Something which I'd never consciously realised, but knew in a subconscious way, is how important shadows are to a drawing. Beyond the obvious cast shadow, which fall onto the underlying surface, there are shadows on the object itself and also a 'balance point shadow' which is the very dark area right under the object. All three of these combine to give shape to an object and a sense of its presence in the world. So to get to grips with this aspect of drawing I settled on a simple shadow sketch of some fruit under a bright light:
The nice thing with this arrangement is that there were so many different shadows at play - more than can be discerned in the photo. On the fruit there is obviously a darker area away from the light and I've loosely shaded this in - without trying to capture maximum detail. However down on the table I could make out at least three different shadow areas with the closest being the darkest and some quite clear delineation between the shadows:
Placed side-by-side I think that my picture matches quiet nicely with the arrangement in terms of shape and position. However even though I worked hard on the shadows I think that I should have made them much darker - which is tricky as I was using a 4B pencil to fill in the darkest areas and even that was barely sufficient. Nevertheless the fruit looks solidly placed on the table and that's quite satisfying as so many of my pictures until now have kind of floated in space. Not bad for a month's effort though!