I decided to try a praying mantis and am really happy with how it worked out! I worked off of the references for my practice page to get an idea of shapes and proportions, and made my full page character off of those. I started way too close to the side of the page, but I still like how she looks. I tried to focus on confident lines and feeling out the sketch, but I kept falling back into searching, chicken-scratch lines. I also tried adjusting my work space to encourage drawing from the shoulder and elbow rather than the wrist. It is making a difference but it is taking a lot of effort to break the habit. Either way I had a lot of fun with this one, and have a new love of mantises.

I really struggled with working on these. I think sketching from a line drawing is something I have never tried and I found it very difficult to not want to just replicate the lines as I saw them. I tried the level two project as well and had a much easier time mentally on that one, although confident lines are still tricky.

These were both before watching the demo. I think I'll try the camel now that I have watched the demo and see if I can improve my line quality some. I think I get hung up on trying to match the image more than I am focusing on clean, confident lines, so I will keep that in mind next round.

My first attempt was the banana, and the after watching the demo I tried to do the pear. I only had one hardness of pencil so the values were tricky, but I think I was able to improve between the two attempts.