The value of... value!?

This will be the first of many posts on this subject I'm sure. Learning to understand lighting and value is my main goal right now. I'm enjoying the challenge, though i still get "stuck" sometimes. Lighting can be tricky for me especially.

So first I'll show some of the oldest of what I've done the past couple weeks, keep in mind these are all still sketches.

This is something i tried before watching a video on drawing cubes. At this point I still wasn't using a value scale, which really shows.

This robot is pretty cool i think, i wanna come back to this soon, though this is still before using a value chart, I was thinking more about lighting in this, but still struggling with certain problems.

A couple more early sketches with value and lighting.

This drawing kinda sucks, but its around when i really started using a value scale hard core.

This is the original line sketch, i like it better, the face just lost the original personality in the painting.

This is something I'm still noodling around in actively, It's starting to come out nice, it's just been a slow process. I didn't start from line art, and that seems to really slow me down at this point.

These two are studies of the same picture, on the 1st, I quit because i didn't do any construction on his face and it sucked. The other one isn't really done either, but its coming out ok i think.

And this is my current project, working from line art, painting under, tweaking line art, tweaking painting, then over paint to finish I'm thinking. This is my work flow in theory, so far on this pic, i'm sticking to that and the time isn't to bad so far, 2-3 hours. Some video i watched talked about lighting from the front being the easiest strategy, so this is what I'm doing till i semi master it.