Drawing blobs helped figuring out rotations of boxes for me and made it fun! I struggled with the second picture in figuing out the rotation of the pelvis box.

This assignment was difficult for me. I followed Stan's instructions, but the ellipses I drew always ended up looking warped.

It took me very long to draw each hand. I struggled with getting right rotations of boxes and determining which directions the lines are converging.

While watching the Level 2 demo and Critique videos, I tried the Level 2 project. When I see these pictures, I notice that they look less three-dimensional than how they look on paper. 

My first batch of Level 1 practice. I overlayed drawings using PowerPoint. I had difficulty in capturing right angles of the direction of the faces in many pictures.  

This is a simplified drawing of my office. I thought it was simple enough, but it took me so long to figure out the position of each line using X-ray vision. I need more practice drawing straight lines.

My first try. Drawing straight lines was more difficult than I expected. I tried to make it like the viewer was standing in the kitchen.

The second batch of practice I drew while watching Stan's Lave 1 Demo. Two of them were drawn with an overhand grip. I took too long (~30 minutes, even longer with an overhand grip) to draw each figure. I need to be able to draw faster.

My first batch of rhythm practice. I started practicing the overhand grip. The first one (most right-side picture), the third one (the middle), and the last (most left side) were drawn using the overhand grip (although I switched to the regular grip in the middle of drawing the 1st one as I got very frustrated). The line quality was clearly worse for those drawings. For the 4th drawing (second from the left), I struggled with capturing the gesture of the pushed-forward chest and pulled-back hip. Any critique/advice will be appreciated.

A couple of attempts I did before looking at the demo's. I feel like I want to practice more and more and more gestures. But I also want to catch up on where the course is live now. The struggle is real!! Anyway.. my own critique on my drawing. - I have to get back into line quality. Thick and thin lines are now total random to a point where it hurts my drawings. - I'm practicing more confident lines, but there is still plenty yo learn looking at these. I love working with the charcoal pencil I was using for these studies. The coarse brown papers is nice, but I'm not sure it's ideal and also a little too small (A5). - I get distracted by details, and when I get back into these, I need to focus on the flow and gesture first, without putting in those calves, bumps, rolls etc etc. :) Still having a good time and looking forward to every drawing session!

I enjoyed practicing gestures by drawing those seals so much that I drew all 40 references. These are the last batch of practices. I need to continue to work on the line quality. But through this practice, I got a little better at drawing using the entire arm rather than just the hand.

Did additional practices as I watched the demo. I tried to include some subtle exaggerations, but they did not look enough.

My first five practices. I had to carefully watch myself not to draw contours instead of gesture lines. I caught myself many times writing contours... But differentiating contours and gestures was difficult.

Eyeballing was more difficult than measuring everything, especially when the sizes of the reference and the paper were very different. The reference was displayed on my 13-inch laptop computer, and I used 14 x 17 paper. Although I tried to focus on the proportions rather than the actual size and length when I eyeballed, my drawing tended to be pulled toward smaller sizes, which made me very confused, and I kept correcting the sizes. I need to do more eyeballing practice!

My second attempt at drawing accurately. I do not have Photoshop, so I used PowerPoint to create the overlay image. I showed my drawing to my boyfriend and asked who he thought this person was, and he answered, "Michelle Obama." :(

This exercise required a lot of patience and took a very long time to complete. When I got tired, I started eyeballing too much rather than carefully measuring, and my proportions started getting off. I had to stop drawing to rest and wait until later to continue.

My first attempt on Level 2!

More practicing simplifying. It was difficult to simplify the monkey. I ended up just tracing the outlines for some complex shapes. I am not sure if it was a right way of simplifying.

A few more practice drawings. This time, I tried to incorporate the line organization lessons from the previous section.

Thinking about basic shapes within each animal shape is a fun exercise.