Week 1: Fire hydrant, toy car, backpack, log cabin, instrument, playground, blaster.

Ginger root Kai Havertz and Pete Townshend loosely from reference.

I started on another creature from reference, but didn't have time to finish. So, I'm posting what I have now. Will work on it some more over the weekend.

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.