Yeah I quite like the Ronin blockiness; it alludes to their relative primitiveness and rough culture.

Blargh, here, have some things I did a year ago in school, Excuse the horrible lining up, scanner(printer) small and I had to try my best, then got lazy.

I know I screwed up a lot, especially on the scale in the second one.

Took my first HDR image. Pretty nice, I'm hopefully to find more exciting subjects!

@Shook, I'm fairly sure you're thinking of an ellipse, a sphere is the one exception to perspective, it never changes from a ball at any angle or perspective.

You got pretty close with your depiction, the highlight and brighter value looks a bit out of place though.

I meant those circles you can draw around a sphere, but regardless of my poor wording, that's some quite useful info there, thanks! c:
I've dicked around with it a bit, and here's what i have so far.



The reasoning behind the third version being that i prefer to stick to 4 colours, but i can see that this notion just doesn't cut the mustard for spheres. So i tried dithering it, but i probably won't be doing that a lot since it takes forever to do. So oddly enough, the main obstacle for me here was/is my few-colour habit. :U

spheres are still clowns though

@unwoundpath: Nice! I personally don't think you screwed up in any notable manner, so props on that.

I'd still say your shading on the sphere should be more circular than that to be honest, the highlight is fine but the rest are just sort of randomly oriented curved lines

Mine's far from geometrically perfect either but I think it portrays the general idea

Just posting to say that Metal Chao is absolutely correct in this instance and y'all should follow his advice.

Spheres are tricky before you get to know them.

There's just something in my head that says "NAY" to perfectly circular rings of shading (namely because the normal planes of a sphere will only ever have a circular intersection when viewed perpendicularly), but i suppose my head isn't always the most reliable source of information. :U
But let me illustrate why i'm confused about these spheres:



I'm thinking of the highlight as the reflection, however wrong that might be. In the above case, light is coming down vertically, which obviously produces a completely straight border between light and shadow. More diffuse light hits the eye from the more directly exposed top of the sphere, and right around the halfway between the top and equator, the specular reflection hits the eye on the right (also shown as a specular reflection hitting YOUR EYES RARGHARGHRGA). Now, here's why circular shading bothers me:



It'd look like that from this angle of approach, which strikes me as off. But now that i'm analyzing the ♥♥♥♥ out of this sphere, i noticed that i've been doing something that i KNOW to be wrong:



I forgot that the sphere curves in all directions for the highlights and core shadows. I suppose this does bring it closer to those neat circles that you're telling me about, so now i'm actually pretty convinced that you were right all along. Fancy that. :U

Also, in case it isn't obvious, i'm really grateful for your help, guys! If i were to find all this out by myself, it'd take like a million times longer than it has already. c:

Here's a thing

It looks like it wants to hurt me, yet it bares the medical cross.
I like it.

Scribbled this up out of boredom.

And this is why you should always mirror your work every now and then:

@Bomb: Lines are really scratchy, you could go over it in a new layer with smoother lines.

Mongol raider pestering a village.

Man, the definition you're able to put in with just some simple hatching is beautiful.

Thanks Alphagamer, glad you think so.