That large shape describes the boundaries of the brow ridge on top, the edge of eye socket where it marries up to the zygomatic process on the lateral side, and the bulge of the eyeball and skin folds on the bottom, and then on the medial side where the eye socket meets the nose bridge bone (note: not the tear duct!). It's a construction technique used to wrangle the complex shapes of the eye into a simple, attractive shape first, in which the smaller secondary and tertiary forms can be drawn. It's a good example of working big to small to create accurate proportions and achieve the primary big effect first, then build upon that by adding smaller forms and details. Yes, the eyeball, lids and eyelashes are secondary, not primary forms when you're dealing with the entire head - features in general. Going in right away to draw the eyeball and lids without this construction will probably result in wonky proportions and much more difficult circumstances for applying shading and lighting the entire eye. I think with experience you can relegate that construction phase to your mind and go right for the eye while keeping the larger shape in mind.

1 - the entire top black part pulls off like a lid, so that the entire interior including the sharpening blades are exposed. You can just dump the graphite shaving out and then gently push the black lid back on.

I'd suggest trying to really drive home the box form and its plane changes in the torso (ribcage + pelvis). In your images, the large torso forms are flat-ish or represented with ovals. With mannequization, we want to really understand exactly how these large forms are oriented in 3d space, and the box forms Stan demos (building upong the robo-bean) will train that sense. I'd suggest following along with Stan's video demo, pausing frequently and copying his drawings. Then try it on your own. It'll sink in eventually.

Minor nitpick: Try to evenly light the photograph of your image and crop out distracting backgrounds, like the table. If you have an editing program, consider knocking grayscale drawings back to black and white so the tones are more neutral in hue. Your image has an orange-ish hue. Just a nitpick. Thanks for sharing!

Love how you deliberately show the planar facets in the image on the right. It shows you're thinking critically about directions of the planes on the form and which value to assign to each plane depending on where the light source is. This is the a good strategy I think.

Nice! What I think you did correctly here was to keep the light and shadow families in their respective areas, not mixing light family values into the shadow parts of the form or vice versa. This is surprisingly tricky to do when learning how to shade. I do think that you could push the shadows on the left even darker. Thanks for sharing!

In your drawing, the shadow area of the pear has values that belong to the light family. This violates one of the primary rule of shading: the lightest darks should be darker than the darkest lights. Stan hits on that point in various lessons here. When you have values in the shadow area competing with values in the light area, the illusion of 3 dimensionality is destroyed, flattening out the image.

In your drawing, the shadow area of the pear has values that belong to the light family. This violates primary rule of shading: the lightest darks should be darker than the darkest lights. Stan hits on that point in various lessons here. When you have values in the shadow area competing with values in the light area, the illusion of 3 dimensionality is destroyed, flattening out the image.

Really nice selection of fruit! The variety of shapes and values are fantastic. I think I might try a pepper too!

Nice studies! Bravo for following the exercise instructions and picking your own fruit and providing the ref photos!

Nice shapes. Values make sense and read well.

Thanks for sharing. You might want to try a larger paper format that can lay flat on a surface. The reason is to enable you to move the writing tool (looks like a graphite pencil?) from your elbow and shoulder more. I was taught incorporating arm-based movements in your gesture marks is an important part of learning gesture to increase grace, fluidity, spontaneity and line quality. On small paper sizes, we're forced to make small wrist-based movements. Larger paper encourages you to use elbow and shoulder in your marks. Definitely not a "requirement", but might be worth trying what the masters old and new suggest.

Yes, this is a very subjective topic, lol, but I'll add that I really like the pencils Stan uses here, called Conte a Paris - the pierre noir series of charcoal pencils. Very, very nice material, but the issue with them is they break VERY easily. You have to baby them to the extreme to keep the charcoal from breaking in the wood casing, and they aren't that cheap. For the kind of stuff I've learned here on Proko, I've been more efficient with Wolff's Carbon pencils - 6B. They are good when you want something more precise, technical or don't care about going super black, which the Conte's will give you. the 6b is soft enough that it will still give you a lot of range in tone and line quality. Paper is also important. For learning the stuff taught here on Proko, I'd only recommend pairing charcoal pencils with smooth newsprint, or the texture will get in the way of learning, imo. When I'm trying to execute something more finished instead of in learning mode, I'll switch over to a different paper with more texture for the effect.

If you're looking to be able to invent work, whether it's figures, environments or whatever, you're definitely in the right place for self-learning. There's a lot of great courses here for that. Research them and buy them as you can afford. Once you pay, you have lifetime access to the content.

It looks like you have the basic construction step down, so I'd suggest a couple things: Practice, practice, practice basic perspective. Once you can convincingly wrap an rubber band line around a ball and construct spheres, this becomes easier. It's also worth knowing how multiple forms intersect, or "interlock" as Steve Huston calls it, for dealing with the underlying perspective of facial anatomy. Keep at it like an athlete training sport and you'll be surprised at how much better your Loomis heads eventually look. Second, I'd recommend leaving off eyes, mouth and hair and save that for a portrait class. Can't say enough, however, just how much it helps to have mastery over the basic perspective involved in the head first.

Obviously it depends on what kind of paper your sketchbook is, and what kind of inking your doing. If it's like a Strathmore lightweight sketchpad, fineliners will probably look OK, but brushwork will bleed and can even wrinkle paper. Alcohol markers would be pretty iffy for the same reasons on thin, toothy sketch paper. For learning, sketching and inking for fun, I tend to use very, very smooth marker paper. As per what Stan recommends, I have found these Ohuhu marker pads to meet those criteria. Might want to try them: https://ohuhu.com/product/ohuhu-spiral-bound-marker-pad-for-alcohol-markers/. That paper is is pretty close to the smooth bristol board sequential artists use and it's spiral bound, and it's a good portable carrying size - not too small.

Just curious, are you creating these studies directly from the photo reference on your own, or are you using the drawing demo Stan produced for these arm poses as a guide? Personally, I've found referencing Stan's drawing and copying it was a lot easier than trying to design and think through these anatomy studies just from photo/life reference myself, without a professional artist's interpretation to guide me first. Anyway, it looks great!