Hey David! I like the overall silhouette shapes you're finding with each of these pears, but your interior shapes are difficult to read. I'd recommend trying a 4th pear using only a hard edge, 100% opacity round brush, and limiting yourself to 5 values. For this exercise you want to create distinct shapes for each of the 5 values, and fit them together like a mosaic or puzzle. Using the hard round brush will keep your edges sharp, and prevent your values from blending together. When everything is softly blended the pictures tends to look blurry and without definite form. Using a low opacity brush causes your strokes to overlap which will make your values inconsistent with each overlapping stroke. Try another one using only 5 values, keeping everything hard edged, and definitely take a look at the demo and critique for this project! Hope this helps, keep up the good work!