@Chris Bodary, @johnercek, @Samuel Eli, sorry for not getting back to you earlier (the drawing has kept me busy!). I really appreciated your comments! Here's some more work in progress: the figure brought into perspective and the 2 value notan. Do you think the notan reads? Cheers!

It looks good I have no advice I’m afraid a bit beyond my skills. It looks like a great start! Quite the challenge! Look forward to seeing the result.

A couple more of these mannequins. I draw using sanguine before I watch the demo, then I watch the demo. Then I go back to the model and use my sanguine more as a gesture/bean under drawing and try to check my landmarks and negative shapes as I go. Amazing how many mistakes I find even when I finish this second pass, where I’m trying so hard to “see” the model and the shapes.

Great exercise! I’m finding it pretty difficult I have to say. I’ve uploaded these in reverse order. My first two crouching man and twisting woman. Pretty stiff looking, but teaching me to look harder. I reckon I could spend a year just doing these figures. I won’t but they may be all I concentrate on for the rest of the year. We’ll see.

Finding the shapes on the robo bean a bit difficult to get my head around. I draw what I’m seeing but often it’s quite different from Stan’s. Perhaps if I do another few hundred I might get more into the flow? 🙃 think I’ll do the foreshortening one then do a few dozen without him as a guide then come back to the videos. Wish me luck😀😀

I’m trying to do both 🙂. And animals. I bounce between each, and try to find ways of incorporating all of them into single compositions. I’m sure there are many good reasons to concentrate on single subjects but I prefer to nudge everything forward a bit than charge with one. It also helps me do what I want which is to illustrate stories and create narrative artworks. Ive not done any courses in painting but I’ve found lots of helpful tips online as a starting place. I intend on doing a couple of Michael James Smith’s workshops before I decide which more complete course I’ll take. NMA’s one looks good.

Hi! I could really use some feedback! What do you think?

First attempts at landmark drawing without Proko to guide me. Sometimes mighty hard to see the scapula under the muscles. And working out the deltoid connections. And I seem to have a pathological habit of making the legs a little too short. I’ll do some female figures before I move on to robobean. And I can see I’ll need to do the anatomy course! I’ve used photos from the academic male collection available on this site.

Been using what I’ve learned in portrait fundamentals to try to improve my animal drawings and paintings. I think I’m starting to understand the shapes better.... maybe. Long way to go still. Anyway thought it a good upload for Proktober.

Drew a bunch of portraits using what I’ve learned in the course. The youngest one was hardest by far, so much so that I needed to grid. So much to learn. Certainly better than I had done before it though. Am doing the figure drawing course now but will return to this one afterwards as repetition is crucial.

Nice work John. I don’t think it’s lost any life really, but definitely has a different personality. Nice line work too.

Enjoying the bean. I think I can get my head around it easier than gesture, but will bounce between the two of them for a while before I go to the next stage.

Some of the gesture drawings completed. and uploaded. Several thousand more to go! Aiming to get 200 done before moving on to the bean but I won’t upload that many🙂. Great deal of respect for the skill required to do this well.

Started my ear journey with three different media on the same ear. I’ve only been using a 2B .7 rotring mechanical pencil till now. I think I’ll alternate between the conte and the charcoal for a few drawings from here. Doing these illustrates how much I have to learn about form and shading, not to mention precision.

Trying to get to grips with lips, forgive the alliteration and the poor shading. I think I’ll practice this more on full portraits.

Some nose jobs this week. So many different shapes! Not sure if I’m going about improving in the right way. I watch the video. Draw along with it. Then try to apply this to several drawings with my photo references. Then I go back to the video and try again. I’ll keep going with this approach till the end, and then try a dozen or so portraits before going through various aspects of the course again.

Some eyes. Just doing a single page of each of the features to start with. I use a .5 mechanical pencils 2B. I’ll start using the conte pencils to run through the whole course on a second run. Reasonably happy with the the eyes though I find I have to be quite loose with my interpretation of the form in the tutorial. Such a huge variety of shapes. Deeply wishing I could be better faster! But having fun along the way.

Trying to vary my Loomis work with skulls. Having trouble with that. I think I’ll probably take to drawing the Loomis construction directly on images to try to see where it sits better. I find I’m always massaging the images when I try to start with the sphere/jaw wireframe. Are there any Proko videos which use skulls more?

The ongoing attempts to use Loomis to understand portraits. Clearly more practice using extreme angles needed. It’s only doing those that you really challenge your assumptions about translating what you see into forms on paper.