Don't get discouraged, your work has progressed a lot! Go back and look at your first pieces, and compare them to now. It takes a lot of time and input, but you'll continue see your improvement. Here's a relevant Proko video where Stan looks back through some of his first sketch books. Hope this helps! https://www.proko.com/lesson/you-dont-need-talent-ill-prove-it

Heyhey, great submissions. I used a photo from the Level 2 set. I used around 7 values. Attached a gif of my process. Cheers, Flo

My attempt with strawberries. I used a 2B and a 4B.

Here is my attempt at the animal portraits. In retrospect and thanks to a really nice explanation from one of the moderators (thank you Patrick!) I think I will revisit this after work today and look more into shape design. I was a bit too focused here on keeping the shapes geometrical (perhaps with the exception of the buffalo horns, which were frankly really hard to simplify).

You’re on the right track with your thinking, the "best" approach is to use whatever works for the reference images at hand, and use as few and as simple shapes as possible. The primary focus for this exercise is to keep your shapes organic and simple, and focus on creating cool, simple designs. Simple shapes can be stretched, bloated, indented, or curved, no need to adhere to geometrically perfect squares, circles, triangles, etc. That said, the semi circle in your example is a great design shape to play with! It’s a simplified shape with a straight counterbalancing a curve. You can even wrap that shape around the entire pose like an envelope to represent the entire simplified idea, albeit too simplified to fully express the pose is of a cat quickly pivoting direction. If you stretch and distort that shape you give it directionality, motion, and specificity, you can use it to create just about any pose! The semi circle is still maybe too simplified, so that’s where the design element comes in. By making choices with your shapes, how to bend, pinch, squash, and stretch them to dynamically capture the pose you’ll begin to develop your own shape language. Using C S I or curves and straights, you can create shapes that are simplified and specific to the pose you want to capture. Take a look at the Simplifying Shape Design livestream, Stan draws a few examples and covers this process really well. https://www.proko.com/course-lesson/simplifying-shape-design-livestream/comments If you wanted to focus on using shapes that are more universally reusable for other poses or animation, look into The Bean! https://www.proko.com/course-lesson/how-to-simplify-the-motion-of-the-torso-the-bean/assignments Also from an animation standpoint, Ethan Becker covers this and a few other elements of your question in a few videos https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mFuNdJoEhq4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FCHhNJWzUnc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iLIjD-5AgWU Hope this helps!

2 attempts at designing value groups. This exercise was an opportunity for me to put @Michael Hampton 's Head Drawing and Construction course into practice 😉. So I started by studying the structure of the head, then I related that to the light direction and the shading. And I tried to design all of this with today's lesson in mind. I first separated the shadows from the light, then I went into the details and nuances. I didn't have the courage to work on a whole page (for fear that it would take too long), but it is true that it bothered me a little in the details

30/30 - 30 minutes of gestures, 30 minutes of sketching. This exercise might be useful as just doing a long pose on the back 30 isn't in itself going to teach me a ton. Though I probably should be sticking to exercises for at least a week, so wasn't sure if it was too early to switch it up.

This exercise is genuinely very hard. Separating light and shadow, while working with larger shapes requires an enormous amount of discipline. This is literally my 20th attempt.

I started with some two value thumbnails and decided that I preferred the simpler shapes of the beard in the first one and the volumes of the head created by the shapes in the second thumbnail. Then I did a small five-value study where I tried to combine what I liked from the thumbnails. I feel that my final drawing lost some of the simplicity of the earlier sketches. Seeing how I struggled to control five values, I don't think I dare to tackle level 2 :(

Here is my assignment, what do you think?