10-29 Cell-Shade Practice

I'm trying to push my values more, especially the terminator, because that one is vital to making my cell-shading pop. 

Notes:
Uh, the first two suck a metric ton of ass, buuut, tbf, they were the first and second pancake (and we all know how well THOSE turn out on any given Sunday). My first mistake was not just using the sphere lasso and paint bucket to drop my shadow and base color for the ball. I used (I believe) Kyle's brush kit (whoever Kyle is) once I had the initial values slapped down, bc it has a quality smudge tool; and the second ball I didn't bother rendering, bc I made it purely to visually document the degrees of black and white on the B+W spectrum. The "bounce light" is just BARELY darker than the base shade, it turns out. 

 The third ball I slapped down all the values and then smudged everything, swiping a hard line just to spread it around, informing the degrees of light and shadow. I focused on the terminator and occlusion the most. The solid darks create the most contrast; they sell the illusion of depth. 

P.S. I tried to just focus on mileage for this exercise, pushing aside my perfectionism (and attendant fear of failure) to complete the study. 'Don't get it "right", get it done!" was my mantra for the past five hours. (No, THIS study did not take me five hours.)