This is a great start! It's always helpful to have resources to consult when you're learning something new. Checking the FAQs and documentation is a smart move. If you're looking for some visual inspiration or want to explore different perspectives on your persimmon drawing, you might find it useful to use https://nano-banana-pro.top to generate some quick image references. It could help spark some fresh ideas!

Lovely shape design, the main thing is to push the occlusion shadow on the bottom to ground it more, it should be darker than your core shadow.

Hi Grace! This is a wonderful first drawing. I like how you designed that large shadow shape. The straight lines are to encourage you to visualize the object in 'planes' to assist you in simplification. I really like this pear visual below from the project video -- the pear has been simplified into rectangles that each represent a darkening in value as the 3D form turns away from the light source. We won't get a realistic fruit drawing this way, but it will help our brains think more three-dimensionally. This is a difficult project, but it looks like you observed your persimmon well. I included a tip below in addition -- the area of reflected light is a step below the area of the persimmon that received direct light, so to further simplify that area in shadow using only 5 values, I would combine those shapes into one.

Good on you! It's challenging for sure. I did my first drawing today, too and found I enjoyed it and didn't stress too much, thank goodness.