Beautiful! The character in this is very cute. For this one, assuming the girl's face is the focal point of the piece in a "spiral" type composition, why not try using whatever you place in the top right to guide the viewer's eye to the bird, while allowing it to be less busy than the left side to give the viewer's eye some rest? In the first picture, you have a really good "path" from the bird on the right, to the grass, to the dragonfly wings, to the bunny on the bottom left, to the flowers on the left, to the butterflies, and then back to the girl's face. Perhaps try something like small spinning flowers, petals, or grasses curving from the background behind the girl's head to the bird. You might consider using color for this in the later stages, too--a streak of harmonious tones that supports the flow, maybe? I hope you post the finished piece!

Howdy! I think Mac did a good job with that wonderful pose you built (go Senshistock!). So, I'll focus on something I'm noticing with the face. Make sure that all of the facial features are drawn at the same angle as the entire head! Here, I noticed that the nose sort of looks as if she's facing more towards us, while the angle of the head as a whole is to the right and tilted slightly downward. Remember that the nose has a distinct top and bottom plane, and two side planes; especially at tricky angles, try and lay in a simple 3D box first to get the angle, then carve in the subtleties of the nose anatomy on top of it. Start with big shapes, then work into the small ones. Proko has a really good lesson on the nose that I just watched today, actually. You should check it out! Meanwhile, the right eye is too close to the right edge of the face, and the tilt doesn't match the rest of the head (it's too straight). The corner of that eye should actually be pretty close the other side of the nose, just like the left eye. Notice that in the reference, the curve of the brow is even overlapping it a bit! Personally, it helps me to lay in the frame of the eye socket with the brow ridge, nose, and the top of the cheek before I draw in the eye to make sure I'm not skewing or flattening the face by accident. I did a quick paint over to try and show what I mean. I hope this helps!

Let's see what the community wants. We were planning on keeping this category clean with only official challenges, but if there is enough interest in allowing user created challenges, I'm ok with it. I can just pin the official ones to the top. Let's VOTE.. Reply to this comment with your thought!

I'm a kid that needs help with their quicksketch.

Perfect advice so far! I would also recommend you take it a step further for good measure; pull up some anatomical diagrams for cats along with your other regular photo references, so you have an even stronger idea of the structures you're looking at and how to build your subject believably. A well rounded knowledge base of what you're drawing makes bad references much easier to work with!

Woah, spines! I'm gonna post this first exercise separate from the other two for now; this is part of my third attempt at the assignment. Taking the time to measure angles, lengths and end point locations before building the forms (instead of blindly shooting lines out of the blue and hoping for the best) did wonders! Any advice or notes?

Well, there's the anatomy tracing exercise! I understand this as more of an introduction to the learning tool than anything else, but I wanted to give it a shot as somebody who vaguely knows these muscle groups starting out. I'm not sure If I'm seeing the flat areas well, so finding the tendon areas on the back were difficult on the last image. I am also not sure about the tendon areas of the abdominal sections in particular, either. Fiber directions are meant to show my understanding of insertion/origin when present. A lot of important muscles seem to connect around the scapula, so I found that pretty tough. Any advice or important things I missed? Any way I can push this exercise? (Labels on the first tracing was identification practice and weren't meant to stay there, but oh well!)

I get confused by this a lot, too! I suppose it depends on what you're doing right now and whether or not you're getting the type of practice you need out of it. Personally, I have poor line control relative to where I want to be, and I think it's because I've naturally been thinking in approach 2 for a long time. It's not that it hasn't resulted in growth ( I credit it for teaching me not to get attached to one drawing if its going badly, for example), but it's also encouraged my sloppiness and it's not teaching me what I need at the moment. So, I'm consciously making myself to use approach 1 more often, and spending more time doing one thing right. It means my production speed has slowed down, but my accuracy is improving! I once heard an artist say, "slow is smooth, smooth is fast," and that's been repeating in my head since I got back on Proko's courses. Biiit of a ramble I wrote up there. But basically, I think the right question to ask ourselves is, "What am I trying to learn?" That'll help you know what to do for each concept you're trying to pick up. For example, I'm trying to improve my understanding of anatomy and perspective, which is a very technical goal and based in accuracy, so I've decided its better to do 10 attempts right than 50 of them wrong. For things like quick gestures, I think more=better. Further thoughts?

I did the joint assignment a while ago, but I remember where I struggled and it hasn't gone away. Any tips for blocking out feet+its joints (big problem area for me!) or interpreting the joints correctly? Any specific tips about the fingers would also be wonderful--you can tell I totally gave up on them!

I've never gotten feedback like this, so I'm excited!