Day 31 Took me 2 weeks to finish week 6 and I'm already a day behind on Week 7 T_T Trying to also juggle the line weight course and finish up the final perspective homework for part 1 which due date is creeping up on me fast. Anywhosie. Our dear departed Nicoladies thinks I can do a 5 hour contour drawing over the course of five days..... sorry Nicky... it aint happening XD. Not sure who can draw that slow for an entire hour but... not me and my arthritis ridden hands. So let's make it 5, 15 minute sessions of Dr Jones here and see what happens. Gesture still meh, and memory drawings are still a real struggle. I did do a page of cross contour drawings but... they have been swallowed by the studio space.

Day 30 This was a good day. Spent time practicing some basic gesture heads (big thanks to Tim for the link to the pdf and to Stan... for making it available to us awful free loaders that still haven't taken the basic course... even though we clearly need it. Used that head knowledge and tried to apply it to my gestures along with revisiting the right angle studies. To cap it all off I got to spend 2 hours on Len's line weight course. A full productive day of drawing, I'll take it.

Day 28 and 29 Have some dissension in the ranks! I've been dragging my brother along on this quest to finish Nicholadies and ... he ain't too happy about it T_T He feels it's too advance for our level of drawing and wants to try something else out... and I get it but... we never finish! Please man! If we stay on course we'll be finished in July and we can go back on the basic, learning how to draw carousel but can we please, please, pretty please finish this! With that said... let's look the horror shot the last two days have wrought. Gesture drawing, Memory Drawing, Model Drawing and the new exercise is right angle studies. When you look at a pose face on and then try to imagine what it looks like at a right angle. These are actually quite tricky to find reference for. I know Muybridge is public domain but he seems to be under lock and key in some corporate dungeon at the moment.

Day 27 Nothing like the threat of Physical Thearpy to make sure I get all my drawing done early XD. Had the serious case of T-Rex arms last visit. Not sure if I'll have use of my right hand later tonight T_T (Hoping to touch more of my line weight class. Water color.... was interesting. I'm not familiar with the tools or the process so I felt like my concentration was constantly split between the actual drawing and fighting the tools. Also my set up has all of my pencils and dip pens set up to my right so I have the water color setup to my left and... doesn't feel great. Won't say I'll completely abandon it but... leaning towards to keep working with the pencil. Reverse poses... were kind of fun to do in how the teased my brain, as long as I wasn't too concerned about the final product. A friendly Proko member led me to the Rhythm pdf here on proko. I'll be curious to print out some poses and trace over them using the shapes and lines in the PDF and see if that bears any fruit.

Day 26 Looks like I'm not going to be able to sit down with Nicoladies today T_T So here is what I have from Monday. Per usual the memory exercises really beat me up. 2 minute gesture... meh. Looks better next to the memory gesture at least XD. The new wrinkle is doing model drawing with watercolor... and I do indeed have watercolor but finding the time and space to do it... a bit tricky. I was hopping to do that today but it just did not happen. Here's hoping I do better tomorrow.

Day 24 AND 25 Starting to panic about the gesture drawing. Part me want's to quite that part of my brain because every time I go off on a tangent I don't ever seem to finish things... but I really want to get better at gesture drawing and I'm not sure I'm seeing or feeling much better about these. Even with the increased timer of 2 minutes. Wondering if I want to carve out some time to work with the Manikins in "How to Draw the Marvel Way" and bring them over to Nicolaides... or should I just be patient and continue to do the scribbling? Tough to say. I do need to grit my teeth and get more work done two half days again.

Day 22 and 23 Boo this man... again! Did half a session on Monday skipped Tuesday and Wendsday, and didn't start today till 5pm! Bad Giff! Very Bad Giff! On the bright side today was a full day. Really struggle with the moving images. Been looking at the works of Eadweard Muybridge to help me out but... they are hard to find! What's going on! These are all public domain images and everybody seems to have them behind a paywall or some obscenely expensive books! 30 bucks for public domain images edited and bond in a book! That should be the price! ... feeling like I hit a tangent here? Hope to wake up bright and early tomorrow do some line weight work... going to have to find one day to do double Nicoladies to get back on track... that will be difficult.

Day 21 Not a bad day. 2 hours of Nicoladies and I hit all the exercises, 2 hours of line weight... kind of productive! Sure the final products are ghastly and unsightly but... eh small victories. Memory games tripped me up pretty good and struggled showing the lighter values in the model drawing with the instructions wanting us to use a ball point pen for the drawing (I used a micron). What I really need to figure out is how to take better photographs of my work. I have over head ceiling light, the window curtain open and 3 lamps pointed at this board and I can't get rid of this shadow!!! What do you expect me to do? GO OUTSIDE!! Now we're just being ridiculous here!

Day 19 and 20 Okay Nicolaides! I am going to go against your orders and actually read the ENTIRE chapter over the weekend. Even though you insist that I should never read ahead... I need to read ahead. Hopefully I can get all the reference material I need over the weekend so I can rock and roll during the week, because these half days are now beueno! We will.... maybe not draw for the whole 3 hours per day but I do want to hit every single assignment at the very least. Sorry for not adjusting the levels on the photos. It be very late.. but rest assured, dear viewer!!! They look like all the other illustrations.... I'm not crying! You're crying!! I'll be back on Monday! Going to spend some time with the line weight course(https://www.proko.com/course/line-weight-fundamentals-course) and building a crude clay model to help me with my next illustration. Enjoy your weekend folks!

Day 17 and 18 Two half days T_T New exercises leave me rather flumexed. The movement/swing exercise is when you should watch a model repeat the same action over and over again and you draw a 2 to 3 gestures on top of one another. Not having a model I chose to use Gifs of athletes and animation from older disney cartoons... and yikes! I could not focus and pick out the key poses. Also drawing on top of each drawing really made a mess, I ended up drawing them side by side to clean it up. On a happier note! Although the Model drawing on the 17th was semi disastrous it went a lot better today! I decided to break up each phase in 5 minute intervals. 5 for the basic scribble model, 5 for horizontal contour and then 5 for vertical and something interesting happened. I wished I had more time! Which is kind of the feeling I was looking for. Think I'll keep practice at 15 minutes and slowly ratchet it up from there. Less happier note. PT was very painful, I am so happy that I decided to do all my drawing in the morning because my arm is completely and utterly fried. Hope it feels a bit better in the morning.

Day 16 Memory Games was the new wrinkle today. Look at 3, 30 second poses then draw them in 30-60 second each. Had an alright time remembering the shoulders and hands but often got quite lost with the pelvis and legs. Kind of cheated by farming my "Drawing the Marvel Way" knowledge. When I get lost I kind of build a pelvis and imagine the line of action to help be my guide. Not quiet the goal of the exercises though. I'll try to focus more on the whole body tomorrow. Struggled with the modeled drawing so I essential just redid the Youtube demo I found a couple times. I'll try to break it up into two 15 minute sessions tomorrow and see what fruit it may bare.

Days 13-15 Howdy Proko land. Sorry for the late uploads. Been exhausted lately. Starting Physical therapy this week and though I'm pessimistic they will do anything for the chronic pain in my hands and elbow... I guess it can't hurt T_T Lot's of half days and 3/4th days I'm afraid. Really struggling with the model drawing section. We're suppose to spend a half an hour to an hour on on a single illustration and... i just don't have the skills for that T_T. But let's just keep treading on here and see what happens.

Day 12 More Gesture and weight drawings and once again even though not on the schedule wanted to do some more cross contour. Tried to make a conscious effort to do the Gesture slower despite the 60 second time limit. See if I can't find some sort of pleasing line to work with.

Day 10 and 11 Kind of fell behind so I added Day 10's Contour Drawing with today's exercises. Not exactly ideal but it is what it is sometimes. Super frustrated with the cross contour drawings. Not sure why I can't see the curves correctly. Hopefully it's just time and practice. Switched up my Gesture drawing by using Pose maniac. Kind of neat I did a set of female and male 3d models and switched the difficulty to easy. Can you tell... not really but I'm guessing there is a lot more to learn and do here. Ended the day on 'weight' drawing. Didn't really have a good sense of what it was by just reading the book so I snooped on the Youtube and followed along with a demo. Still kind of confused by it? Here's hoping that future passages in the book will clear it up a bit. Extra note: I skipped my 'makeup' day on Saturday and Sunday because Target is clearanceing out a portion of their art and crafts section. I never buy art supplies at full price, so I traveled to dozen of them scooping up all the markers, color pencils and paper I can find. Can't speak for all regions but you may want to check out you local Target and see if they're any deals to be had..

Day 9: Nothing Fancy today. Contour drawing and basic gesture drawing only. I'm going to pick up my plastic fruit tomorrow and I think I'll do both blind and cross contour drawings with them. Although I like looking at moving scenes and comics.... I just get lost so easily. I'm not sure I'm really accomplishing what the exercises is meant to ingrain in me.... even though looking at plastic fruit for 30 minutes sure sounds a lot less fun than silver sable or lord of the rings T_T New wrinkle today was I attempted gesture with animals, had a good enough time with it. Hopefully I'll carve out enough time tomorrow to make up the day I missed on Tuesday and I'll keep chugging along come Monday.

Day 8: Hey... I finished with some time in the day! Do I dare raise my blood pressure and attempt more perspective... or raise my blood pressure by trying to ink my mediocre drawing? Decisions, Decisions. So today's gesture was 'Flash' pose which is when you only look at the model for 1 to 3 seconds and draw for one minute from memory. Though I learned I have a terrible memory.., I did discover that I enjoyed having a whole minute to draw as oppose to the 30seconds that I have been doing. So when it was time to do regular gesture... did a whole minute... not sure that they look any better but it was nice to not feel so rushed! Still searching for plastic fruit that I can either draw on or stick a rubber band on, so a lot of guessing when it came to the cross contour studies. Ended the day with a blind contour drawing of Fantastic Mr Fox!

Day 7: Boo this man!! Yes I missed Tuesday T_T Told myself I was going to finish up my little personal project in a couple hours... and it turned out that it needs much more than a couple hours. But I'm back on the train! I'll have to post the missing day on Saturday. Not a lot to say. I've been looking for plastic fruit that I can mark up and help with the cross contour exercise but Walmart, Michael's and Pop Shelf all came up empty. I'll have to take the one hour trek to hobby lobby this weekend. Other than that? Little concerned about my gesture drawing. Not sure if they should be looking better at this point but I'm going to do my best not to stress about it and just follow the instructions in the book. Edit: No ref for the blind contour drawing... it's more Lord of the Rings. Found a fun website:https://www.everysingleframe.com/ which let's you pick a movie and it will select a random frame from the film. Saved me some time from looking for reference and just letting them do it for me.

Day 6: OWW! Took the weekend off to draw and ink a personal project and I have totally lost my groove! (Did I ever have it to begin with?) Still struggling with Cross Contour. Found a tutorial online and it started off simple with fruit which was plenty challenging for me... then all the sudden it's like LET'S DRAW HANDS! ISN'T THIS FUN?? (Note to proko land and any and all art teachers: No beginner in the history of beginner-dom has ever ever uttered the words, "Hands are fun!!) Then we entered 'potential gesture' when you're suppose to draw the next pose that you believe the model would take and woof... woof. Spent more than half my life reading comics, you'd think it wouldn't be that hard to imagine another image and where the shoulders and hips would be but... nope nothing in my noggin. Finally went back to blind contour drawing and both models had way too much hair... I was completely and utterly lost. .... so yeah not a great start to the week. Think I'll try to see if I can buy some plastic fruit that I can wrap rubber bands around for the cross contour drawings and try to find much simpler references for blind contour.... like someone bald!

Day 5 is in the books! I'm taking the weekend off from Nicoladies to draw some karate girls and dinosaurs... yes I'm a simpleton.... I'm sorry to disappoint. The day didn't quite go as plan, longer than expected doctors visit plus some pretty bad pain up and down my arm slowed me down, But the BIGGEST PROBLEM was the cross contour exercise... I didn't quite understand it XD. I'm going to have to take some time this weekend to find some exercises to help me out with it because the book spares less than a paragraph on the subject... which is shocking since looking ahead this exercise will be dogging me till the book concludes! But hey! Five days in a row that's worth a little, tiny hip-hip-huzar... right?

Day 4: Perspective Course kicked the stuffing out of me so only Half of Nicolaides today T_T Apparently I'll being doing some cross contour work tomorrow so fingers crossed that goes somewhat well.