I'll start by saying you did a nice job on the face, and your shapes look pretty good. To improve, you need to look at the angles of the reference and then look at the angles of your drawing. You will see that in the reference the angles in more diagonal, and yours are straight up and down. This makes your penguin look like it's going to fall over backwards. I did a quick diagram to show you what I mean, I hope it helps :)

Hey hifoxwild, I can tell that you are starting with the details, which makes this much harder. You need to begin with gesture, simple shapes, and then add details. I did a quick sketch to show you what I mean :)

Hey hifoxwild, Nice job on your first project, you did a good job using straight lines to describe the shape and you got the angle of the pear just right. Make sure that you look very carefully at the lines you are making to describe things in your drawing. You will notice the stem is bent, but you drew it straight up and down. As far as your rendering, I did a quick sketch to show you how you should arrange your values. This is based on squinting your eyes to compare the values to each other. If you squint, you will notice the shadow of the pear is the same as the cast shadow on the ground plane. I hope my sketch is helpful, keep it up :)