Algitru's Sketchbook

[Jeremy Ray]

Morning Still Life

This may be out of line for a sketchbook, but, how realistically can you shade a cylinder?  IMO your stuff doesn't look solid because the shadow falloff is not quite right. 

Soft brushes are very good for this, especially when used with the darken/lighten only blending modes, or multiply/dodge/add/softlight.  You have to be careful to maintain planarity, but the soft brushes can be faster to work with than tediously building up a shadow gradient with a hard round brush.  You can use the hard brush, very carefully, to get the planarity back at the end.