I did both the pear and the portrait. The proportions are a bit off on the portrait, but I found limiting to 5 values and keeping the edges sharp to be a really good exercise. It makes every detail a decision point.

Level 1 pear 1. HB pencil. Things that surprised me or I learned: - Race of the darks: definitely start with the darkest shadows, and get to as dark as you can with your pencil. I didn't have other pencils at hand, so yeah. It was hard to get a light enough value, and especially to differentiate between lighter values. Before I knew it, what was supposed to be the lightest value turned out as dark as the next lightest, so I had to add to all darker values successively, over and over, but then I hit the HB's limit I think... - Coming back to a certain value and adding an extra area with the same value is really hard. I'll have to practice my values with silly filling doodles. - It's hard to draw hard egdes without actually drawing a line, just by shading... - This was a lot more fun than I imagined up front ! Yay !

First try, went for drawing from life instead of the photo. I really struggle to see the differences in the half tones vs color changes. Hard to stick to geometric shapes/lines too!