This assignment felt like a slog. I understand that part of the learning is to discipline yourself to do things outside your comfort zone, but I didn't enjoy this whatsoever, especially not the boots. I think once I actually learn something in the demos and in the rest of the lines section, I won't dread stuff like this as much. At least I forced myself to do one boot to say I did it. I'm excited to use my own reference photos from now on.

I just did a few of these mushrooms but look forward to warming up with more. This is way, way better for me than the ellipse exercises from Drawabox, since Stan designed this so that we actually draw something at the beginning of the course, not just practice concepts for what feels like infinitude. Good job Stan for designing a warmup that I actually want to do!

So this portrait was a bonus for me, as I am definitely more on the Level 1 track as far as my draftsmanship skills. But I took this as a challenge to work on my gouache skills in my sketchbook with a flat brush, so I got way in over my head! First mistake was the block-in - my proportions were off and I thought I could just fix it in the gouache stage, but the head ended up being too short regardless. Next mistake was using zinc white instead of titanium white to mix these values. I ended up learning a valuable lesson in when to use which white. Another mistake was just not mixing enough paint in the first place, so I had to remake mixtures twice or three times. I also should have keyed the painting much lighter and just mixed just touches of the lamp black into the white rather than mixing white into black. At the end, I was just overworking everything, so I just threw on highlights and called it finished. Overall, I knew this was going to be a shot in the dark, but I'm glad I got to practice gouache and working with simple blocks of color. The pear was good practice with pencil work, but since I felt like Level 2 was above my pay grade anyway, I'm glad I got some gouache practice in too!

First 3 attempts! I spent more time on the second one, but that one was a lot more time-intensive and I blended the graphite more by using the overhand grip instead of using the point of the pencil on the third. All were done with the palomino blackwing, I think I could probably make the values more distinct once my other types of graphite come in.