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You’ll learn the most important foundational concepts for drawing anything and soon you’ll be drawing pictures out of your imagination or from reference.
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Founder of Proko, artist and teacher of drawing, painting, and anatomy. I try to make my lessons fun and ultra packed with information.
assignments 358 submissions
I started rendering the spheres in charcoal using Conte 2B/White on smooth newsprint, then repeated the exercise in graphite with 2H, 2B, 4B, and 8B pencils. One of my main struggles was pushing the lighter values dark enough, and keeping the gradient transition smooth and even. I tend to start light and build up slowly, but I often stop too early—so most of my spheres end up too light or high-key, even after multiple layers of rendering. Some of the transitions are patchy and uneven as well (which I can see way more when they’re viewed as small thumbnails!)
For the untimed spheres, I gave myself between 45 minutes to an hour each. I didn’t change my overall approach much for the timed versions, but I noticed some differences as the time decreased. The 10-minute version felt fast, but I liked how it came out a little more stylized. Since I didn’t have time to smooth things out, the first, more gestural marks remained visible, which gave the drawing a certain energy that I actually enjoyed. In the graphite version, the reflected light came out too light, but I focused on using cross-contour marks to help reinforce the spherical form.
In the 5-minute studies, I realized I spent about 50–60% of the time just getting the lay-in right and making sure the sphere looked proportional. That didn’t leave much time for rendering. Charcoal helped here—I was able to lay in darker values more quickly and shift my focus to halftones sooner. I also tried a 5-minute graphite version using a blending stump and a quicker, more gestural hatching approach. The stump helped build value faster, which gave me a bit more time to suggest cross-contours and pull out highlights with an eraser.
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ASSIGNMENTS![]()
![Bag of Snakes]()
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![Aireen]()
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![Ash]()
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![Andrew Kovachik]()
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![@na_talie]()
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![@na_talie]()
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![Travis Rossi]()
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![Chuck Ludwig Reina]()
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![@gothamdemon]()
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![@gothamdemon]()
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![Juan Andres Gonzalez Trejo]()
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![Patrick Bosworth]()
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![Rich Acosta]()
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![Applesmapple]()
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![Lorena Faria]()
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![Patrick Bosworth]()
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![Wieke Pierhagen]()
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![Laika]()
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![Ibrahim Sahibzada]()
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![Melanie Scearce]()
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![Laika]()
The reference image of a ball is in the Downloads!
Level 1
Welcome back! Your next project is to shade a sphere like I did in the last lesson.
- Start with a linear layin, in this case it’s just a circle and some ellipses for the cast shadow and terminator
- Separate light from shadow with a flat value
- Model the core shadow and reflected light
- Render the halftones
- Add the highlight
- Deepen the occlusion shadow
- Fade the penumbra
- And make your final adjustments
The most important aspect of this exercise is getting your value relationships correct. If your edges are rough, and your spheres look like they're sculpted from clay or play-doh, that's totally fine!
Level 2
You’ll be doing timed studies. This will force you to internalize the process and improve efficiency.
- Untimed - You give yourself as much time as you need to get it right. One slow, fully rendered, realistic sphere, with careful edges and clean values.
- 25 minutes - This is still plenty of time. You'll have several minutes to spend on refining each element.
- 10 minutes - You’re gonna start feeling rushed. You don’t have the time to labor over any details. You have only a minute or 2 to quickly indicate the correct values of each element.
- 5 minutes - This is hard. Don’t try to make your drawing look polished. Simplify everything and get that quick impression working. Repeat these until you internalize the process and get faster.
Reducing time forces you to prioritize. Taking 5 minutes instead of an hour to shade a sphere means cutting 57 minutes of something. You have to identify the critical 5% of effort creating the illusion of depth. You can carry that knowledge over to your longer drawings and spend more of your effort on those critical things.
Timed studies also build mark-making efficiency and better draftsmanship. You don't have time to overwork your lines and smudge things around. With no time to overwork your lines, you have to practice putting down a few strokes that indicate your intention.
Submit Your Drawings
After you’re done, upload your completed sphere drawings below. And try to reflect on it. What did you struggle with, what worked, what didn't. This helps me provide better feedback and allows you to practice more deliberately.
Level 2, write down what you prioritized, what you removed, if your approach changed at all between the studies, and anything you learned about efficient rendering.
Deadline - submit by April 18, 2025 for a chance to be in the critique video!
Another great exercise. It was excellent to have the relationship between shadows, mid-darks and mid-lights so clearly broken down and then a great learning challenge to try to control the distinction. I extended the brief to try to apply the learning a little further
This was my really first attempt with shading and with charcoal pencils. It was really hard with the halftones. And also with planes, but I think you can easily see that XD Charcoal is also really messy but it was also fun to use. Long road ahead I suppose.
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8d
This is the most beautiful sphere I have ever seen. Great work, Aireen!
I finished the course and then switched to charcoal pencils and my rending abilities obviously took a dive. After much frustration I have realized I need to go back and practice the basic concepts. So for now I'm back to practicing spheres and value control 🎉
By the way, I apologize for the dark spot right next to the highlight on the left sphere of the second page. My kneaded eraser chose to disintegrate and when I tried to remove it, it never came off the page, but just smeared. Apparently, you should not hold that eraser too long.
Level 1 and 2 shade a sphere assignment. Any critiques would be greatly appreciated!
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25d
These look terrific Travis. The only recommendation I would make, is go a little bit softer at the edge of your core shadow. While it is sometimes a very stark transition, there is still a bit more softness to it. But again, looks great!
I think throughout all of them I think I grasped it but in execution the 10 min drawing happened to be hard for me. Learning what mistakes I did in that one made my 5 min drawing feel better. Also I think the one thing that carried through was the bounce light being a lil too light.
I squinted with all them and felt my core shadow was dark but didn’t carry through the equator of the ball. Overall still had fun with this being challenges with time
any feedback is welcomed
I think throughout all of them I think I grasped it but in execution the 10 min drawing happened to be hard for me. Learning what mistakes I did in that one made my 5 min drawing feel better. Also I think the one thing that carried through was the bounce light being a lil too light.
I squinted with all them and felt my core shadow was dark but didn’t carry through the equator of the ball. Overall still had fun with this being challenges with time
any feedback is welcomed
This was a great project to get back into drawing; it had been a long time since I’d done any shading, which I’ve always found interesting. I did these two drawings fairly quickly—I’d say in about 10 to 15 minutes each—using different graphite pencils (4B and HB).
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1mo
Really nice job! The second one has a lot of great line work going on and the reflected light isn't too strong, nice control. I'd suggest bumping up the value for the terminator in the second one just a bit to get a bit more of a 3D feel to it, and to separate the light and dark more clearly. Keep up the good work!
Was on vacation for the past week, just got home yesterday and I'm just getting back to drawing now. I don't hate how this came out. I imagine I'll get more and more used to shading over time. I definitely put the terminator way further to the right than the reference photo, but I decided just to run with it anyways, to at least make it look normal
I really appreciated the method. This approach helped with trying to determine the best values and i wrote down all of the reminders! Here's my attempt. I think my lights dont have enough of a gradient but I think I did a good job with smoother shading than my past attempts.
first and 10 min attemp
photo made it lighter u know the drill
would love some suggestions
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1mo
These look really good! Overall you achieved a really good result in 10 minutes, thats a tough timeframe! I think your light halftones are bit too dark, and your reflected light is a little too strong, so your shadow side is reading very close in value to your lightside. If you lighten your light side a bit with a kneaded eraser, and darken your entire shadow side a bit with another layer I think you'll see an even more 3D effect. Here's a great video from Dorian Iten on shading that might help!
https://www.proko.com/lesson/mind-blowing-realistic-shading-tricks
Somehow the pictures are lighter than what I drew, maybe it's the reflection of the graphite pencil?
OOPS! I only found out during the critique video that there were reference photo's!! Totally missed that. So these were done from my mind, sorry!!!
I found that I really had to get the first line layin right before starting with all the other stuff. And with time pressure, that was harder to really take the time to nail that part. I struggled a bit when drawing the shadow outline; where on the sphere do I put it precisely? What if the light was a bit higher or lower? But I pushed those questions aside for another project to ponder on; first this ;-)
With the 5 minute timer I used the side of my pencil most; it saves a lot of time. Details only when there is time left.
Pretty happy with how it turned out!
I'm feeling more confident in my second attempt. I checked my work by putting a blur filter over it digitally.
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2mo
Nice! Your shading looks smooth and even, and all the components of the shadow are in the right places. Don't be afraid of the core shadow! I think you could build up that shape even more and blend it out to the bordering halftones.
I feel like I'm not really taking long enough to shade everything, but when I step away and look at it I'm not sure what else to add. This drawing took about 10 minutes. Maybe it's because it's easier to set values digitally. I avoided just blending everything together.
