I am really digging the idea of the timed study -- especially the 5min one. Beyond what was mentioned in the project instructions, I feel like the time constraint is kind of liberating. There's less pressure to produce something that looks good because, you know, you only spent 5 minutes on it. This helps with the motivation to practice. I can consider a drawing a success even if it doesn't look so great as long as I'm focused on the key concepts and getting the repetitions in.

Looking at all the submissions, I am fascinated by the fact that so many interesting variations can be teased out of these simple plans.

I did a tin watercolor palette freehand. I started doing it with instruments but realized I kind of need a T-square to make it work. I'm going to pick one up and give that another go.

For method 1, I did not draw the entire second letter for the back plane. Most of it would be hidden by the front and the extrusion part. So, I only drew the edges that were visible and connected those to the front plane. I was struck by how tough foreshortening is to deal with. A small difference in distance from the vanishing point will have a large effect on how much an object is foreshortened -- i.e., it does not scale linearly -- which makes it much harder to eyeball. The other thing I thought was that this is kind of like taking the melted pancakes and rotating it 90deg so that the top (or bottom) is facing you instead of the side. I tried to do this in some of the sketches.

Level 1. I did two sets of the toga guy because I felt the first one was too samey same. So, I tried to mix it up some more to get some different effects.

Here are my submissions: a tin watercolor palette from direct observation and a hydra from imagination (multiple snake heads in different orientations). In both cases I found I had to sketch them out many many times to figure out the structure. Even with seemingly simple objects, it was not so straightforward for me to reduce them to simpler forms.

Here’s a glasses trick that works for me: if you use bifocals, stand about 2-3 feet from the reference and look at it through the bottom (near vision) part of the lens. That gives me a nice blur effect. It helps to reduce the image size a bit if you’re using a screen.

Level 1 three value studies:

I made this pretzel lookin’ thing. Sketched out the idea, drew it and then traced two versions with different overlap.

I did the level 1 version a bunch of times and just posted the last two attempts. I only had time to take one stab at level 2. It came out better than I expected, but I had pretty low expectations after seeing how much I relied on being able to see the other values on the scale when doing level 1. That said, I can see how this would be a super helpful skill: when doing an actual drawing, being able to identify where a given value is on the scale without seeing it in the context of the scale seems like it would be quite useful.