I'm having trouble understanding how this exercise is supposed to be differnt from the previous one with the snail and the boots and it makes me feel like I'm missing something. I might just be overthinking it, but can someone give a hint?

Woah boy. This exercise is rough, I'm just finding it so hard to control the pencil from my shoulder and elbow and to make confident strokes. The long curve of the snail shell is particularly rough, and I had to fight the urge to make it up of lots of small segments. This was maybe my eighth or ninth attempt and, the first one that was even a little acceptable to me.

Gave it a shot. Really struggle with line control, so I'm excited to practice more. Some of the sloppiness is because I started to add more detail lines but then decided against it, but I drew the lines too dark to erase fully :(

I think this critique video has been incredibly useful. I really urge people not to skip it, it has TONS of information in it, I feel like it's essential viewing. I've seen a lot of my own mistakes in the video, which is helpful. I guess the only frustrating thing is that so much of my struggle is just down to not being able to control my pencils as well as I wish I could, but that will probably just come from more practice and more experience.

I'm late to the party because I just started the course, but here's my first attempt using Reference Pear #1. I'm not happy with it, but I'm really glad I did it. It was pretty hard for a complete beginner like me, so I think I'll do this assignment again a couple of times after I watch the demo in the next lesson. My choice of paper was probably wrong, I think it's too textured. (EDIT: Of course now that I'm watching the demo, I realize I completely left off the shadow. Ha! I'll definitely do a couple more now...)