This was extremely rough. I thought it wouldn't be that bad since I have my hand to look at. I was wrong; keeping proportions and gestures when doing boxes is rough. I realized with each hand that you really have to use gesture first if you don't have a reference. Grounding a drawing in perspective is hard from imagination if you are working with complicated forms.

The proportion guides finally make sense. I can see why, though boxes are a great first step to good construction, and not an end-all solution.

Yikes, I need to really work on using my arm to get better lines. Bad lines at the beginning = bad result at the end.

My hand hurts from the overhand grip, but I feel like I am getting the hang of using the force shapes. These are, in order, left to right, and I can definitely see what Stan meant about warming up. My last one was quicker and more solid. I'm actually surprised that the proportions aren't the worst, even though I didn't think about them as I went.

Hope its alright I plopped them onto the same sheet.

Fun!

I don't feel great about this but I find that it is really hard to eyeball proportion without looking at shadows. This breaks the idea that we should be looking out for better shapes like in the last few lessons and isn't great for drawing the same subject later.

I already see a difference because I used straight lines from the start. I don't know if it's a good habit, but I used different marks to represent the hair, as I knew the contour shouldn't be focused on detail at this stage. I like how you mentioned just plugging things in and checking them, as I think that is a good method for my process. It felt wrong drawing boxes at first, establishing a measurement to build everything else on, but I can tell that because the first measurement was good, everything else was better, too. I still feel like I am not getting the full benefits of this, however. Maybe it's because I am comfortable drawing fast, or it's just years of habit, but I cannot, for the life of me, get measurements without using the shadows as shapes to measure from. This hurts me because my layout relies on value too early to represent the figure, and I don't know if that is the right approach. I'll keep trying to do this and see if slowing down gets me a cleaner result. I know I can just do another linework layer on top, but it would be awesome to start a full drawing from a cleaner start.