I'm at a total loss concerning the two attempts I circled in red. In the one on the left I tried to create a "rubber torso"--a 360-degree twist, but I simply cannot get my head around it. Somehow I'm completely blocked. If I had playdough in the house I'd have made a model, but I don't. Any suggestion will be greatly appreciated.

These were some tricky poses. I started to rely on blob to box method from some lessons ago.

Practice 10 windmill

This project is a lot of fun! I just got some red pencils and used them for the first time. I really liked using them for the initial sketch. I may try to do some more and "ink" some digitally. It's hard to see my scanned in pencil sketches. The first three sketches are level 1 and the last two are level 2 tree houses.

I tried to push the forms but looks like boxiness is now engraved into my brain :D Will have to draw more and push to exaggerate the forms.

Level 1 Wireframe makes it really easy for me to see where I distort the drawing compared to the reference. For example the nose on the turtle. It's not supposed to be pointy and I only saw it once I had to draw a wireframe and realised that the drawn nose is a different 3D shape compared to the original. I should erase it and fix it if I want to be true to the photo but I liked this version so I kept it. Ideally this would have be a deliberate decision beforehand but it was more of a lucky accident.

I love cross contour.

I took Patrick's approach to this assignment and did a quick 10 pictures 1 minute practice. I'm still not clear on what I'm looking for here. The way I understood this assignment is that we're supposed to make circular shapes and fit a cube in perspective inside or roughly within the limits of our defined space. I'm still more comfortable just putting down the cubes especially with the time limit and a model. I can also make these from imagination if need be. I feel like I'm skipping something important and given my shortcomings I can't allow that.

I really enjoyed the "monologue" about all the different art topics represented as a web of knowledge instead of a linear progression tree. Learning something and coming back to it months or years later seems to have value. At least I notice a lot of artists saying "I am brushing up on my fundamentals" or "Going back to the fundamentals". So it definitely seems like one can not master an entire topic like perspective in just one go. Better to learn the basics and get to start applying perspective in your drawings and projects in order to start training that muscle. This annoys the completionist in me as I realise that I can never say that I have completely finished learning perspective as I will have to come back to it in the future. BUT at the same time it is liberating because this tells me that I need to keep on learning different things and jump back into a topic later once my knowledge of other topics around it has improved enough. As in I am never blocked, there's always something else to learn or practise. Overall this removes some frustration around not seeing improvement or progress after practise sessions. If some topic stops improving then jump to another topic that is somehow connected and improve there instead. This drawing skill as a web of topics just feels very different to some other fields where the topics to learn are sets of very specific rules that you learn in the linear order (looking at you engineering, comp sci, med, etc). Sure there's intuition in those fields as well, but specifically the learning process in art requires you to loop back and forth A LOT MORE instead of considering a topic DONE. Thanks again for this monologue. Felt like a really insightful podcast episode.

Really good exercise. I feel like my brain is working hard and I am doing many attempts before I feel like I am happy with a line placement. So this clearly is a process where I am experimenting and learning a lot.