Great stuff! I would definitely agree that spending perhaps an hour or two on one drawing would have a great improvement. That's something that I've heard Steven Zapata recommend because doing a longer drawing even at the beginning stages of learning can have great results! Which will increase your urge to do the next drawing and so on.

Hi, Great improvement! Getting Rid of those lines around the highlights and halftone definitely works to make the shading more realistic! The proportions and construction are also much better! I would say that the the main problem is that the masses of value are still to hard. Everything in your drawing would benefit from being much softer. That would help to define the soft turning of the form. For example in this pear drawing by Stephen Bauman (Attached) everything is much softer, although he still keeps the shape design and value organization just visible. A helpful phrase to remember is to keep things ''soft but specific''. One other thing is I think the contour and shadow shapes in your first drawing looks much better where as the second attempt looks too angular to me. As Harold Speed suggests, the construction ''envelope shape'' should only be used to get correct proportions. Once you have that you can be more gestural and natural in your drawing, especially when drawing a soft and natural form such as as pear. Hope that helps!

Great great drawing! Nothing major jumps out. I will say the value on his left cheek is a bit dark. It's almost as dark as the cast shadows. On the model, it's not quite that dark. Then there's a couple tiny dark shadows on the sideburns by the ear that you didn't get. So, double check your values and then not sure what "style" you go for normally, but you can start doing a lot with edges at the level you're at. Amazing work.

Incredible--amazing work showing all the different planes with hatching!

@mil3s, Overall you did an excellent job, met most of the fundamentals but there are a few minor things i noticed. I've attached an image where i did annotations for a better understanding.

I think this is a solid, dimensional drawing. I would compress the values on the light side a little, but that's just nit picky, but I would continue the dark background around the whole image. Right now having the black background on one side makes the image look unbalanced. Other than that, quite good :)

Hello, not a critique, but a couple of questions. 1. Why did you make the background the darkest area? In terms of value range, you kept it pretty close on the face, but then the background is a black. Because of this, the range widens to accommodate the background, and then suddenly it looks like the face is underlit. 2. Why did you put the background on the side of the face? I always thought you added darkness to highlight a bordering bright, or to fade shadows into the background. Instead, I see a clear distinction for the eye socket shadow and BG, and not much stark contrast between light and shadow (only on the forehead and cheek). But yeah, I'm not very good at shading, and was wondering why you made these decisions. I've attached pictures to show what I mean. If you'd like, I have a .psd file with all my edits, so you can mess around with them, thought I think it's too big to be put as an attachment here.