Great improvement on the penguin in the after demo! You did great on all of these. It's weird, I also find that pen makes me more experimental and fearless of mistakes despite the medium being less forgiving, it's fun!

I think you definitely improved! It looks like you were getting tied into detail on the first try, especially with the penguin. They look a little more simplified in the 2nd try, but I would suggest trying to loosen up a bit more with your lines!

Ok. I think I do know a little something now. I think that I'm confusing speed for being loose. As in the faster I make a line the looser it is. But i think that I can slow down and make a loose mark. In my second attempt, I slowed down in the beginning and reminded myself to visualize the mark before putting it down. As the drawing went on, I'd slip back and speed up again. So, perhaps I need to take a step back and a small break when I notice that starting to happen. Essentially, I need to focus more on slowing down and taking my time. It's hard breaking a years long habit of being involved with jobs where you had to get stuff done right away or you're considered not good. I also think that what I dislike about my line confidence and quality is the fact that I notice that it isn't up to snuff and I need to put in more time and practice with my lines. Especially since I'm doing that novice habit of comparing myself to other students homework. Completely forgetting that we're all at different levels, even as beginners, and I've only been really doing this for less than two months. I definitely have problems with instant gratification and need to learn to cut myself some slack and focus more on the process and not some fantasy end point. I'm me and not you and this is where I am and where I need to get to is up to me and how much effort I put in. I know this seems like an out of nowhere ramble but the past few days I started panicking and getting dejected. The good thing is I'm not quitting and I'm going to keep going. I just really needed to get this out and put it down somewhere. So why not on this post? Anyway, if anyone read that, thank you for reading it. If you have any advice for me or critiques of the drawing, that would be greatly appreciated and I'd be grateful for your time.

Hey Jon! Once again I think you're being pretty harsh with yourself! You picked a very complex reference for your drawing! It has so many soft, undefined edges that it's difficult to identify where the forms are. For example, where does the back of the leg end? How about the top of the tail or the edges of the muzzle? The objective of this assignment is to practice draw the big shapes with loose, confident lines, but with a complex reference like yours, not only do you have to do that, but you also also need to do a lot of hard work making sense of the subject and figuring out how to simplify it. Instead of doing those two hard things at once, what if you made things simpler? If you consider the reference images that Proko provided, they are all lineart drawings with a very clear contour. We don't have to work very hard to find the big shapes in them. Could you try again using some similar types of references? Perhaps simplified illustrations of creatures, like Disney animals or Pokemon. As for your drawing itself, I think you could make some big improvements by focusing more on showing the rhythms in the subject. For example, when I squint my eyes, I can see a big C-curve stretching from the back of the squirrel's leg, up its back, and all the way across its head. Then the side of the head and the upper part of the left front leg make up another C-curve. The ears are little triangles that are basically straights with a rounded tip (reminds me of Ethan Becker's lazy-sided triangle. Forgot the exact name he gives it). I do see another very subtle C-Curve that separates the body from the side of the face. And there's even the suggestion of another C-curve originating from the the center of the right ear and wrapping around the body (which you might also simplify as an ellipse covering the whole upper body and head). In addition, I see essentially a large C-curve that stretches from the base of the left ear all the way down and into the spot where the back-right leg connects to the foot (you basically captured that curve, but I think you could draw it all the way through as one confident line). Around the muzzle, it's basically a bunch of ellipses. One around the cheeks and chin (passing through the eyes), another around the nose and bordering the mouth, another for the nose itself, and then an ellipse/lazy triangle for the mouth. The back foot looks to me like it's essentially a triangle, so I think you could use that to get the structure down first before working on the individual toes (do squirrels have toes?) Thanks for sharing your work! Keep it up, and I hope you can have some fun with it! (that's a reminder for myself too 😅)

You can really see the improvement from one drawing to the next! It’s great to see how much your understanding develops throughout the process. Nice work!