Level 2 projects. One is from direct observation of people at my daughter's softball game. The other is from a reference photo of two footballers pretending to play darts. Is it just me or does the guy on the left look a lot like Stan?

Level one. Some of the blobs got kind of erased when I was cleaning up my lines.

Level 1 jeep. The spare tire came out kind of too big, but I figured it's not that important for this project. This was like my fourth attempt at it. I kept getting lost in a soup of construction lines and couldn't get the drawing to come together. For this one, I ended up drawing it from the bottom up. That is drawing the wheels first then the body on top of that then the spare. That seemed to help.

Level 1 and 2 - heads 9, 11 and 15. I struggled to get the features of the heads to line up with the boxes. Especially getting the center line of the head to match up w/ the center line of the box. I'm going to try this again after the level 2 demo comes out.

Inspired by my living room. I drew it from memory and did not directly observe while drawing. I drew the lines freehand. But, after I was mostly done, I went back with a ruler to check and then fixed the lines that were significantly off. The most challenging part was the front of the couch - the part facing to the right. I think because of the angle, any small deviation in the line from the convergence point caused it to look off. More so than other parts of the drawing where small or even moderate deviations didn't appear to make a huge difference. That is one area where I used the ruler to check/correct a lot.

Simplifying is complicated. I found it helpful to make a more detailed sketch first and then simplify from that. Trying to simplify directly from the reference was too much at once. I felt like an intermediate step of simplification helped. The number of shapes used seems like kind of a subjective measure, but I kept it to what I considered 10. The rooster's comb and the buffalo's horns don't seem that simple to me. But, I drew them as a single shape anyway. 

This is from a drawing by David Malan. Definitely a learning experience trying to replicate his use and execution of line weight.

While working on this, I realized that I have never done anything like this before. I've never studied someone else's drawing through replicating it. So, I'm not sure if I did this correctly. But, it was interesting as I found myself thinking about the drawing in a lot more depth than I normally would - going past general observations of technique down to low level details while still trying to stay connected to the overall energy of the drawing. Anyway, I chose this picture by Bill Sienkiewicz. I like how the lines communicate the menace of the bear. It first appeared to me as though there were just a lot of frantic scratchy lines in a evil bear shape. In trying to copy it, I found that there were a lot fewer lines than I thought and that their placement was not as random as I thought. I did my best to recreate that. I left out a lot of the solid black part because it would have taken too long and I didn't think it was important.

On the last assignment, I felt like I did not simplify enough. Hopefully I didn’t oversimplify here with the bird and the hand.

This was a fun assignment. I felt like it helped me to become more aware of when I'm using chicken scratch strokes instead of smoothe ones. Often when there's some uncertainty about how/where a line should be I'm catching myself drawing little short strokes with my fingers. So, it's definitely something to work on going forward.

Day 14

Day 13: gnarly tree

Day 12: Icicles from a photo (it was too cold to draw outside)

Day 11: We took a train trip today. I tried drawing the view from my seat (omitting the other passengers). The lines are wobblier than usual as the train would sway and bump as we traveled.

Day 9: Oranges in a funky bowl Day 10: Plum tree blossoms

Day 8

Day 7: Stapler

Day 6: Lemon tree

Day 5: More of my kid's stuff.