Here is my attempt at the animal portraits. In retrospect and thanks to a really nice explanation from one of the moderators (thank you Patrick!) I think I will revisit this after work today and look more into shape design. I was a bit too focused here on keeping the shapes geometrical (perhaps with the exception of the buffalo horns, which were frankly really hard to simplify).

You’re on the right track with your thinking, the "best" approach is to use whatever works for the reference images at hand, and use as few and as simple shapes as possible. The primary focus for this exercise is to keep your shapes organic and simple, and focus on creating cool, simple designs. Simple shapes can be stretched, bloated, indented, or curved, no need to adhere to geometrically perfect squares, circles, triangles, etc. That said, the semi circle in your example is a great design shape to play with! It’s a simplified shape with a straight counterbalancing a curve. You can even wrap that shape around the entire pose like an envelope to represent the entire simplified idea, albeit too simplified to fully express the pose is of a cat quickly pivoting direction. If you stretch and distort that shape you give it directionality, motion, and specificity, you can use it to create just about any pose! The semi circle is still maybe too simplified, so that’s where the design element comes in. By making choices with your shapes, how to bend, pinch, squash, and stretch them to dynamically capture the pose you’ll begin to develop your own shape language. Using C S I or curves and straights, you can create shapes that are simplified and specific to the pose you want to capture. Take a look at the Simplifying Shape Design livestream, Stan draws a few examples and covers this process really well. https://www.proko.com/course-lesson/simplifying-shape-design-livestream/comments If you wanted to focus on using shapes that are more universally reusable for other poses or animation, look into The Bean! https://www.proko.com/course-lesson/how-to-simplify-the-motion-of-the-torso-the-bean/assignments Also from an animation standpoint, Ethan Becker covers this and a few other elements of your question in a few videos https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mFuNdJoEhq4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FCHhNJWzUnc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iLIjD-5AgWU Hope this helps!

I was browsing the web in preparation for the master study assignment, and came across the awesome Toh-Yasu. In restrospect I might have been better off picking something that required less measuring, to allow more time for rendering. I tried to limit the time spent, but ended up around the 2-3 hour mark still. Also, I took this opportunity to do an experiment with shading a paper using coffee, which was surprisingly fun to do. Hence the darker paper. Oh, and another think I might do differently next time trying something like this is to draw larger. Failing to utilize the entire page made it hard to measure and get the details right.

I tried to blend the hierarchy and shadows/light into this one.

Ugh, this kind of exercise truly exposes the difference in difficulty between simply copying something and actually coming up with stuff from imagination. Which is good in a way, but also awfully humbling. I continued with the snail theme from before and did a kind of Hachikuji wannabe character. The main takeaway here is that whatever fluid sketching skills I might have, they go completely out the window as I am faced with inventing rather than copying. Hopefully that is something that can be solved with enough practice.

For this one it was quite interesting to notice the shift in confidence as I moved from the girl to the hand. The girl being rather cartoony made it easier for me to draw fluid lines, while the hand made me more prone to measure, correct and redo lines. I am really interested in how to tackle these situations, as I feel that there are subjects that demand a level of preciseness to not fall apart completely. When I got to the penguin my desire to play Fantasy Life i got the better of me, so I sort of rushed it :P

I stuck to the Level 1 on this one, as I really liked the "pose" of the snail.

Fun exercise!

I'm in a similar situation with you in that there I'm drawn to the tactile and emotionally connective qualities of traditional, but I want to versatility of digital. In the end I went primarily traditional, and supplemented the digital later. Actually now I often draw the original sketch in traditional, take a photo and then use the digital tools to enhance it. In terms of learning I think I learn better with traditional, but I occasionally use my tablet to check proportions, etc. If it is iteration for learning, it's actually more efficient for the learning process to redraw the whole thing again from scratch. That way you can really see yourself improve upon the fundamentals. I love redrawing a wonky head. But when you get later into the creative process, you'll want the ability to e.g., fine-tune or completely change the color scheme, when you play with stuff like composition. In short, I ended up being a type of hybrid. Like bilingualism, it did take more investment in time to familiarise myself with the digital interface later, but yeah - I recommend going traditional first for fundamentals. Especially if you are a tactile person, you will connect so much easier with the material.