I have prior experience with game development and graphics programming in general. In those subjects, you deal with setting up virtual 3D worlds and project them onto a 2D surface(the screen). I feel dealing with that helped me have a better intuition about perspective. In graphics programming, you set up a thing called the "view frustum" It is like your cone of vision, except since it is a screen and not your retina the frustum is a pyramid and not a cone. By the very nature of the fact that it expands out the further you go, the cross-sectional area of the frustum encompasses more and more space, but it still has to be mapped down to the size of your screen. That is the root of why things appear to diminish as things get further away from you. It also plays a part in why things curve when that view frustum gets especially wide(wide angle lens). You can take a 5pp drawing or panoramic picture with good enough detail and zoom in enough to where you can see things that will more or less conform to 1pp, 2pp, and 3pp. Just like if you zoom in enough on the line of a circle it will eventually appear flat. This would be the effect of a telephoto lens appearing to have less convergence. Here is an interesting video showing a game with perspective sort of in reverse. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yY9GAyJtuJ0 And here are a few other videos of his dealing with interesting space projections/extra dimensions. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zQo_S3yNa2w https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=by8eAnez0i8

Here's my first follow along attempt of Minecraft -Steve. Thanks again

@Proko how would you practice cubes without measuring? Happy New Year to everyone!

The youtube link to the livestream is privated/unavailable. Here is the real link https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ci99NYQ6Pow

I wish there was more of a heads up for this Livestream so I could have been there.

Thank you for this video and the very clear explanations. I think I understand all the individual rules for line weights, but I struggle when I try to combine different sets of rules when drawing. For example: a cube sitting on the ground. Everything thick for the outlines: okay - but then it fights an ambient occlusion approach, that would tell me to make a thin or no line at all at the edge "touching" the ground. I tried to reverse engineer the rules of how other artists solve this, but I never got any universal solution out of it. Any ideas?

Somehow rotating the paper eluded me for a long time. I think part of it was that in High School we only ever used big newsprint pads and it just never occurred to me since then. "I fear not the man who has practiced 10,000 kicks once, but I fear the man who has practiced one kick 10,000 times." -Bruce Lee Whenever I'm doing warmups I'm reminded of that quote. In this case, replace kicks with strokes. Though "fear" may be a bit dramatic. I also noticed using a permanent medium like pen helped me to slow down and think. If I've gone a while without trying something in pen I find myself regressing to overly-searching lines. It is a tendency I have to fight. Along with being heavy-handed. Those are my thoughts on what I've gone through so far.

I love pangolins.

This is my second attempt. Tried to sketch more this time. Using a red pencil seemed to help. Again, my proportions on the hand were a real struggle. I didn't let it push me into a perfectionist mindset this time. I am happiest with my penguin again. I think part of it is that it is always the third one so I am feeling good and loose by then. That and it is probably my favorite picture of the three so I enjoy it more.

I got too frustrated by my out of proportion hands in my first attempts. I overcorrected and fell on the copying from observation side of things, rather than simplifying what I saw. The robot I am okay with. I felt like it was already so simplified right out of the gate there wasn't much more that I could reinterpret to CSI's I think I am the happiest with the penguin.

Some kids paints I decided to draw today. It is a real struggle for me to draw ellipses with confidence. I tried shading the value of the paints for the fun of it. Not sure how accurate I was.

Some warmup drawings with a china marker on newsprint and then I tried CSI simplification again with Freckles as my subject. She is my girlfriend's dog.

What are some good drawing tools with which to draw tapered strokes?

Why doesn't this video show the check mark after viewing? @Proko Support It looks like I have only watched 79% of the course content.

I'm not used to give up but... I give up with the boots, I don't know how to crack them down... :( This is after more than 30 min of work. I suppose I go too much into the details. I will check the demo of Stan and will maybe retry again...

@Stan Prokopenko are there line exercises we could do to practice those confident, sweeping lines outside of actual drawings (kind of like the ellipses in the Mario mushrooms)? Would it be beneficial to make random CSI lines over and over as warm up/practice? Thanks!

Here are my level 2 assignments. I haven't watched Stan's demo yet. Judging by the thumbnail I am definitely not simplifying enough. I feel good about my line confidence though.

These are my tries - Like many other I've seen here, the boots were...very difficult for me. In general, most of these exercises are quite difficult for me, and I do feel the difficulty level has increased significantly from the first project, to this one. I am, as I've related elsewhere, rather new at this, and haven't drawn for close to 40'ish years before these past few months. Anyways - I draw every day, and hopefully will keep improving enough to keep following along this course! Oh - one thing more. I draw somewhat fast - each of these did not really take long, but I have no idea how to do it slower, and still SOMEWHAT confident lines.

My level 1 assignment. I attempted the snail in pen. I let myself get into too much of a rush with it. I'm really happy with how the boots turned out though I'm not sure if I simplified enough. edit - I redid my snail in pencil. I'm much happier with it.