For whatever reason it won't let me reply to your reply to me, so I'm just going to post it here instead. @J Menriv: No need to apologize for the original photo, haha. I was just curious because I think I've only seen pencil and digital work so far in everyone's submissions. I totally understand the difficulty in taking photos of pencil drawings too, for all the reasons you mentioned, so I think editing your photo was fine. Plus I've definitely seen Stan do the exact same kinds of edits when he does the critiques. For the record, your unedited photo looks great too. Those bold, thick lines look really consistent, so it's not like the edited photo was hiding mistakes or shaky linework. Also, I think I get what you're saying about the shadow thing. Thank you for taking the time to explain your process in words for me. Specifically, "not completing them entirely" is an interesting idea, like you're just giving the subtle impression of shadows instead of explicitly drawing them. I'll have to keep that in the back of my head and see how it feels.

I haven't watched the demo or critiques yet, so I don't know if I'm really qualified to give any feedback on either. That said, your observation that the shadow method has more range than just the high-contrast shadows seems pretty insightful. It kind of reminds me of the original pear exercise, where we identified multiple areas and planned out specific values (in this case line weights) in advance. Were you thinking in terms of specific levels of line weight? Like 3 or 4 instead of 2? Also, more of just a question because I'm curious, did you do these with multiple mediums? The horn looks so seamless, like one line, but it almost looks like the left side is marker and the right is a much thinner pen. Great job by the way, in case my admiration wasn't clear.

I just thought about it for a bit, and I think I realized something about varying pen/pencil pressure mid-line. With the digital drawing tablet, I can easily rotate and resize the drawing so that I can do every line comfortably. This is harder to do, or straight up impossible sometimes, on physical paper. I think for the mushroom exercise, which I've been doing on paper, my pencil skitters when I'm pushing the line. Maybe on paper I should plan my ellipse, and where I want the darker part of it to be, so that I'm only bearing down on the pulling motion of the stroke. After doing a couple tries, it seems like I'm either onto something or placebo effecting-ing myself. But this seems to make intuitive sense to me: I have greater control over the pull of a circular stroke rather than the push segment.

I really love how simple and polygonal your snail looks. It's like I can see each induvial pencil stroke.

Not a lefty, so I don't really know what I'm talking about as far as smudge mitigation goes, but I'm wondering if it's a problem with this particular reference photo. The shadow, where we're putting down the most graphite, is on the left side of the object. I wonder if a mirrored photo, where the shadow was on the right, would give you as much trouble. Also, I don't know about you, but I did the shadows first, so maybe in instances like these working right/light to left/dark would work better? (I feel like a kneaded eraser would be able to pick up some of those smudges after you're done, but that doesn't help if there's any smudges on the drawing itself.)