Squeeze My Lemon

Just when you think you're progressing, you try drawing a lemon and it all goes to hell. I'm still directing all my attention to studying tonal values which is why I've moved to these small charcoal studies. These drawings are about 4"x3", part of me thinks this might actually be too big as I still catch myself getting bogged down in the details; even though I know not to do this. To be fair I'm a lot better at this than I used to be , I at least have some sort of approach now and I know what I'm looking for.

The first lemon is quite honestly a complete crime against humanity, moving to the second I had started to feel that maybe my paper was too dark. I had to add chalk to lighten the ground to the correct value and I'd prefer not to do this as the more chalk you add the greater the risk of everything getting mushy. On the 3rd try I moved to white paper; much better but I think I got the local value of the lemon too dark.

Below is a step by step of how I'm handling these sketches. Step 1 is the basic line drawing and shadow block in, Step 2 develops these shadows slightly and adds the objects local colour values and Step 3 is where I introduce black pastel to really bring out the darks. My Step 2 is a bit overworked and I'm overblending the final product a bit but because I'm mostly concerned with tonal value at the moment I'm not too worried about this. I'm sticking to willow charcoal for the time being though I'm finding it wipes off too easilly, so when it comes to placing the darkest darks I use pastel or conte crayon so that it stays whilst I work on the rest of the picture. Not too pleased with these but I am happy with how I'm starting to see all the different tonal values- this is improving and I think it has clicked.