A few seals (or sea lions I'm not sure)!

I struggled a lot with this one, this is actually my third attempt at this over the past few days and one that I'm finally satisfied with. Probably the assignment I enjoyed the least out of all of em so far. Though having said that I did enjoy it a bit more after I changed my technique. I mostly, after putting in a few first measurements like the vertical fifths, eyeballed it. I found it much more enjoyable (and effective) to eyeball a bunch of bits in and then just correct them after the fact. I did a little bit of checking my work with overlaying it in Photoshop so there is a bit of erasing and correcting. Bit messy in the cravat(?) too. Anyway, good result in the end I feel!

Some of the example animals, maybe try more later. Couldn't really get the rooster the way I liked it so now he just has an afro for some reason. There's a bit too much detail on the hippo and larger buffalo I feel but I liked the direction I had so I wanted to do a bit more.

Here's both importance and lighting. Well, I think they turned out alright! Actually, now that I look at it the right side of the head in the neck around is probably too heavy in the importance one. Now to watch the demo and see if I got the point of the assignment!

Here's my work from before watching the demos. The hand was an actual nightmare to draw, I didn't even get to the arm because I ran out of space constantly. As for the penguin and VR girl, I didn't like my first go at either of those so I thought I'd try again before watching the demo. I'm pleased with how they turned out because I can definitely see improvement from the first to the second in both of them! I think my first attempts of both were rushed instead of confident. I've watched part of the demo and can see some of where I have gone wrong, I need to use some more simple lines to to build it up first before I start adding in more detail (I am getting distracted by contours instead of trying to capture the gesture of the drawing first). I will make another attempt at the arm probably tomorrow after watching the demo!

Here's boots and snail. Another exercise that looked too hard that I ended up enjoying in the end, very well designed course! Somehow I feel like I got a better result from the boots than the snail despite the boots initially looking harder with all of the laces. It kind of just fell together after i got to the end and started filling in smaller details and I'm quite satisfied with the result. I think the snail captures the picture fairly well but in both the proportions are off for sure. It's difficult to resist adding some contour lines as well to try to describe the shape of the snail's shell and some of the plane changes in its neck(?). With how they turned out I think accuracy to both the photos is a little bit off but I'm really feeling what I drew, especially the boots. Trying to focus on confidently drawing lines in big strokes from the arm rather than scratching them in with small motions from the hand does give a very nice result. Trying different brushes in Photoshop too as I do these projects and I quite like this pencil. Proportion is something to look out for for me on my next pieces. I did use my digital cheating to move it around a bit and resize since I ran out of room on some edges of the canvas so working out where to place stuff before I start so I know where all the extremities will be will be useful too.

Some mushrooms, very valuable exercise to not only warm up but also get used to the pressure sensitivity of my tablet's pen to draw in only the right bits of the ellipses. Shout out to Stan's son for helping develop this method!

Here's Project 1! I decided to use my tablet since I already owned one and it is better at holding my interest than using paper (though I do own a sketchbook too). I'm more or less a total beginner and expected to find this exercise too difficult to be enjoyable - but it was quite fun! When I did it myself, the brush I used in Photoshop was too soft so I ruined some of my corners and such with it. I did the three pears and the man as well (beyond my current abilities I believe but wanted to give it a go) before watching the video but then re-attempted the first pear after watching the example video. I also decided to use more pencil-like brushes for a more similar experience to the video but I didn't enjoy using them much (despite the fact that I think it gave me a better looking result) - more investigation into digital methods is required! I did better than I expected and was also happy to see my improvement from pear 1 to pear 3 even before watching the demonstration. Comparing the video and my second attempt to my first pear I can definitely see a massive improvement. The light/dark balance making the image more interesting instead of splitting it right down the centre was particularly obvious between my first and second attempt. One thing I'll focus on in the future is cleaner edges. Thanks for the great course, and any feedback is appreciated.