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About instructor
Founder of Proko, artist and teacher of drawing, painting, and anatomy. I try to make my lessons fun and ultra packed with information.
assignments 159 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.
DOWNLOADS
project-shade-a-sphere-reference-color.jpg
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project-shade-a-sphere-reference-black-and-white.jpg
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project-shade-a-sphere.mp4
167 MB
project-shade-a-sphere-transcript-english.txt
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project-shade-a-sphere-transcript-spanish.txt
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project-shade-a-sphere-captions-english.srt
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project-shade-a-sphere-captions-spanish.srt
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ASSIGNMENTS![]()
![Wenhan Lee]()
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![Ronald Aetherborn]()
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![Ronald Aetherborn]()
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![Daniel Cabot]()
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![Chuck Ludwig Reina]()
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![David D]()
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![Sean G]()
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![Patrick Bosworth]()
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![@goldfinch411]()
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![Chuck Ludwig Reina]()
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![@aakerhus]()
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![Chuck Ludwig Reina]()
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![@androida]()
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![@justjen]()
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![@aakerhus]()
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![@justjen]()
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![@justjen]()
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![@doodleibu]()
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![@doodleibu]()
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![Angel Kritikos]()
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!
Level 1. Feel free to give constructive criticism. I used No. 2 pencil for the traditional drawings (because that's all I had). And I used the airbrush (Krita) for the digital drawings.
Getting the cross hatching to warp smoothly across the curvature of the sphere and controlling its value at the same time so that it's lighter around the center light was harder than I expected!
Did the level 2 challenge!
I was able to complete the 25m version just in time without sacrificing any quality at all, so I took my sweet time with the hatching for the light values. For the 10m version, I spent too much time on the shadows, so I couldn't do any hatching or directional shading for the light values; the shading of the mid-tones for the lights is also just much more uniform as a result. For the 5m version, I felt more comfortable, oddly, than the 10m version since I was more used to the shorter time limit. I was able to vary the mid-tones in the lights to a greater extent than the 10m version, which I was happy with. And also, for both the 5m and 10m versions, I didn't manage to squeeze in the penumbra.
Some spheres good practice not sure how I’m going to apply this to more complex forms with different local values, I’m very excited to learn this
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12d
Nice work! Exercises like this sometimes seem so abstract, but trust me, learning to do a sphere like this is SUPER useful for more complex shapes. Often times when I'm drawing or painting a torso, or a head, I will literally shade it like a sphere to start with, then start adding other elements. Working from simple to complex like that is the key to tackling challenging compositions. Keep up the good work. Cheers!
Tried to do this as a quasi-memory exercise as previously coached in the lessons. I think I need to go back and study the reference some more to imprint the shadow shapes and bounce light behavior. I don’t think they are bad, but I felt like I second guessed myself a lot about how the light would interact with the form and meet the viewer’s eye. Something still feels off on some of these, but I couldn’t pin point the error.. if you see something obvious, let me know. Otherwise I’ll chalk it up to visual memory and practice.
oh, and sorry for the noise in the image. Previous sketches are bleeding through a bit. Oops 🙂
I’ve done an exercise like this before in a preview of Form From Imagination by Steven Zapata so my approach to shading a sphere is heavily influenced by that previous experience.
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18d
Very nicely done!
My 5, 10, and 50 minutes practices. I find that I spent a lot of time trying to draw a perfect circle, which left me very little time to finesse the different values within the shape.
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22d
Looks really nice.
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22d
Looks nice! Something to keep an eye on is how dark you went on the shadow side. While it does get pretty dark, especially near the top left of the sphere, there is also a lot of reflected light from the ground. That can be tricky though! One thing I think really helps with these exercises is to think what are my "in light" values on the scale, and what are my "in shadow" values. That helps me organize my ideas a little better. Good stuff!
I tried to do most of these without looking at the ref and flipped the light direction in one.
Level 1 paper- the two spheres on the left I drew while watching the lessons. The two on the right side of that paper are untimed ones. Since both took less than 25min before I got to point where I felt like I'm only going to smudge the sphere if I do anything further, I did only 10min and 5min spheres for level two on the second paper - (the first one's 8min because I messed up the timer :lol)
Overall difficulties
- unless I'm looking at the ref, I completely get lost at where I should put the highlight.
- The terminator tends to get too harsh-edged (in the spirit of The Terminator, I suppose, but still looks wrong)
- The shape of the shadow - need more ellipsis training
Timed prioritization
- I gave up trying to get the shape the shadow correct,
- Made the spheres smaller
- Used 4H on the light areas on graphite to avoid going too dark when going fast (I need focus time to stay light)
2 firsts for me... First time using a pen and first attempt at using cross hatching. Any feedback on how to improve cross hatching technique is VERY welcome. :)
Lvl 1 entry. I didn't time it, but it definitely took me over an hour. This is one of those projects I'll be doing frequently. I have submitted a drawing done in charcoal a while back, but this is such a good exercise on how to get better in digital shading as well.
In hindsight the terminator is way too high on the right side, and it's still very challenging to make proper gradients as I didn't allow myself to use any smudge-tools for this entry. Looking forward to try again!
I like it, but I'm not sure that the halftones are subtle or light enough. Should he dark halftone next to the core Shadow be lighter than the bounced light shadow? Thanks.
Practiced some more. How do you determine length, angle and width of cast shadow when not using a reference?
And level 2.
I’ll give the 5 minutes some more shots in various media since it definitely could be improved with clearer shapes, but that’ll be it for today 👀
As for what I tried to focus on for 5 minutes:
1. The lay in
2. Defining the terminator and laying in a shadow value
3. Defining the core shadow
4. Defining the dark midtones
5. Defining the rest of the light tones and an attempt at gradation
And ended up removing:
- Multiple passes at darkening whatever needs to be darkened
- Occlusion/cast shadow definition
- Gradation between some shadow shapes
- Actual refined shading lol
I imagine I should focus a bit more on executing 1-4 better? I'll watch critiques.
Submitting after a long time. For lvl two I prioritized my edges and my shapes more than my values. I didn't remove anything. I dedicated most of my time in softening the transitions where needed. As for the values, I wanted the umbra to be the darkest every time, in order to make the sphere feel grounded.
