Drawing a sycamore ball - 2

Well I've been staring intensely at my sycamore ball so long I need to take a break.  Hooray for blogging!  I've gotten the form down -- every little casing and spike and cavity is drawn in.  I draw what I see, not what I think I see.  This involves really looking at the subject, then down to the paper to draw just what I saw, then eyes back on the subject again.  Lots of looking back and forth.  The trick is not to get lost . . . "Where was I? What was I just drawing?"  This happens when drawing the many petals of a flower, or in this case, the many spikes of the seed pod.  Anyway, I finally captured it all.  Whew!



You can see that there is some dark shading in some areas, but not in others.  It is uneven.  That is because I mostly was concerned about getting the form right.  I wasn't really paying attention to relative darks and lights.  I will go back and work on these light values next.  My light source is above and to the left, so I have to make sure all the shadows reflect that.  And to make the sycamore ball look round, I've got to darken the outer edges and create areas of highlight.  I'll leave that for tomorrow!