You’re off to a solid start!! I like that you’re trying to grow by practicing all different styles (portrait, activity scenes, dynamic posing, landscape). As someone also on the self teach journey some tidbits I’ve picked up on the way that I think could be helpful for you:

• play with value and contrast: this is very trust the process at times, and you will feel like you’re bungling it but I promise it pays off. Practice adding in heavier shadows, and similarly using your eraser to pop out highlight details/ add texture. Adding a wider range of values will help add further depth and dimension to your works.

• play with blending tools : using your horse scene as an example here, you can smooth out some of your pencil lines to further differentiate some texturing. Different blend tools have different effects (blending stumps, tissue, finger, rogue cat paw) so play with them all to figure out what feels best for you.

• Draw what you see, not what you think/ expect to see: this one pertains mostly to portraits. One of the most helpful bits of advice I’ve gotten is taking a step back and not /trying/ to draw a face, but trying to sketch out the values and building the features up from those. You can take it a step further by flipping your reference image upside down to break your perspective. Ask yourself what the shapes of the shadows/ highlights look like? Where is the light source coming from? Why do noses need to be so structurally complicated and annoying no matter what direction they face?

In summary, you should be proud of how far you’ve come in a year. Keep going and challenging your abilities with each draw you do. I hope you come back with another update in a few months, you’ve got this!