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You’ll learn the most important foundational concepts for drawing anything and soon you’ll be drawing pictures out of your imagination or from reference.
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Founder of Proko, artist and teacher of drawing, painting, and anatomy. I try to make my lessons fun and ultra packed with information.
LESSON NOTES
Here’s a clip taken from the premium critique of the drawing basics course.
The assignment was to simplify a pear or a portrait down to its shapes, values, and edges. In this critique, I break down some of the common issues I saw students have with their shape design. I’ll give you advice and talk about proportion, asymmetry, and improving your shadow shape design. If you enjoy this critique and would like more be sure to check out the full course.
DOWNLOADS
critique-simplify-pear-from-observation.mp4
3 GB
critique-simplify-pear-from-observation-transcripts-english.txt
65 kB
critique-simplify-pear-from-observation-transcripts-spanish.txt
67 kB
critique-simplify-pear-from-observation-captions-english.srt
113 kB
critique-simplify-pear-from-observation-captions-spanish.srt
115 kB
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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.
This was SO helpful! I am self-taught (until now) and spend a lot of time spinning my wheels and have a hard time evaluating my own projects, this is AMAZING, worth the money right here, Thanks for taking the time to be so thorough!
Hi All! The one on the left is after watching the critique. Would appreciate any feedback on what could be improved.
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7d
I think you should try to define the outer edges a bit more and get the background value more uniform in coverage like your other values. Right now it feels too "separate" because there is a slight halo around the pear where you tried to avoid shading into it. Also, don't forget to keep your shapes and straight lines for the values you see in the drop shadow! Good work though, and I definitely see improvement from your first attempt :)
My second attempt at the pear after watching the critique video, I tried to shade with the pencil tool this time and had some issues there but overall i think it turned out better than my first attempt.
Critiques welcome
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23d
Great start! I would suggest drawing out a value box scale somewhere on the page so that you can refer to it as a key for your 5 values. Right now it's a little hard to distinguish your 5 values because of your shading technique. Some of your values were not broken down into shapes with straight lines as well as other values like your highlights, which are specific shapes.
and this is my pear evolution! Really enjoyed the critique lesson! I focused now mostly on keeping the edges sharp and to have a well defined value scale.
Hey! ... Just took some time and probably willl redo the drawing of the face.. after watching the example vidio... want to get better at shading... especially the darker pencils are hard to handle.
Hello!! Day three here yayy!
So while watching this demo I took some notes, some quick, some drawings, had a lot of fun! Thank you!
I'm going to watch the next video and hopefully do a project:))
Have a nice day guys!
The critique helped me understand the difference between the values so much better. Here one pre- and one post-critique.
•
1mo
Nicely done! Great work on the shape of the shadow.
Hello. I am excited to learn about the technical aspects of drawing. I took all the art classes when I was in high school, decades ago, but have not done much since. I chose the pear option 3 to make sure that I was not just doing exactly as he said in his demo. I did attempt the project once before the demo and once after. Overall I struggled with shading the correct values and drawing what my eye saw.
I am new here. Always want to learn how to draw and I am finally trying to do it. There is a lot more to this than I had realized and this is really hard for me! I took several runs at this level 1 pair over a week. Struggled with every aspect of it… angles, proportions. Simplification. The five values were particularly challenging for me. Here are my first, second and fourth attempts.
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1mo
Values can be a big challenge! You did nice work on these! You did well at lightening up the light halftone throughout these drawings, along with getting some nice shapes going. Values will be coming up later in the course, but practicing making a value scale with your tools will make it a much easier task!
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1mo
Good work! Remember to look for the lighter shadow halftone within the darkest shadow, it'll make the shadows not feel as flat, as there are two values that make it up.
I didn’t pay for the course, but I snatched a screenshot of the pear from the next video. I did this in maybe 10 mins. I have never drawn or sketched in my life, and I am pretty proud of this. I used a mechanical pencil, and my brother happened to have some kind of charcoal smoother pencil thingy around. I am quite proud of myself. :)
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1mo
Nice work! For this project, and many in this course, I would recommend against using a smudging tool! It can definitely be useful, but the blurriness can be used to hide mistakes, and when you're learning it's important to face those to understand where to improve! Use neat, overlapping pencil strokes to fill in areas, and gradually build up darker values. Keep it up!!
After watching the critique video, I gave the exercise another try, this time using only markers.
Hey Marco! Where are you finding these still life images? Also your studies look great :)
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2mo
Very, very nice! You did an excellent job designing the shapes of your values. I especially love the geometric look of your fruits and veggies!
Hi @unalloyedman ! I just started this course yesterday. Can I humbly ask if you are learning the course using digital materials (i.e., Procreate)? If yes, may I ask what brushes you used for this practice? I was using the HB pencil brush on Procreate, and it was a bit difficult for me, so I was just wondering, as your drawing turned out really nice!
Grateful for any feedback on the shape finding and the value hierarchy! (lighting on photo is not the best)
I’m in no place to give knowledgeable feedback. But I can say this is really great. I think you have done really well at finding the shapes of shadow and value on his face.
I tried doing this exercise with the banana reference photo used in the video. Any suggestions are welcome!
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2mo
Ooh, a banana is a great fruit choice for this exercise! Nice work dividing the planes of the fruit and designing the shapes for the values.
I tried to do this project with cup of coffee photo as my reference. Any suggestions are welcome!
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2mo
This looks great! All I would say is to take notice of the edges of shapes, the ones on the cup are a bit darker than the values around them. You'll want to make sure they match the value they're next to so the cut off isn't as harsh! Keep it up!
