I know my shell is waaaaaay off. I am getting used to using my full arm and shoulder. I do like my snail's head. I am not ready for boots yet.

Using a lighter pencil for the initial sketch stage is something I'll try going forward; you can see that I used a dark pencil (2B) for all steps of the drawing, and so: 1) Lines couldn't be fully erased, making the final product messier. 2) I was more hesitant to put lines down. So things took much longer. Overall I took 4 hours on the boots and 1 on the snail. I think with sketching lightly, I'll be able to get the basic form down, and figure out where the key proportion landmarks are faster. Also, drawing large is a good challenge. (The second snail picture, I made to further try to simplify the image into C, S, and I curves, but also drew significantly smaller, making things easier.)

I'm still getting confused about how to simplify things. Sometimes I think I've gone too far, but then I watch the demo and realize I haven't gone far enough. I still need to wrap my head around it. Hopefully, the 2-week drawing challenge will help me with that. Here are the boots and the snail I drew before watching the demo. As for the boots, I fell into every single "trap" without even realizing it xD

Tried the snail, finished it then watched the demo. Totally only focused on the actual snail and forgot it was actually perched on something....

Tried snail before and after watching the demo. Then Tried the boots without watching demo.

After watching the video: Image on the top Before watching the video: Image on the bottom I put in the lay-ins for the laces. The left boot had me stumped.

Tried doing the boots

Some takeaways from the demo: 1. The first "rough" sketch is waaayyy more rough than mine was. Mostly staight lines and Stan says that this is also slow for him and that he would ultimately be doing them in 30s 2. There are some lines that are too complicated for one stroke (the upper C of the snail shell). I tried to just force these lines, so it's good to know that that may not be realistic. 3. Curves don't have to be exact. If the curve doesn't add something to the drawing, it doesn't have to be perfect. (e.g. removing the "M" like curve from the bottom of the snail shell). 4. A clean line shouldn't prevent us from a confident line :) 5. A big difference between an "easy" and "hard" subject is how intuitively we can spot proportional errors. The Camel and Skull are hard because if the proportions of a skull are wrong, the human eye is very good at picking them up. Even if the boots are misproportioned, they still look like boots. 6. I could be wrong about this but I think when Stan is putting the initial rough lines down he draws a lot of them longer than where they may actually end. I'm guessing this gives a bit of a mental flip where we focus more on the positioning and angle of the whole line versus focusing on small details. 7. If you have a lot of 1 kind of curve shape the others will pop. The boot has a lot of C and S curves so the striaghts in the heel will pop. If you have a lot of 1 kind of curve its good to find the other curves and make sure they are included.

first two pictures are the ones I attempted before the demo. the last two are the ones I attempted alongside it

ha . i did not even see the wall the snail was on ..... how could I have missed that.

5th attempt with out watching all demo needed to reference a bit. its good to try on own first . going to watch demo step by step attempt again . decide not to try level 2 instead going back to previous assignment and a bit of the next one .

My attempt for simplifying the boots and snail.

I was super conscious about my line quality being horrible but did it anyways. Demo really helped, i had a better understanding how to blockout a boot.

There was a big gap between my first boot and my second boot. First things first, I need to dedicate more time to these courses. But I do feel good about some of these lines while I do see room for improvement in others. I look forward to learning how to erase better too. 😅

Did the project again after watching the demo. First two are before; last two are after watching it.

First attempt snail before watching the video, feedback welcomed… proportions went off a bit but it does look like a snail!

This turned out better than I expected but after watching the demo I see differences in the approach I’ll consider going forward. Still working on my straight lines too. Boots are next.

Sharing progress and feedback is definitely welcome. I wanted to do the boots again after the demo but thought I would try another image to mix it up. I got really tired of the laces. I tried to keep my lines confident and spent less time on this one. I also learned why it’s better not to draw on the back of sketch book pages. 😬🤣

Level 1 CSI project. No feedback needed, just sharing my progress. I wasn’t really motivated to do the shoe details, so there’s just a rough lay-in for the laces.

Somehow I feel like my “After Demo” attempts got a little worse? With my second attempts, I tried to shift my focus more towards line quality and making confident lines. Feedback is welcome! Thank you :)