This still life of two pears was set up next to my north-facing window without any shades or reflectors. Today is sunny, so I got some nice light and shadow.

My drawing was fairly accurate, but my shading makes it hard to tell how the pear on the left is sitting. It looks like it’s lying down, but it’s actually standing up. And my stems got way too large. I was pretty distracted during this sketching session (problems with our water heater, ugh) so that probably accounts for the problems I encountered.

This was my view of the pears as I drew.

My drawing overlaid on the reference photo shows the comically large stems. But I’m happy with the pear shapes!

I did another block-in of the overall shapes using an HB pencil and that went very well. The shading was dicier because the 8B woodless graphite pencil I started shading with was too dark, and the whole tip snapped off in the middle of using it. I switched to a 4B woodless pencil which worked OK.

It’s occurred to me that I’m in this weird zone between making a sketch and making a drawing…tomorrow I want to reset my expectations and focus on accurate drawings and two-value shading with a single object.