Attached are my thumbnails, value study, and a full render. I know the render wasn't part of the assignment, but I was curious to see how it would turn out. Did anyone else notice a resemblance between the statue and Marshall?

I am really happy to learn more about 2D shape design philosophy within the bounds of 3D representation. This project helped me redesign my process to ensure my pen strokes remained hard and details were pushed out, no matter what. This felt impossible, as I constantly wanted to blend my edges or fall back to a traditional layering process. Thankfully, I kept redoing the assignment until I finally felt I had a grasp of how to organize darks and lights. Here are some notes I took along the way: - Actually squint; don't just try to generalize. Squinting reveals the actual values without the barrier of focusing on one area. - Darks are blobby lakes (keep these simple and connected). - Midtones are rivers (this from the video unlocked so much). - Highlights are "texture islands" (it's okay to separate these to show emphasis).

Gestures are fantastic. Every time I do them I feel like I learn something new.

Here are my balls. As I got more time, I added more complexity to the layering and lighting process. The biggest thing that helps is a layer below my drawing that solidifies objects with tone instead of just exposing the paper/canvas underneath.

I took my time to ensure these thumbnails were useful for creating a piece. I know they have blended edges in places and too much detail for a notan study, but I didn't want to ignore the momentum I gained treating this like an actual project. I hope it's still valuable as an exercise! Feedback is always appreciated!

After looking at others' work here, I wanted to try applying color to mine and use what I saw to better define the shapes. Color is so informative that I found it easier to refine proportions, since it is now separating objects. Now it makes sense why many speed painters bounce around in their processes. One step can help with another and work like a puzzle. I hope to use this more to help me see where I can improve my values.

Levels 1 and 2. I worked digitally, in the same way I use charcoal, and tried my best to preserve the lights as the white of the canvas. I first rendered multi-value shadows with an overhand grip, added a posterization layer, and refined the shapes in a simplified form. This forced me to eliminate detail where possible and focus on proportion and shadow design. To go the extra mile, I pushed the values further without the posterization. Extra values help, but getting the main shadows and highlights are what really matters.

I ended up making a good pencil for this project so that I could have better control over how textured values feel. Overall, I think I was able to find great worth in being able to adjust the brush size to vary the amount of smoothness a value receives.

Level 2! I still want to return to this often. I haven't looked too much into body construction yet, as I know it will be a frequent subject in future lessons. I can see how staying loose will make this easier, as it's quality over quantity until I improve at spinning the body in my head.

This exercise was killer at first, but then it was amazing! I made it ridiculously hard on myself by staring at each thing for two minutes before trying to draw it from multiple angles. (I really want to get better!) This is an amazing project. It's nuts. For a sec, I got into the zone and felt like I could draw anything I imagined. I hope to feel this more and more as we go!