I am having one of the worst drawing weeks of my entire life. My hands are trash. I have essential tremor always but it has been unhinged this week. I am house sitting so I don’t have a scanner and everything is awful. You’ve all been sharing such fantastic work I feel obligated to balance it out with my failure. I’m just struggling. Raving over.

130th Day of Proko and counting. 10 second gestures. Okay, this was pretty ridiculous. I found my self laughing a lot as I fumbled through them. Still fun, though.

2nd post of the day in here. A little while back @Martha Muniz was nice enough to give me some feedback regarding shading. She pointed me to a video on shading by Dorian Iten on YouTube that was very helpful. I revisited the video tonight and took a crack at it with digital tools. Shading is a big area of growth for me. I've done a lot of t-shirt and comic book illustrations, but the style I work in is far less subtle than what I'm trying to develop. Dorian has a shading course here with a lot of free lessons. I delved into those a bit tonight as well. The figures I've drawn after watching a few videos were done with the intent to find the terminator (where the form light meets the shadow shape), which is an exercise Dorian recommends. I'll eventually buy the premium course because Dorian clearly has an approach I want to get deep into, but I'll wait a little while until I finish a few of the open courses I'm in.

Feel and convey, feel and convey.. think i over-felt. It was my first time to gesture draw with an older model. Doublespeeding the vid amplified his instability during the pose which, to my surprise, got translated into my lines unintentionally. Fascinating, but got a bit freaked out so i did another session with a totally different model to shake that off. i started with 30s w/ these. Still lagging so much after being out of practice for a while. 

My gesture drawing practice for this week. I tried NMA timed video on youtube and did it twice. I feel like the second time around the poses turned out better. Once again, sorry for the quality of the pics. I have to figure out some better lighting so that the whole page is lit evenly.

I drew 100 Ears. This took longer than I intended. I had some real-life stuff(quite the rarity). Enjoyed my time amongst these cavernous cartilages. Trying to improve my shading. Some of the different angles were hard to get. I definitely used up some erasers with these. I think the biggest challenge was the impersonal nature of the subject matter. Other features are evocative but ears, especially the unadorned variety, are not especially emotive. I think that's why I found myself dragging my feet a bit. All in all, plenty to improve upon, but happy with the practice.

For some reason this was not easier... Drawing the blobs first helped me put them in the right place in relation to each other, I think. But then turning the blobs into boxes was somehow harder than just drawing boxes. And in some poses I wasn't able to figure out the proportions correctly...

Didnt get as much done today, but lets see how long i can keep this up for...

123rd Day of Proko and counting. A few two minute drawings tonight. I switched up brushes from the Keane to the Elvgren. It takes a few sessions to get comfortable when using a new brush but I like it.

I thought I'd try charcoal this week. For some reason I feel much more loose with it but also it's harder to place the lines where I want to. And easier to make a mess ;)

Just a quick revision of tilting the boxes in perspective. And I thought I'd try adding a Loomis head to the exercise cause that would mean some more ellipses in perspective too ;) I haven't drawn Loomis heads much before and all I know is from Stan's free video in the portrait course. So any corrections or feedback would be very welcome!

118th Day of Proko and counting. I'm sucking wind tonight, but I got a few 2 minute drawings in. Not my best, but I'll try again tomorrow.

Time for my weekly hour of gesture. I did 5x5min, 5x2min, 5x1min and then, on the advice from @Joseph Osley , 5x30sec. And true enough, the 5x2min poses I did afterwards felt like forever, I didn't know what to do with the time ;) Same with my last 10min pose. I feel like 5min is my sweet spot but I'll keep practicing the shorter ones too.

113th Day of Proko and Counting. Two, five, and twenty minutes.

115th Day of Proko and counting. Two and five minute sketches.

Here's my first batch of the assignment, I didn't time these drawings. Some poses were harder than others and I had to redo them, especially the ones with foreshortening. I kept feeling like I was making mannequin studies with some of these as we were supposed to be more accurate with these drawings than gesture drawings (at least that's what I think we're supposed to do). All critiques are welcome!

Had some trouble with form intersections in another drawing so I thought I'd practice that as part of the review of one point perspective.

After this rich journey with Patrick, I have now created my own fantasy figure. As I drew, the story took shape, which is another new fantastic approach I learned in this course. Once again my warmest thanks @Patrick Jones and thanks to @Proko for those amazing Reference bundles Dumped in the mud and castaway, A young girl finds herself discovering, What wonderful powers she was covering - A delicate creature but she could array Her beautiful wings, as if to say "A soiled body and a broken mind, Cannot cause injury enough to grind, A woman's spirit and her dragon heart - They give me wings so that I may Soar high and fly far far away" my dearest niece Maia Helmbold has expressed my story so wonderfully in these lyrics

111th Day of Proko and counting. Not a lot of steam left at the end of the day today. Just a few more two minute sketches.

I'm joining in with some timed sketches. I used the gesture sampler and did 5 x 1min pose, 5 x 2min, 5 x 5min, 1 x 10min, and then again 5 x 2min. And boy, I forgot how little quick a 2min is, I can barely get anything resembling a figure on page in that time! My goals is to do a 1h session like this once a week - mentioning it here so I feel accountable ;) Sorry about the quality of the photos, my pencil lines are too light to show well.