I decided to do all 3 pears and now I will work on the portrait. I went full graphic-design mode. Getting the shape down wasn't too bad but having to use hard edges and using a limited amount of values was surprisingly hard. I also used smooth Bristol for the first 2 which wasn't a very good idea. The second try I tried to keep things more clean but it ended up as super bland. On the 3rd try I went for a more puzzle - like look.

the shading, differentiating planes were the difficult parts.

What a humbling project! The demo makes it look so easy. The demo helped me with getting the values differentiated better than my first attempt (attempt 1 is first photo and second photo is after demo). Good to have stake in the ground to know where I am starting.

Ok, I tried drawing the pear two different ways. Digital is my medium but I also wanted to see if I could emulate a pencil drawing since the direction of the lines offers a lot more dimensionality. any feedback/advice would be greatly appreciated!

Did a before and after of the pear. Need to practice more! The before is on the left and the after on the right.

Here is Peach by me and my hearty b2 pencil.

So here's my portrait. As usual I got way too into this and ended up spending hours on it. This is why I never finish anything. The rightmost eye is a bit wonky as I seem to have forgotten about perspective there for a minute. But other than that I was really surprised about the result. I did grind on this one portrait course for half a year last year but it was all digital so I was surprised to see a lot of the fundamentals carry on to traditional free hand drawing. Now I do have to say that I'm not a beginner, I'm using this course to brush up on fundamentals and maybe find that missing piece of a puzzle that I haven't found yet. Drawing is still very difficult for me after years of practice. Just felt like putting that out there before anyone starts to compare. Also for anyone struggling with paper texture, I highly recommend hot press watercolor paper. Smooth cartridge papers and Bristol are very appealing due to the smoothness but they are very very harsh when it comes to pencil strokes. Watercolor paper also takes far more layers and prevents at least a tiny bit of the graphite shine. Makes scanning easier too. Edit: Added a better picture, scanner ate the first one.

After finishing, I realised that I completely forgot the instructions during the work. No straight lines, no restriction to 5 values. And I was already at the edge of my patience with the shading. And so the drawing looks, ugly. I'm already about to give up and that after not really starting . Try tomorrow again after watching the next video - maybe there is the magic pill.

So here is my first try. I think the shape isn’t quite there yet. The top portion is to small and to straight. Really struggled with the values and the blemishes on the pear. So I thought just don’t draw the blemishes.