After watching proko's review, I wanted to focus even more on the 2D contours. I find these exercises just incredibly instructive and also amusing. It's just amazing how characters are created just because of the variation of shapes.

Another Joshua Black study. Original artwork on the left, followed by my study and then my initial lay-in. I need to do quite a bit of lay-in work to establish where everything should go before starting the actual line quality study. My lay-in lines and process are surely different from the artist who I’m studying, but I find it difficult to focus on their technique until I have a solid foundation.

After the demo version I was really motivated to create my own little animals:-)

really struggled a lot with this one....

Drew one image per day. At first, I wasn't sure how much I should add, but going into the level 2 reference images I felt pretty confident. I still need to get better control over my hand/arm movement but otherwise I am pretty happy with how they turned out. The boots felt the most difficult, and I'm going to give it another shot tomorrow. Thanks in advance for any feedback!

Since I love raccoons (as you can see from my previous sketches;-) I decided to stylise this animal as well. Playing with the different shapes was really fun and forces you to step out of the usual thinking...

Here are my attempts post demo and post critique. I went back to the snail reference from the lines chapter and did the cross contour :D

This is a really fun assignment.

Attempted captain skully twice. First attempt was in blue. I realized I missed the point on this one after watching the demo and critique. I think I was so lost on how to start this one that the hairy lines were an inevitability. Second attempt was in pencil, I really tried to do the lines with single, confident and clean pulls. I did use some 'hairy' searching lines in place of ghosting to figure out where I wanted to place the line and then executed it and erased the hairs lol. I think it turned out much better. Would love some feedback 😁 thanks in advance!

This exercise was very cool! It's super helpful to simplify - I want to deepen this approach a lot more. What do you think? Any feedback is welcome:-) ps: the buffalo was definitely the most difficult for me...