Here's my level 1 assignment. My brain persists on drawing everything with outlines, so though I know this is about designing with simple shapes, I struggle to let go of thinking about details. It's like I'm constantly telling myself that this flat, grey blob doesn't have anatomy, so don't do it! Next I do it. It's really annoying. But, for this reason, I find that this is a very good exercise for me and I'm going to make value thumbnails part of my daily routine. I want to start learning concept art and this, I believe, is one essential skill to have.

My submissions for the Proko x Steven Michael Hampton Gesture challenge! Medium: ball point pen on sketchbook 9x12 Strathmore sketchbook paper.

Week 3 - Hands and Feet There's... a LOT of training ahead. First six and the last six are done three days apart. The first session was really hard, and every sketch turned out messy and ugly. Two days later focusing on big shapes helped me get a hang of it. Maybe.

Week 2 - Static Poses I strongly dislike poses where the figure is lying down :D. Uhh... It's funny that on two different sessions I get the same pose for reference, and manage to draw it rather well on the first go, but get a total failure on the second go. I'm really enjoying this challenge, so looking forwards to next week!

Week 1 - Dynamic Movement I'm so slow! One minute goes by and I haven't figured out all the limbs. But great practice, I enjoyed not caring about what the end result will look like. 5 min poses are harder for me, seems with more time in my hands I get caught up in overthinking.

I realized that until this assignment, I've treated value as lighting. It's very challenging to decide whether I'm looking at a light value, or a light colour. I took the reference pictures to Krita and used the colour picker tool to study where the colours settled on the colour selector. Is that cheating? It helped a lot and made me see how I was wrong many times. I was fantastically inspired by N.C. Wyeth's painting and wanted to just make a quick sketch of it. It's not the assignment, and I'm posting it here just because I really like it :). A year ago I couldn't have made a quick sketch like this, I think, so I'm happy that I've learned something. Then I thought I'd try out a two value study by adding a lighter value to a dark silhouette. That's something I want to learn well, making quick thumbnails with just shapes and value. What a perfect assignment for me, thank you!

As soon as I had a pencil in my fingertips, I forgot to remember that details aren't for this assignment. This demo helped me recall that, thank you!

I explored with HB pencil, full graphite pencils and charcoal. I find the full graphite pencil achieves the smoothest result and it was also the fastest. I like a little grainy texture, though, so the result I get with regurlar pencil makes me happy. I love the charcoal pencil, it's so rough compared to full graphite and gives a truly grainy texture. I tried both the over hand grip and tripond hold, and a curious thing... I found myself holding the pencil right at the end of it, just holding the end between three fingertips like I was about to drop it. This felt very light and more controlled than when I hold the pen near the tip, and put more pressure on it. Lovely assignment and nice experimenting. This is meditative :D.

I think my 7B pencil wasn't sharpened well enough and so I instead of a smooth value I got a bit of a melange pattern, but at least it's fairly uniform ;)

I tried to create a scale now that I have two extra pencils and I have some new learnings! I created two scales. Top one with 3 pencils (4B, 2B and HB) and a bottom scale with 5 pencils (4B, 2B, HB, 2H and 4H) It's really hard to get the value gradient smooth for 9 values. The pencils are different in hardness, but they have huge value overlaps. Meaning the lightest tone of 4B can still be lighter than normal pressure 2B. So to create the scale I had to apply a lot more pressure on the pencils in the darker end of the scale to push them further out. And at the same time use minimal pressure on the pencils in the lighter side of the scale to push them away in that direction. Only then was there enough "breathing room" in the center of the scale for the middle tone pencils. My previous presumption was that light pressure on 4B would still be darker than normal pressure 2B, but this is not the case. A lot of overlap in value ranges. What does it mean for me? I can't rely on my muscle memory of pressure and switching pencils if I am going to use 10 values. I will have to judge this by vision. Or I will have to just get more pencils and broaden the range of values I have available.