I particularly struggle with this when drawing the figure! It’s so complex I desperately try and get the contour in, but the drawings I love the most are full of lost edges and unworked areas.. I just try to copy master drawings as much as I can, and find it particularly useful when I know what their reference has been so I can do my own, copy, redo my own trying to remember what I’ve learned from the copy etc.

Me too! I'm a heavily line-centric person and it is very difficult for me to group shadows and shapes. Something that I think helps me is to take off my glasses or blur the image, then with a piece of tracing paper, go over the image with a pencil and map out the shapes of the shadows. I'm still using line, which is my natural inclination, but I'm not outlining lips or individual eyelashes. Then fill them in with an even layer of tone. I start with two tones, and I'm slowly moving into three tones. I try to compress the values to 5 tones at the most. Then I take an image that interests me and do the same but without tracing it directly. I'm a slow learner, so it is taking time, but it actually helps. I love line a lot, and I don't think it is an entirely bad thing that needs to completely go away, so when I have an image that has its values, I go back and reinforce some parts with line, like where shadow edges are hard, or where I want a focus. Hope this helps! P.S. Its a bit awkward at first, but using the pencil like a brush helps with the line issue too. Especially if you have large newsprint paper and a conte or chacoal pencil sharpened with a blade into a stabby lance :3