A practical guide to sketchbooking with ballpoint pen. Build confidence, explore imagination, and make drawing part of your daily life.

Develop your favorite thumbnail sketches by adding new details and exploring variations. Stay loose and don't be afraid to refine your ideas.

It's time for your assignment. Use the provided descriptions to create a variety of thumbnail sketches, exploring different silhouettes and ideas.

For this project, we're going to design our line quality to be more interesting by practicing organizing the line weight.

It’s time to switch our brain over to think more three-dimensionally for the Depth and Form method. In this demo I'll show you how you can primarily use one method, but not be strict with it. So, I sprinkle some influence from the light direction method.

Drawing the head with a downtilt.

Learn to draw the head from the side view using the Loomis Method with this real-time demo.

I've been wanting to put some more time into painting with gouache lately so I'm starting a study thread, feel free to join in! Here are two pieces from this weekend's attempts. The first is a Dean Cornwell study done along with a livestream from Jeff Watts. Clear reference was tough to find, so I just went along with the process I saw Jeff work though in the video. I spent about 3 hours on the Cornwell study and then applied the same process to an original sketch I did of Norman Rockwell from a black and white photo, which also took about 3 hours. Still getting the hang of organizing values on the palette, I feel like my palette gets crazy and disorganized quickly, so by the end of the Rockwell piece I was hunting and mixing a lot more to get back to the appropriate values. I'd love any feedback, suggestions, notes or revelations you've had during your own gouache adventures! Tools- Palette - Winsor & Newton Permanent White, and Ivory Black, Holbein Permanent Yellow Deep, and Flame Red Robert Simmons 785 Round #4 Arches Aquarelle Watercolor Cold Pressed Paper Livestream- https://www.youtube.com/live/gsTAsfjR_uk?si=l8BQy83zXAEOzYwk

That messy stage between a rough thumbnail and a final design is crucial. Let's take a rough thumbnail and develop it into a more detailed sketch. We'll focus on infusing personality through shape design and silhouette. I'll walk you through my process of refining anatomy and proportions while staying loose and open to discovery.

Gesture drawing tips for handling complex poses through abstraction, balance, and expressive rhythm.

My course is now on Proko! A common question that I get from beginners is: What the hell am I supposed to draw? In this course, we're going to look at how to think about *what* we draw so that we can solve that problem. We'll look at generating ideas from "scratch", taking vague notions and refining them into concrete designs, and producing work that can participate in a greater pipeline to create tangible products.

Drawing consistently good looking lines can be hard. Here are 5 line quality warm-ups that you can practice to improve your line control.

It’s time to inherit some power from the masters! In this project, we’re continuing to improve your line quality by choosing a master drawing that excites you and studying the artist's use of lines.

In this project, we’ll continue working on improving our shape design by applying the concepts we learned from the last lesson. You’ll be working on identifying the gesture of your subject and then designing dynamic and interesting shapes that support that gesture.

Let's study a Bridgman torso, combining different techniques and adding my own rendering to make the anatomy clear and articulate.

Let's practice creating gradations with texture. This warmup helps you control value and describe form using only your line work.

Let's practice showing form using cross contour lines by drawing blobs, ginger, seals, lobsters, and other creatures.

Alright level two-ers...Since you've already got some experience with sketching, I want to give you a bit more of a challenge to start practicing sketching from Imagination!

Let's dive into your "Organizing Line Weight" submissions! In this critique I'll look through both level 1 and level 2 projects and discuss how to improve line weight issues.