Really awesome progress! If you feel comfortable, I think you could push the values in the shadows even further for more contrast. Congrats on graduation and keep up the great work!
These look great! I think the contrast is good and you can really tell the light source.
I'd say try to add lighting and shadow to the background like your reference. It might help with the figure in the far back.
Thank you Adam and Lesley for your feedback! I'll make sure to implement it in the next practise session 
And here I go with another form study. I think I've made some good improvements in the last weeks with those...
There is another thing I want to hear your all opinions on: as I am going to have a little more time on my hands now, I feel like I want to do some personal stuff as well.
The big thing I've encountered whenever I want to start a little personal project, is that I tend to give up midway because I feel overwhelmed with all the stuff I have to consider and comparing the idea I have in my head with the work I can put down on the page is always super discouraging.
I am not sure how to tackle this, all my art journey up until now has been studies, studies and studies.
How do you guys cope with that? do you just go big, like the things you want to do eventually, embrace that you suck and try to learn as much as you can from it? Or do you try to scale your personal projects so that you can get a little win out of it? and if so, how do you do that...
Sorry for the wall of text Thanks in advance for your thoughts. 
This is super coincidental since i had this thought a few days ago, most of my stuff has just been studies and i have rarely set aside time for any personal work. I've seen several discussions on people just tending to do alot of studying yet rarely do personal projects. There are several things to think about such as; make multiple pieces and cycle between them if you find that you've kind of got tired of one (however then you may not go back to it since you're discouraged), another is your 'eye' growing faster than your hands but the big thing for me is that i needed to just create. 'my purpose for starting art was to create, so even if it is bad and i suck terribly, i need to push forward, step up and cling to the hope that i will one day reach where i want to' is what i said to myself yesterday. I have the same kind of mindset where i'll start a piece then leave it midway through alot of the times since i feel like it's bad and get discouraged. I don't want to extend this out too long so i'll link this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GFHNyGWVYQU
i watched this yesterday and had a little bit of a thought that i should set aside some time for drawing, even if it turned out bad. I hope this helps!
First of all, DAAAAAAAAAAAAMMMMMMN! This is aesthetic. I think the side values for the tall skinny figure could be lighter, but overall everything works so well together. Love it, so much progress here.
The following is hella long, so here's a summary: Keep studying as much as you can, do study challenges but make a theme and infuse some creativity into it. As your studies get more complicated the easier it will be to do illustrations. Each of the videos/topics here are like tools, so if you try to tackle something you might get frustrated because you don't have all the tools yet to finish the job. Also, focus on the research and process rather than the finished product.
tldr;
For your other question I'll give my experience and you can take what you want from it.
One big thing I learned from doing the later terms and the design course from CGMA is: I was being too ambitious and diving in head first to my personal projects. So much thought needs to go into the shape of things, the style that you want everything to be in, which reference material you want to use etc. When I did personal projects in the past I felt discouraged and gave up on a few. When I did finish something I would share it but the feedback was even more discouraging because I was lacking in so many fundamentals.
One thing I noticed was that I got more satisfaction from modifying studies or doing challenges where the focus was practicing something but I added an element to make it fun.
When I did Inktober a few years ago, I decided to practice anatomy so I treated my Inktober drawings as figure studies and made it fun by adding clothes based on the themes.
I finished the challenge and I'm really proud of it, despite not liking every design lol.
Another thing I noticed is that focusing more on the process and research makes me put less emphasis on the art techniques and makes everything more enjoyable. I think I used to worry too much about the textures, anatomy, etc and that crippled my creativity. Before I knew it I got turned off from what I was doing and gave up (ie that 2-d city project I was doing 
) But when I started to be okay with ugly scribbles at the beginning of the process and focused more on how things work and shape language of my ideas it became easier to draw more finished things.
I think it's good to be study and research focused at all times and have fun with it. Once I started studying more advanced topics it was easier to do more advanced images. Now I feel more confident with tackling character art, props, and general illustrations.
One concrete example is the whole "what should I do for the background?" phenomenon that plagues most of us artists. Before, I used to think of a cool character, draw the skeleton, pile on the details, and put some generic gradient in the back or "suggest" a street or room etc.
Now going into my personal project I wrote out characters that I want to focus on and listed characteristics for them. Then I went and gathered photo references for the general feel of each character and the world they live in. After that I looked up art that sums up the general style I want the project to be in. (I promise I'm getting to backgrounds, stay with me 
)
From this point on, once I get the character sheets down, I will have a ton of information to construct an illustration. I can tell myself "Okay, this character has this personality and would stand like this. They have this kind of role and live in this time period so they'd most likely be in this location." After that it's a matter of making composition thumbnails and bam, I have a full scene instead of a random character with a bokeh background.
On top of that, I'm so hyped from the inspirational references and art I collected that it will be hard for me to abandon it. I'm excited to see how everything turns out.
Sorry this is so long, but I hope it helps you in some way 
Thank you so much, @OpaqueApple for your reply! You wont believe it but I just recently watched this exact video And it is a great video, Astri has such a positive mindset about the topic she talks about and her point are all really good! I'll make sure to watch it again to really get its essence
@LesleyCarol, thank you so much for taking the time to put together such a comprehensive and also entertaining post, it was great to read, so no worries about its length and also thanks for the feedback and compliment about my form studies (thanks to you they turned out so great, as you introduced Istebraks content to me and you always took the time to critique my work). I remember Ethan Becker saying sth similar about turning your studies into original pieces, which was at the time I heard it an interesting idea, but I did not quite understand how to do it. With your post, its a lot clearer to me now.
BIG THANKS to you two!
your 3d shapes are really inspiring in a sense
they look so good that they could count as an artwork themselves. I'm just starting this whole art school thing and doing those shapes is an assignment I try to motivate myself to do right now and seeing your result helps with that!
Thank you for the kind words, Nori! Happy to hear that they look good
It's great that youre somewhat motivated by my studies Wish you the best with your practise!
Here is todays practise. I thought I'd put my new knowledge of forms and value to the test by doing a study of the Asaro head. Doing a proper line art sketch of it plus assigning values took about 4hours 
Though most of the time was spent copying and trying to make sense of the orientation of certain planes (the eye and mouth area gave me the most trouble), it was still fun to draw.
The values are probably not 100% correct, but its a start!
Have a great day, everyone!
This is awesome! I think it's great that you're taking the time to understand challenging concepts. This approach will definitely help you apply that knowledge to future pieces and help you work more quickly in the future! Keep up the great work!
This looks amazing! Your value knowledge is really shining here!
The main things that sticks out to me are the front plane of the forehead and the back of the head. The forehead's front plane is pushed forward too far and a little too curved. The back of the head is too rounded and pulled back a little.
Keep up the awesome work!
Thank you @afoster1138 and @LesleyCarol for your encouraging words and helpfuls feedback!
I did another one today using the already existing lineart and attempting to go for a different light setting. I might add some cast shadows later, but this is the progress so far.
I feel like I understand values in forms with hard edges a lot more now. A big thing I'll have to tackle in the nearer future is radial shading (balls and cylinder)... I think this head's eyeball shows why
Anyways, have a great day, everyone!
these are really good, the asaro head study feels so alive. it makes me excited to get onto light & value but that'll be a good while away , keep up the good work mau.
These are awesome Mau.wamp! Keep it up!
That is a really good exercise! Haven't seen many people do it actually. Getting to know the head planes is probably the number one pitfall for many artists.
You did really good with shading, I can only point out one issue: the plane on the cheekbone facing up should probably be lit the strongest as well as the upward-facing plane above the lips. I presume the light on your source photo is still slightly above the head (judging by forehead and eyelid ligting).
Thank you two @OpaqueApple and @EricjC for your kind words!
And thank you Viktoriya for pointing that mistake out, now that you said it, it's pretty obvious!
I think what Marco Bucci said when he was talking about Asaro head studies was to only use 4 values, and then use more painterly techniques to group faces and do hard/soft edges to do more than just try to copy the value of each plane. Regardless I think your study is sick keep it up
Thank you for your comment, Ziggy!
Thats a very valid point you are making! Maybe I can find that video, check it out and integrate his advice into my practise!
Here is a current attempt on shading som spheres! I really like the quality jump from sphere 1-3 to 4-10. When I started with #4, I decided to take more time with each one of them. Working slower and really taking the time to do things seems to be a reoccurring pattern in my practises. I might have subconsciously increased my tempo by watching youtube artists as all their works are obviously sped up to fit a 10-20min video...
Well whatever, here's today's practise
I can definitely see the improvement with your later spheres! I love the ones you did with the back lighting. The build up of values is really subtle and looks really nice.
One thing I notice with most of these is the transition between the core shadow and lit area of the sphere is too abrupt. It almost looks like the sphere is two different colors/shades. I think it would help to add more values to make the transition smoother. I think number 5 does this really well. Also, don't be afraid to go stronger and lighter on the bounce light.
This depends on what style you want, but I think going over them with a low opacity soft brush will give them more of a finished look.
Hope this helps!
Oh yeah that makes a lot of sense, Lesley! I might have misunderstood sth regarding bounce light: You sure know about the rule that "the darkes light ist lighter than the lightest dark." --> does this also apply to the bounce light? Because I think the main reason why my bounce lights are so light is because I was kinda afraid to break that rule...
Also thank you so much, Lesley for always taking so much time to give feedback and to provide in such graphic and easy to understand way!
Of course, I'm always happy to help!
In general I think that rule is good to follow when doings that are from imagination like this. I think there are rare cases where this isn't true, but I think it is when it comes to bounce light. I eye dropped values from shapes and the bounce light was darker than any value on the lit side. One comes close, but it's still slightly darker. 
You bring up a good point with your sphere though. I think for 10 I'd say it's good to go lighter on the bounce light, but for 8 and 3 it's better to make the core shadow darker instead. I should've mentioned that I had to use a darker value for them.
Here's today's practise. I think the spheres with lighter base value still look kinda wrong, but I am pretty happy with the darker ones! (like the first and last of the second row )
Also tried to lighten the bounce lights, but I am not where I want to be yet...
Have a great day everyone!
And in addition to that I am currently working on a "personal" piece where I tried to implement what I am currently learning into sth more creative.
So I thought where would I be able to draw a lot of spheres? Okay yeah, a billiard table. But I wanted the balls to be lit from different angles, so I though: the solar system! Nice slap some bounce light on, bcs that stuff apparently doesnt exist in outer space (because science ) so I ended up with an orrery!
Here's the current progress. I am not yet sure if all balls are correctly shaded, so I'd be very happy about some quick feedback from your end, everyone! 
This looks really cool and believable!
I'd say go darker on the shadows and blend more in the middle so it doesn't jump too sudden from dark to light.
Can't wait to see this finished.
Thank you for the feedback Lesley!
Here is the new version:
I don't quite know how to go on with this piece. I guess I have to make up my mind first about what is actually around the Orrery in order to do stuff like bounce lights and also attempting to render the materials.
Maybe I should phrase my question like that: When I have practised the stuff I intended to practise with a practise piece, should I keep going (even though that would mean "wasting" a lot of time with other things like rendering materials), or should I call it a day and go on to the next practise piece?
Have a great weekend, everyone!
Unless you want to study materials I would just move on until you get to the material section of the course.
If it were me I'd go back to portraits and start learning how to apply the blending techniques to the face. Correct me if I'm wrong but didn't you start doing shading and value studies a month ago to start rendering the face? I would start trying to shade each facial feature and do mini challenges like 5 a day or something. Or you could try lighting the Asaro head based on moods like "dramatic" or "lonely" etc to make it interesting. You've made a lot of progress with shading but outside looking in it seems like you're diving into a tangent since you started off wanting to shade better but now you're considering rending materials.
Haha you are definetly right, Lesley, I am getting a little distracted with the value studies
I actually started working on shading the human nose (along with Istebraks tutorial), but I also started my new job this monday and I am still struggling with gathering the concentration to do my art practise I hope I'll adapt soon, so I can push further.
Until then, I'll keep doing the form studies as they have become a little easier by now...
Thank you so much for your comment!
Here is today's practise session. I am not really sure how to really practise shading the nose. It seems so complex and working from foto reference is quite tough as all the shading is so soft
How do you practise shading/constructing facial features?
I are you going for an exact replica? These look a lot darker than the references.
Just asking so I can give better feedback.
I just used them to construct the nose itself and then I tried to do my own light setup like in my form studies.
I just wanted to get something done last week, work has been really tedious and I couldnt concentrate.
Ah okay, that makes sense.
For me I usually study everything as it is so I can understand the forms and nuances for the feature. Then I'll do one or two on my own to see if I can make it fit with the others.
I think what you're doing is good practice too. It may be helpful to do one or two just like the reference to get a better idea of the plane changes and then change the lighting for a few others. On the ones you did, the the wings of the nose aren't as defined and the shapes are a little off. I think you did well with choosing the the correct values.
I just noticed this, but have you done any organic form studies? It might help to do those as a warm up since facial features are more organic.
Hope this helps!
Thank you for the feedback, Lesley. Apart from the spheres, I haven't done any organic form studies yet, but good point, I'll go to do those first and then continue on with facial features. Maybe that ends up being a little less frustrating
Did another form study today mixing in organic and geometric forms. Organic forms are really tough as I feel like I still lack the brushmanship with the soft brush, its super hard to control it and i often end up with hard edges which I have to soften with the smudge tool afterwards.
Also still a little unsure about my values in general. Often the core shadow of an object appears as if it had a totally different base color 
And here is today's form study. Took about 2.5-3 hours
I especially enjoyed adding the cracks and details in the end
There is one question I have: I noticed in the bottom right form I have a very strong bounce light coming from the plane where the cast shadow lands. Is it even possible to have bounce light from a plane that has a drop shadow on it? 
I wish you all a great weekend!
Here is todays organic form study.
Way better than last time, I still have a lot of things to work on 
Have a great day everyone
