Unfortunately I've been busy the past few months but finally I am able to start catching up with the course. Here's five portraits, first of the musketeer, second following along with Stan's demo, and the remaining three from google/pinterest. I'm pretty fond of portraits so I didn't mind this project / it didn't feel overly difficult but there's definitely still improvement to be made. I like stylizing faces when I draw so I wasn't shocked to see I'd often enlarge the size of the eyes. When I was checking my work there were a few times I was really surprised at the placement of facial features compared to how I see them! Anyway, I kept each one to about an hour long but I'm thinking I could honestly slow down a bit to measure things twice/thrice.

My level 1s and some level 2s. Definitely will do more as it's quite fun. Went over 10 shapes quite a bit but they add up fast when you need two eyes, two ears, etc. Also it's funny how some animals like the squirrel don't really look right without the bushy tail or buckteeth.

Circles have always been the bane of my existence, especially trying to draw them from the shoulder digitally. I also find I give my pen a death grip when trying to draw circles so I'm focusing on breaking that habit before I injure my wrist. Anyway, here's another warmup idea in the same vein as the Mushrooms. Kirby! I think he's great for this because... he's really just a circle and a bunch of ellipses (or ovals if you want to complicate it). Plus if you can nail the shapes it's kinda rewarding on its own.

Thanks for this demo! I love graphic art styles so most of my art heroes tend to work with ink or digitally. This helped a lot with figuring out what I should focus on when studying them.

Here's a set of master studies. My main art interests lie in video games and comics with very stylized/graphic art styles so I focused my attention mainly there. First is of my favourite artist Shigenori Soejima. I was debating this choice because I think the appeal of his drawings often come from other elements than line quality, but I felt it would be stranger to omit a study of my favourite artist lol. Luckily, there's videos online of his work so it was easier to get a better understanding of the process involved and how you can "carve out" an illustration digitally. Second is a quick study of an Adolf Hirémy-Hirschl sketch. I think I first saw a painting of his in a book by James Gurney and I just really like how he captures the softness of the body. I got into shading a bit unintentionally here -- it's pretty cool what he could do with subtle lines. Third is a study of the lines of a comic cover by Pepe Larraz. I really like his lines and how he shapes the body. I figure his work was done (at least in part) digitally but I decided it'd be fun to do it when a 0.5mm pen. Think I did an alright job but then I really scuffed it by lazily trying to put in a background haha. I did a quick cover up of that which I think worked out well due to the graphic visual style... but I included both since the original shows the lines better :)

My level 1 and 2 drawings featuring clutter from my desk lol. From my own work I know I really like the graphic look that comes with outlining the main shapes but I was finding the shadow and light method producing some very cool lines. Think I ended up using a bit of both in my level 2 drawings. As an aside, the game console probably wasn't the best choice since I just got distracted by the proportions but I tried to hold back from fixing things too much haha

For my assignment, I decided to work with a bat. I had intended to be pretty cartoony with it from the start but my original intent was for a cute character which is... much different from what I got lol. The crazed look of some of my references just really stuck out to me so I rolled with it and came out with this shady character. I think the head got progressively bigger in every sketch! I didn't pull up an anatomy diagram until after some of my initial sketches but I decided to keep some of the things I got wrong anyway since I felt they helped keep the character simpler and more cartoony.

My first go around. I started with the penguin and that could probably use another attempt or two but I'm pretty happy with the arm and vr girl. Though I'm not good at planning out how much space I need so I was working near the edge of the page for the girl which made moving my arm awkward. I tried my best not to squish the proportions because of that too much but it definitely happened a bit. Anyway, pretty satisfied so will move onto level 2.

Portrait simplification I did after watching this critique video. It's a well known portrait of Audrey Hepburn so there's a good chance you've seen it before. In the end, it maybe wasn't the best choice as the lighting on her face is very soft but I think there were still some interesting shapes in there. I'm glad I watched the whole video before finishing this as the example on toned paper gave me the idea to use a white pencil for two of the values. Previously, I was using the colour of the toned paper for the lightest value which meant I had to squeeze four pencil values under the paper's value, thus it was much harder to control and get good contrast. I think using white pencil went a lot better but I definitely need some practice with it. Proportion wise, I've noticed I have the tendency to make faces too long. I tried to compensate by making the head bigger in the hair area but think I just ended up throwing off the positions of some of my shapes (such as the highlight on the ponytail). Definitely looking forward to hopefully learning some measuring techniques later in the course lol

My first go at the level one assignments. The laces on the boots were definitely the most challenging part. I originally tried drawing only a few segments instead of every part I could see but it just made the segments I included look like they were floating there. Will be interested to see how they're handled in the demo!

Two more pears (2nd and 3rd references provided) after watching the critiques! Going to move on with the class at this point but feel I've already improved on my initial attempt quite a bit.

Another attempt at pear 1 after watching 1/3rd of the critique video. I tried to focus on having hard edges without just outlining the shapes. It's hard to resist that temptation with how difficult it can be to fill tone right to a desired edge. Also made an effort to design the highlights to give some insight on the form of the pear. I'm finding controlling values still very difficult. My second darkest tone (used for the reflected light) ended up looking too close to my dark halftone in some areas and yet also blending in to the darkest value around the border of dark and light.

My attempt at drawing the second pear reference after watching the demo. I think I managed to control my values a lot better than my first attempt but I definitely went too dark with the darkest midtone.

Attempted Pear 3 and the portrait. I find it difficult to separate the lighter shadows and darkest highlights. Also, I found I couldn't resist outlining my shapes which created a more abstract look, especially with the face.