decided to redo the pear assignment after getting critiques (thank you to anyone that did) and watching the critique video. The right one is the first attempt the left is 2nd. Any critiques would be greatly appreciated!

My first attempt at object drawing.

After drawing the young asian man (I previously posted it under a different thread- Thanks for the feedback!!) and viewing the critique video, I decided to always try to spend a couple of minutes doing a thumbnail first, while "squinting" to help with composition and blocking-in the values. This photo is from the Proko Art Sample Pack- Pose 004. Comparing side-by-side, I now see that I should have made the size of the top part of his head, from forehead to back of head, a bit deeper. Any suggestions on how to represent the thinning swirls of hair on top? I was trying to stay within the limits of the goals of the lesson (5 values, geometric, not too detailed etc)

How can overthinking and overworking be dealt with? Does giving yourself a time limit help with this? This first portrait with markers feels so tentative though I sketch in pencil first. You can see it in the shaky lines and lack of clean even tones. Is it just a matter of “numbers”, say after my 10th or 50th? Can anyone cite other B+W references on this site or otherwise where the lighting is so perfect for this type of study?

Tried again with procreate

My attempt to put lessons learned into practice. I wanted to use a different portrait because I found trying to do the example portrait after the demo and critique I was heavily influenced by Stans picture. I’m happy with my effort, again my proportions are off.

The biggest take away i had from the critics was " that the value range could get restrained and the light one could get extended " in order to give more interest to the focal point .

wow, these were very hard. I have to admit I find shading very tedious so it's no surprise how messy it is. I added some doodles of how wonky the faces looked like to me lol.

The posture isn't quite right, he has too much hair and his ear is too small, but I'm pretty happy with this.

I really need to make my shading cleaner. That was fun though.

Um, Venom Colin Firth…? Anyways. And yes I used 6 values. Ready to move on!

second attempt at the portrait exercise after watching the demo and critiques

Any tips for the portrait? I had some trouble organizing the values ;(

As a level 1 beginner, this portrait was a real challenge. I think one of the problems was my attempt to create a resemblance rather than focusing essentially on the light and shadows. I will reattempt to capture this portrait while concentrating on blocking out the five values.

Again I draw this long time ago and back to this course today. Is not my first time to draw portrait and also after the pear exercise. I am glad that the result is beautiful. Is still a very challenging to use only 5 tones to draw, maybe it’s not simplified enough.

Here are my homework

No idea if this is where I’m supposed to send my pics. But if it is please critique. Thx, Zig

Final attempt. Dunno if I improved upon the last one but Im gonna move on from this

Third attempt. Better than the others but the proportions of the eyes are off

Did 2 attempts plus one in pen. I honestly can't tell if I did better on the second attempt. The proportions are worse but the shading looks better