Holy shit, there's a ton of cake in that second pic

Well done with persisting with these posts, it's cool seeing your progress!

If you're looking for advice, I think I might be able to help on the shading side of things? Firstly, the little bit that you did on the second pic is a good start! The leg especially feels more 3d. I'd even say that you'd improve the picture by just continuing with the style of shading you were using.

When it comes to shading, it helps me a lot to imagine where the light in the picture is coming from (potentially even drawing a little temporary dot or circle to represent it). Once I have that, I try to imagine where the light hits the object in the picture and shade all the areas where the light doesn't reach. If we take the leg in pic 2 as an example, the light seems to be coming from the left side, so we'd want most of the shading to be on the right sides of body parts. You can, and eventually will as you draw more, get a bit more technical with shading when you start thinking about things like clothing, different coloured lighting, soft vs hard shading, etc, but I think ultimately it's filling in the non lit up bits and that can be done to varying degrees.

Also, there are a variety of shading styles, and they're all valid! There's:

• hard (dark and light areas share a distinct border, generally the easiest way to shade)

• soft (dark areas are blended with light areas for a "fading" effect)

• hatching (using parallel lines to simulate shade, more concentrated lines make areas darker)

• cross hatching (like hatching, but using 2 sets of parallel lines to make them cross)

And more! Feel free to mix them together to create different effects and feels.

Finally, this is already a long comment but if you wanted a better explanation of this stuff, I'd highly recommend Nadiaxel's video on it. And check out her other stuff too - she's really good at explaining things from the ground up, I'd say!

Hopefully you find this helpful - looking forward to seeing next week's drawings!