The first project of the Drawing Basics course is to challenge yourself to simplify the shapes, edges, and values of a pear or portrait from observation. I provide you two photo options over in the downloads tab. Being able to simplify is a very useful skill to be able to communicate clearly in your drawings.

Alright, level 2.. let's take it up a notch and draw an arcade room using 1-point perspective. The challenge here is to draw the front planes as complex shapes instead of rectangles and then extrude those toward the vanishing point. Arcade cabinets are a fun way to practice this.

Before we get into learning about lines, I want to give you an exercise to help you warm up your hands and draw nice fluid lines. This warmup is a fun way to help you practice drawing ellipses.

Alright, let's move beyond random floating boxes. For this project we’ll practice our 1-point perspective skills by building a room and filling it with boxy objects like furniture and appliances.

Mike Hawthorne shows how to use horizon lines, vanishing points, and perspective grids to establish structured backgrounds.

Line quality plays a crucial role in our drawings. And if you keep practicing those bad habits, they're gonna get even stronger and harder to shake. But don't worry, in this lesson, I'll show you 6 habits to get you on the path to good line quality.

In this lesson we’ll take a look at the two that make up the torso.

A beginner's guide to sketchbooks and paper with lotsa juicy info about paper types, texture, weight, archivability and most importantly, how to avoid the common mental pitfall of sketchbooking. I'll get you started on the right path with sketchbooks so you can focus on improving your drawing skills. And you can treat this lesson as a resource you can come back to in the future when you need to refresh your memory of drawing paper. Next week we’ll have a premium-only comprehensive beginners guide to Pencils, Erasers, and Sharpeners!

It’s time to simplify those snails and boots! I show you how I would do it in these step-by-step demos for the level 1 CSI project. Make sure to check back tomorrow for my level 2 demonstrations!

Here’s a project to help you avoid chicken scratch. We’re going to simplify our drawings to C curves, S curves, and straight lines.

In this project, we'll practice measuring accurate proportions with a portrait. Using our measuring toolkit we'll break down the face into basic shapes, starting with the biggest shapes and working towards smaller details.

Hi, i used to have desktop notifications on my browser, however i got a new computer and it never prompted me to turn them on on this pc. Is there a way to manually turn them on for my course?

It’s time to draw the figure! This project is all about capturing the action of a pose through rhythms.

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.

Doing tracings over photographs is a great way to tests your knowledge of the muscles. Check out our new lesson to learn how.

I'm just about to start in on the Rhythms section of the Drawing Basics Course. A few of us in the course have been doing regular calls, and this Sunday (7PM EST) we'll be doing exercises together using Stan's rhythms approach to gesture drawing. DM me if interested in joining us on the call.

I've followed Proko for awhile on YouTube, but this week started looking at the site and have been following some of the free videos. Hope to get some gift cards for Christmas to get a premium course or two. Anyway, I'm excited about the community aspect of this and look forward to participating/contributing! I'm attaching some drawings, despite not necessarily feeling they're the quality I'm capable of. On the pear and portrait exercises I only used an HB pencil, so my values were limited. I may revisit these and use additional pencils to open up my value range. The Jeff Watts skull was just following the video of the master study...I'd like to do this again with the original image to reference vs. keeping up while watching the video. Finally, the cat sketch I did while watching the simple shapes live stream. I obviously pushed further than keeping it at simple shapes, but it was a fun sketch to do. I've had that source image in a drawing reference folder on my phone for some time. I expect I'll revisit this one for a more refined drawing at some point, likely on grey tones paper...some things are off a bit, but generally happy with the result for a quick sketch. I'm open to any and all feedback/thoughts. Thanks in advance! Hope to "meet" some of you soon!

Now that you’ve all had some time to try the first project on your own, you can watch how I do it and figure out what areas you are exceeding and struggling with. Here is my step-by-step demo on how to properly execute the first project for level 1 students.

Pear Critiques are here! Critique for the portraits coming Thursday, but I recommend level 2 students watch this critique video too. I give advice and demonstrate things that should be useful to both levels.

Level 1 demos are done and it's time to move on to level 2! In this lesson, I show you how I would approach the level 2 CSI project.