapes (such as the highlight on the ponytail). Definitely looking forward to hopefully learning some measuring techniques later in the course lol

I tried this 3 times. The first pic is before the demo. I took a good minute away from drawing daily. I went ahead and immediately tried a post demo but because of the more complex shapes I had a rough time. This morning with fresh eyes I tried once more after re-watching the demo again. Much happier with my shape finds and values. Shading seems to have improved as well. Proportions are still not where I want them to be, but I am satisfied with this progress

Really liked my second one. The demo really helped me understand what I need to improve on. I also went slower on the second. As well as used different pencils. I also layered many darker tones rather than changing my pressure.