A first attempt, but I got a little overwhelmed by all the ideas in my head lol. I think the left part turned out well. I love the look of a pagoda and I turned it in this cute, round main character. Everyone likes this pagoda. But the building behind it is mainly functional, maybe you even have to buy tickets there. It's beautiful, but stern and serious. Then there was some side story in my head with the little houses with chimneys in a row, they are all cramped up along the road and they don't have access to the nice garden. They are kind of sucked back into the background, into the mountain. The mountain I attempted to draw to symbolise this, did not get the love that it deserved :) Thinking about it, it would be nice if I let the mountain literally eat the little houses, and fold over the top of the houses.. to be continued! PS: I included the photo that I looked at to get inspired!

I don't know how safe I would feel living here. It looks like one gusty wind away from disaster. The zoning laws in this district must be pretty lax.

Week 4:

I started unsure, but actually had quite a lot of fun along the way. There's errors, like how the right side of the bigger building probably looks more cramped than it should. Any idea on how to judge how much samller things should get as they move away, when they're not the same size? Wondering if it's mostly intutition. Another question for you all: does it look like the twisty slide is inclined so that part of it is underwater? I think so but not sure how much of it is submerged in water. Perhaps just the last bit? More generally, I actually struggle with this problem often where I'll draw things and they don't look like they're grounded on the floor and appear slightly tilted up/sideways (see drawing of box below) Any advice on how to ensure that things you draw appear to be on the ground plane? My guess is that it has to with making sure your VPs are on a horizontal line i.e. the HL should be actually horizontal...

Hi everyone, I attempted one of the photos from the critique, trying to get it closer to the reference. It was a struggle to make the ellipse equatorial without warping it. Also used my best guesses to place the jaw and underplane ...But I'm still lost as ever about where exactly the jaw is in relation to the cranial mass. I'm always asking, how close should the jaw be to that circle? A little further down? Or actually inside the circle? Hope intuition for placement improves with practice 😭 The end result didn't quite match the original so I moved up the chine like in the third photo. Any advice or critique would be appreciated. Thanks :)

Thanks so much for the detailed critique! You mentioned a couple of times that the tilt line and the line for the front of the face should be parallel, same for the brow / chin line. Doesn't that break perspective / foreshortening? And especially for the side of the face, I would expect it to have to go inwards, as the chin is more narrow than the brow.

Week 2: O ellipse, you vex me so.

I drew variations of the same box, making them progressively more curved. The biggest challenge was figuring out the bottom arc of the curved plane when it's hidden. And by the same token, I struggled to imagine the whole bottom plane. It's not like drawing through a box, where I know the rules so at least know when something's off and know how to fix it. Do any of you have any tips to share on drawing through deformed boxes?

Hi Michael and everyone, I need help with the ellipse around the eyebrow ridge & ears. In the examples below from class, my attempts at the ellipses were different than the demo's (See photos attached). I understand that the demo's ellipses are the way they are because the ear is below the brows. However, my thinking is that since the top of the head is visible in both examples, we're looking down from above. And if we're looking down, shouldn't the ellipses look like the way I drew them? I think I've been able to confirm this by finding out that this model's brows are actually higher than her ears in her front & side portraits. Let me know what you think. Perhaps I'm overthinking this when the exact look of the ellipse isn't super important... On a side note, I'm not too sure about the viewer's eye level in second portrait from class, where it seems we could be looking up her even though top of head is visible. I'm thinking maybe the eye level is somewhere between the nose & chin...What do you guys think? Often in portraits, it's hard to figure out where the eye level is.

I had to google what a roly poly is🙃