I don't have access to charcoal in one form or another at the moment but I did try sharpening a 5mm graphite lead to a bullet point. I did the first three that way. The last three I did with a soft pencil. All six drawings took significantly longer than 5 minutes.

Level 1 submission. This was fun. I drew the ones in regular pencil before watching the demo and the ones in blue after. The ones I did before probably followed the outline too much but I really like them. I don't know if it's just me but I found the more dynamic poses much easier to draw. The static ones had a tendency to turn into dead lumps.

I don't have the tools to do an overlay but I think I've done okay. I got a bit frustrated towards the end so I ended up eyeballing more than I probably should have. My biggest frustration was how to block in the nose.

tried with a new portrait, and this broke me, i just cant maintain the distance with only a pen, tried to simplify as much as i could in hopes it would help but no, i'm giving up for now. gonna try to attempt the photo he used in this video and see if i can do any better, but for now i just feel defeated

I'll have to try this some more because I'm not really sure I get it. I had to have the video up as I did it

This was fun and I think it finally clicked for me with the last few drawings. I'm not sure I really captured the idea of the lesson with the koala drawings but I think they turned out very nice nonetheless. I forgot to save the references for the snake and the last bird. It was supposed to be a hawk but it ended up looking more like a seagull to me

This was a fun exercise. I'll definitely come back to it again. I found it surprisingly hard to find good drawings to work from. I don't have ready access to art books at the moment so finding good quality drawings suitable for the ex3ercise was hard. Anyway, so far I've studied a few of Dave Malan's and Glen Keane's works. Takeaways: I suspect Dave Malan uses a mechanical pencil for a lot of the lighter hatching. The lines are all very uniform in thickness and value. In fact that seems to be the case for most of his line work that isn't hair. He uses darker, wider lines combined with hatching to show shadows and heavy lines on their own to show contrast I wish I had the confidence of Glen Keane. Even his squiggles have more purpose to them than my deliberate work. He build up his heavier lines from multiple passes and he uses heavier lines one the more mobile parts. Outlines, key facial features and so on. I'd like to try to draw either an animal or something mechanical so please post below if you know an artist whose work would fit.

Before and after watching the demo. It's an improvement but I'm still not sure I quite get it. I tried to show contrast with line value and shadow with line width but I don't thin I quite succeeded. I'll have to come back to it again at some point

Before and after watching the demo Using a softer pencil and treating the lines more like shapes made a world of difference