This New Year, my resolution is to work on drawing more realistic pictures. The reason behind this, is because I find realism more difficult (seeing as you are trying to recreate something's every detail with perfection). I have done some realism, mainly in the Art 1 class I took freshman year. During this class we mainly focused on hands, and even ended up creating a self portrait of ourselves. Here is what my final hands project looked like:

This is one of my personal experiences working with realism, and I remember how hard it was. For me personally, it wasn't so much getting the outline, it was actually the shading. The reason for this is because we weren't looking at pictures, we were looking at our hands as we drew. This made it difficult to try to place your hand in the same location, so the shadows don't change. So my goal is to complete at least five realistic drawings (be it people or animals) in 2015.