Day 39: Have to be honest... kind of losing motivation. Just not seeing the improvement. Try my best to finish up this chapter and read the next one but... looks like Nicholaides and I are headed for a divorce T_T We have gesture drawing 2 minutes per pose, head gestures 60 seconds per image, right angle studies, a quick sketch from Walt Simonson's Thor and what should be a one hour study of a head that took more like 20 minutes... we'll call him SADRUFF!!

Day 38: Yeah... those hour studies just aint happening with me. No sure what I should do. Perhaps start with a Model drawing, then a slow contour drawing over the model? I'm sure a skilled artist can absolutely take an hour to draw a single body part but umm... If you look me up in the dictionary I guarantee "skilled" and "artist" will not be anywhere in my description. (Gesture, Memory, Weight Drawing, Single Body part Study, Daily Composition)

Day 37: I made a terrible mistake.. I calculated how many more days I have left!! 81!! 81 more days of Nicholadies? WHAT HAVE I DONE?! Think I need to revert back to my original method of model drawing: loosely putting down a light mark for the initial blocking, add slightly darker pencil for outline and contour, and then bring out the china marker for values. Just starting off with the China Marker and following the instructions in the book make it borderline impossible for me to stick with the illustration for much longer than 10 minutes, let alone an hour! (Gesture, Reverse pose, Quick Contour, Model drawing with China Marker, Daily Composition)

Day 36: Have to try to do get these done in earlier in the day. I'm fried when I stay up late drawing XD. For the Model drawing I pulled out some China Markers that I've been holding onto forever... mostly because I didn't know what they do XD. They kind of have a crayon texture... kind of neat. Gesture, Model, Memory and Daily Composition.

Day 35 .... not sure if i was suppose to ditch heads just yet... but it wasn't in the schedule and I'm not complaining! Gesture Drawing, Quick Contour, Memory Pose and Daily Composition.

Day 34: Brutal.... absolutely Brutal. Take a head and do a 10 minute right angle drawing? NICK!!! What in our entire history together makes you think I'm capable of that? Along with the head studies and gesture drawing I had some descriptive poses to do. I decided to read a script from the 1980s TMNT show and try to draw things out gesturally... but I am very, very helpless without the reference. For my daily composition I went back to doing some Busy Town.

Day 33: This was a weird one for me. Gesture drawing and composition from a comic... par for the course... at least for me XD But it was the head study that really flummoxed me. I'm so use to doing the typical head construction: make an egg shape. Cut it in half... cut in thirds... everyone that has ever looked at any drawing book ever knows the drills...but for this? Do a series of head studies over a 30 minute period, using the techniques discussed in the book: gesture, contour, cross contour ect. It all felt very, very wrong... sorry Lita, you deserve so much better T_T Look out Viggo! You're next!!

Day 32: Took me 2 days but Day 32 is in the books. Quick Contour is an interesting exercise... and one I greatly prefer XD. I'll have to start up another multi hour contour drawing since I do need to learn patience. Along with the usual gesture drawing we have some movement studies (boxer, kickboxer, golfer) and capped it off by drawing from another comic book for daily composition.

Day 31 Yeesh! 16 days? It's been 16 days since I last did Nicholadies? Time flies when you suck I guess :P So let's redo day 31 and see if I can stay on track. It's revenge of the scribbles!!! I've been trying to adopt other methods of Gesture drawing but none of it seems to be sticking so.... let's just go back to the book method of scribbly! I do that for one minute and then do a more.... manikin? version for the second minute... a good compromise... maybe? Tried to do memory drawing by reading a comic. Closing it and trying to redraw the gesture of the panel I last looked at and... needs a lot of work. Model Drawing and Cross Contour Drawing... again a lot of work needed and I managed to finish my Dr Jones Contour drawing entirely too fast (30 minutes... suppose to be 5 hours) and finally decided to do my 'daily composition' by looking at Good ol' Mr Fix It from Busy town fame. Here's hoping I can get back on track.

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.