Your critiques are lessons upon lessons upon lessons! These projects and your comments revealed my reliance on observation and contour married to perfectionism. This is helping to eliminate my internal angst when drawing. Thanks for your eye opening feedback Stan😳 Here is a thank you gift for you Stan- The Dot and the Line; 1965 movie version so you don’t have to read the book😂 https://youtu.be/h0yf7IkWceI I am a blue line…you are gently training me to be a versatile line by choice! A big shout out to Marshall too!

These are so fun and informative to watch, even though I'm too ill right now to do the assignment I still feel like a learn a lot of just watching you work. Can't wait to try it out myself as soon as possible!

Redraws along with the video.

Two down-one to go. I enjoyed this tapered line. More practice needed but loving the line is a great start for me.

Fantastic bonus lesson Stan…just clarified my ‘searching thoughts’ about the various introductions of the different line exercises. I just stopped spinning and started dancing!

Sending an invitation to study with the other ‘master draftsmen’ at the Cleveland Museum of Art. Visit in person or online with video essays. See what 19th century French artists achieved when playing with their new tools! “A variety of materials became available to artists—such as commercially fabricated chalks, pastels, and specialty papers—encouraging figures ranging from Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres to Paul Cezanne to reconsider the place of drawing within their artistic practices.” How appropriate for our class! Drawings of the French artists in the current exhibition. Runs until June 11, 2023. And for your library…”A richly illustrated catalogue—the first to document this collection—accompanies the exhibition, featuring new research on each of the included works and essays by leading scholars in the field.” https://www.clevelandart.org/exhibitions/nineteenth-century-french-drawings-cleveland-museum-art

Here’s my first and second attempt at the snail, and also a bonus picture demonstrating some of the struggles I had with this drawing. 😜 The first drawing was way more complicated than it needed to be, and as a result, my line quality suffered and I totally missed the original point of the assignment. In my second attempt, I made an effort to not fuss too much with proportions and details. It made for a less accurate snail, of course, but the line quality is vastly improved. If nothing else, my cat seems to really like this second drawing. 😂

I definitely spent way too much time trying to get mine accurate. And in the end they weren’t very accurate anyway. I’ll try again focusing on more confident lines and less about the accuracy. I am looking forward to those exercises, I struggle with drawing what I actually see.

Before and after demo…and my first attempt to draw after a major shutdown because of Mario frustration. On the go again. The second attempt took 25 min when I really understood simplification for the initial blocking in and not an attempt at perfect proportions and placement. Stan your ‘mis-judgements’ in the demo was the most helpful for me!

Day 13: ‘I told you to stop drinking out of the toilet!’

Day 2-14 I know that the assignment was drawing objects but I was so frustrated with Mario that I backed up to practicing 5 pages a day of lines, point to point, boxes, circles, and ellipses for two weeks. This became a wall for me. Perfectionism creates fear in me that I often stop myself. Overcoming the wall of fear is my major goal for this course. So will continue now with objects for a bit more fun. Just to continue the class is a step forward.

Running a bit "behind" but this is my attempt at simplifying the boots before watching Stan's demo of them. I definitely got caught up in the detail of the laces as others did. I'm looking forward to watching the video now to try to better understand what is important versus noise. I'm also seeing the perspective and proportion issues, but, later... they're just boots.

this took me almost 45min. I thought it was a great exercise. Keeping t escapes angular helped me not to get lost while I was concentrating on the details.

I knew this was going to be tough for me and it was! I kept to simplification and just drew some negative shapes in the laces to suggest them. My best for now.

Drawing from imagination today. I think I'll use this little guy in an upcoming lesson.

Slowed my drawing down to a snail’s pace and felt less frustrated—checking and rechecking angles in relationships with other edges.At some point I always end up off and then it becomes a puzzle but I decided to just press on and finish.

The CSI method forced me to think about where and how I'm placing my lines. I'm really proud of the process, yet the outcome not so much. I felt so much clarity in this method, it was really fun. Even with the CSI method, it feels messy or untamed, it could just be a lack of dexterity/line quality. All critiques welcome. Did 4 thumbnails before this.

Day 1: My Sketching Gear Bag—from life I started out with smooth lines but I had to erase so much to correct angles etc. they became increasingly scratchy. Any suggestions to gain accuracy at the beginning of the work? Now that I have walked away from my work for awhile I can see the errors. I’m going to redo this one using a vertical format.

Day 7: That took a long time. As a reward, I will now eat a single potato chip.