Day 40 (sketching streak) - figured I would come out of my hole and post to a lesson. Since I felt that I have stalled a little I figured to circle back around and do something to at least improve the consistency and focus. I did some timed sketches. Its been a while (over five years) since I have done timed sketches of anything, so I figured this first one was probably going to be mostly getting rid of the stress of drawing under time pressure. And I was right! I picked 2 minutes and 5 minutes, both I felt a bit too short (especially on the VR girl), but the point wasn't to finish the sketches, it was about not wasting time. @Stan Prokopenko I know you said not to time your works before, but for someone like me that will fill every available second with fear, doubt and self loathing, sometimes the clock is our friend. Well once your get over the nervousness and lack of skill :)

My sketches- started with messy, unconfident penguin, to contour like hands, and starting to get the feel for sketching by last set- the singing space woman. Still need to practice the sketch feel for the entire drawing instead of moments within a drawing.

I think the red pencil helps. I still have too many searching lines, but more of them are finding what they are looking for. This looks far better than what I did in graphite:

To continue the exercises, I searched free online coloring pages for a line drawing to work from. I had to erase a bit because I tend to get more heavy-handed as I search and get lost, I need to work on keeping it light and sketchy.

Can I call this a portrait?

Thank you Stan for confirming the use case of lost lines! That made me not so frustrated when I drawing down a mess to get my thoughts materialized. But in another case, if I'm not very good at drawing some kinds of shapes(especially ellipse), I tend to draw down "lost lines", even I'm so clear about which shapes they should be. I just can't control my arm and shoulder. Here is a typical failure below.

Haven’t watched the video yet - had too much fun with the assignment.

more CSI practice. I’m really struggling, not sure how to do this without plotting every point and basically doing a connect the dot or else end up with something completely out of proportion. I couldn’t add the picture, the file was too big.

re - did the camel after Stan’s Demo

I tried them before watching the video. I knew I drew too many details once I saw the video cover. Just hope I can draw more relaxed.

I did the camel after watching the demo. I'm quite happy with the smiling fella. I'm looking forward to see the critiques and a lot of happy camels!

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. 😂

Hola everyone! Here we go, my pre and post demo boots-

Second round after all the tips, definitely felt more flow in the process 🙌

The boots assignment

Here we go, snails pre and post demo! Next- to the shoe!

Beginner day 9. Didnt have much time today so failed on finger positioning.

Overall, it needs more practice.

Welcome to my fruit stall, where I just sell pears. Only pears. I struggle with approaching projects, so I made a conscious effort to keep track of whatever steps I used to make these fine pears. I started with the overall shape and tried to capture the angles of its silhouette. Then I added planar lines to try and define the form which gave me the confidence to go in and divy up the light and dark values. From there it was loose decisions working my way from the halftone out to the darkest shadow and the lightest highlight. After all that was done I actually read the instructions and went back to do a fourth pear that was drawn in only straight lines with five values and sharp edges. I find maintaining sharpness difficult when blending since when I blend it just flattens and unsharpens everything. I'll keep practicing that.

attempt on portrait. It definitely got a lot easier after watching the pear walkthrough (I haven’t watched the portrait yet, I wanted to give it a go on my own). I think it still is a little too messy, especially around the eye