$127.20
$159
You save $31.8
Bundle discount Each additional course part in your cart adds 3% off all courses, up to 15% off.
Full course
You will be given unexpiring access to watch the videos online .
$127.20
$159
Give a gift
Give a gift card for art students to use on anything in the Proko store.
Or gift this course:
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 139 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
1 MB
project-shade-a-sphere-reference-black-and-white.jpg
2 MB
project-shade-a-sphere.mp4
167 MB
project-shade-a-sphere-transcript-english.txt
4 kB
project-shade-a-sphere-transcript-spanish.txt
4 kB
project-shade-a-sphere-captions-english.srt
6 kB
project-shade-a-sphere-captions-spanish.srt
7 kB
ASSIGNMENTS![]()
![@osrour]()
![]()
![Patrick Bosworth]()
![]()
![@sosoph]()
![]()
![@ray777]()
![]()
![Andrew Kovachik]()
![]()
![Alison Shelton]()
![]()
![Ben Whitfield]()
![]()
![@ason]()
![]()
![Christopher Corbell]()
![]()
![Christopher Corbell]()
![]()
![Mika Vermeulen]()
![]()
![Melanie Scearce]()
![]()
![Arthur Nesbitt]()
![]()
![Chuck Ludwig Reina]()
![]()
![@ironfern]()
![]()
![Luke]()
![]()
![Luis]()
![]()
![Michael Longhurst]()
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!
•
39m
Nice work! Great variety in your execution between the two. Really nice core shadow in graphite, and I like your marker approach!
Hi :). I did this exercise twice. Here is my second attempt.
The less time I had, the more each stroke counted. For the 5-minute one, I had to be very focused. I used the knowledge gained in the past longer attempts to try to be as exact as I could with each stroke. I relied more on pressure control and did not switch pencils as much. For example, I used 4B for all of the shadows. I used 2H for most of the halftones and 2B for the darker halftones.
I struggled with the halftones. I found their value variations very subtle, which required a lot of sensitivity to see them properly and a lot of control to reproduce them accurately.
Also, I noticed that, unconsciously, I kept making the drawings smaller (which made it easier to complete in a smaller amount of time oops).
I'm wondering if I shaped the terminator correctly. Does it have to mark the hemisphere?
I Feel like my first one is really good, really clean. But I feel like core shadow on the timed ones feels a bit off. Can someone tell me how to can improve my shading on these spheres!? Perhaps I should go darker to make the highlight stand out more?
2 very similar spheres for this project. I realise I tend to always have the shadow on the left. I should really practice with something else, haha. I mentioned this in the gradient map project but I really seem to struggle with getting the lightest tones with a smooth texture. I tend to want to use the side of the pencil so I can just feather the pencil to the page but this gives such a textured tone. I guess I could get smoother paper with less texture but I feel that would just be kicking the can down the road and that this is something I should improve on.
Here is my first attempt. I’ve been looking forward to learning shading. I am happy with my result since it is an initial try. This will be another assignment to add to my warmup repertoire..
Here is my level 1 attempt. I am not sure I nailed the transition from the shadows to the highlights that well. Shading is always a struggle for me so I need to work on this a lot.
Whew that took awhile! This took me around 2 hours. I only have 2hb pencils, getting the lighter side of the sphere was a big challenge for me, got through it though,. Although unfortunately, through using my finger to try to help with shading, I got some darker light grey blobs in the lighter area, now I know not to do that. But I also think the reflective shadow is a little to light. Glad to have gotten this one done though, I finally have a sphere I can be proud of! :)
Getting used to the range of H-4H pencils for mid-tones - just got a set that has them... Close to the highlight I feel like the paper started to shred a bit even though I was very light with the 4H, but the more I went over the more little rough tendrils popped out. Probably smoother paper would be better to avoid that.
Here's another smaller, quicker drawing I did after watching the cool Cesar Santos tutorial. This was almost entirely done with a 2B pencil and a brush to spread the graphite and create the light medium tones, and the penumbra. I used a gum eraser to lighten the reflected shadow area, and because the core shadow transition was a little harsh I also lightened it and used an HB pencil to create a bit smoother transition. But it was lots of work with a brush - much easier on my paper then the array of H pencils I used for the first drawing!
•
1mo
This is a great start @Mika Vermeulen! I wanted to drop this tip here. I think creating a bit more of a transition from your core shadow and halftone values will give your sphere a more rounded appearance. Good luck with your studies :)
I also did not realize there was a reference image until seeing the previous post lol. I feel like either my halftones or my reflected light are the weakest points in my attempts
•
2mo
These are great. Those reflections can be tricky. Try going a little dark in the whole shadow side, especially around the core shadow. Keep it up!
Hello! This was a fun challenge! The unlimited time definitely allowed me to get acquainted with the process. The times challenged clearly showed the pressure since my sphere are bottom flat lol. I'd appreciate any feedback! Thank you!
Took a few extra attempts at unlimited time. My initial 2 were too high contrast, the light group was too narrow and it hurt the readability. The next 2 were better, intentionally going for a wider value range in the lights, but I think I could have gone darker on the darks, and I was putting the bounce light too close to the bottom of the spheres, the occlusion should have darkened the bottom-most section of the shadow, blending it with the cast shadow.
With the timed studies I am finding that I spend the most time trying to get the dark halftones and the core shadow to blend together without having the core shadow extend over the terminator.
I was also noticing some weird perspective issues I was having with the lay in, I kept trying for a higher angle, but I think i only managed it on the 5 minute one (though I wasted a minute trying to get it right).
This is my Level 1 shaded sphere. I wasn't very satisfied with my first attempt so I tried again. Even the second one needed some tweaking. Getting the values right so that the highlight was visible was tricky, as was judging the relative value of the top left of the sphere and the shadow (after drawing the sphere I actually got a color picker to check)
Here are my shaded spheres. I think my biggest challenge was getting the cast shadow shape correct. Also 5 minutes was really tough to get everything in, but felt like I improved as I did more and got more efficient. Also for the first two, I didn’t realize there was a reference photo, so I did those from imagination with a few checks back to how Stan demonstrated. Then I watched the critique and figured out I missed the photo.
