I too am trying to learn lighting and shadows. Would love to get critiques on this assignment that I recently did.

Hello :), I note that you said you were confused and then decided to dive right in the making of a very complex scene. I know that the "just do it" method is kind of the standard way but I believe it to be a very brute force and inefficient way of working. You are trying to replicate a very complex phenomenon, just right after hearing it exist, in front of a very blank canvas. I personally don't believe that the answer could come out of nowhere. I also think that following someone else step by step guide is a bad idea as we're all different and what might take me a month to understand could take you a week. I know that it is very tempting, we've all done it. What I suggest you is to have a different method or approach. You will feel confuse when you learn something new. Maybe instead of fighting it and bring it to almost predictable frustration, give time to your brain to process all that. Personally when I watch a video about something that is very new to me, I put zero pressure and just watch it casually. Then I come back to it the next day and it's a bit easier,I get more bits of information. I might come back to it several time .I make lots of <5min sketches around that, I take some notes also, and write down questions I have and stuff that are confusing to me. I still watch some videos that I first encountered years ago because they were so dense in information. Get curious about light, also watch non-art related videos talking about that subject, after all, these are physics phenomenons. You'll never get everything from one source. Be aware that it is like food, it takes time to digest knowledge and you can only ingest fixed quantity before you feel full and have to wait the next day. But your brain will catch up as it always catch up, just give it time. It was not a review but I hope you'll find something helpful in that :).

Hey @aheneha! When rendering a reflective surface I would recomend splitting the different stages up! A Ball is already somewhat advanced if you just started practicing that! Maybe consider shading cubes first? Nonetheless I would allways recommend splitting up your process. So in this example the way I would approach this is: Step1: Shading the ball as thou it doesnt have any reflections from the surrounding area. So just the way the shadow is cast by the sun. Step2&3&4: Start including the reflections of the other objects in the surrouning area one after another. When you think about refletions allways keep in mind that only what is directly infront of the particular surface will be reflected. Image 1 is me trying to explain how the refelctions would work for your example. Of course shaded in a shittyer way then how you did. Image 2 is a exert of the Book: How to Render by Scott Robertson which I strongly recommend if you want to learn the logic behind surface reflection and Object Rendering/Painting