I attempted the snail two times for this assignment. During the first time (the drawing with shading under the snail) I found myself super nervous, like for the first assignment, and my hand was way shakier than normal and it felt like it wouldn't listen to me. I kept getting in my head about getting things right, and it ended up feeling like I spent about as much time erasing as I did actually drawing. For this drawing, I did the initial drawing with an H pencil then went over it with a 2B. All in all, while I don't feel bad about the product, I can't say I really let myself enjoy the process, which didn't ultimately feel in the spirit of this exercise. So, I decided to take a breather and approach the snail again another day after watching the assignment video again to watch how Stan went about drawing the turtle to get a better idea of the approach I should try to emulate. This time I opted for an HB pen for my initial line work, trying to go over most areas multiple times with loose lines and not worrying too much if one of them went stray (but still being methodical about things). Afterwards I went over everything with a 4B, fixing any errors I noticed and making final design choices. Overall this second approach took way less time (about less than 1hr vs 2-3hrs), was much more enjoyable, and I like the look of the snail a lot more even with its imperfections. This is definitely something I'm going to want to practice regularly, to train my eye & hand but also to train myself to be able to draw more loosely.

This is my first Proko assignment, and I was surprised with how shaky my hand was while trying to draw this thinking about being assessed! I've only been drawing for a couple months, so the thought of being assessed had me fairly nervous with a lot of the lines, but I had to keep reminding myself that the whole point of all this is to grow and learn from my mistakes rather than not make any mistakes in the first place. I used a B pencil for the whole drawing, which was a fun challenge for pressure control since I've mostly just been using ballpoint pen while practicing line work and Procreate with minimal pressure sensitivity. I found myself wanting to use 6+ values to better capture things like the bounce light in the shadows and the different intensities of highlight ,so to fit assignment prompt of only 5 values I decided to use my middle value for the bounce light to have some contrast for them while keeping the more-but-not-most intense shadow surrounding them (value 4), and I tried to emphasize the highlights by blocking out regions that I thought had moderate highlight in addition to the more intense highlight.

I've been having a lot of fun doing quick color studies to practice using values to create form and to play around with different styles! Definitely a lot of room for growth, so I'm excited to continue doing these and see how my eye and style evolve.