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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.
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ASSIGNMENTS![]()
![Rio]()
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![@manuellopezcabrera]()
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![Ash]()
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![K. Williams]()
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![Kayin Aaron]()
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![Hernan Rueda]()
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![Petar Ristic]()
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![Estel]()
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![Chuck Ludwig Reina]()
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![Jacob]()
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![Dylan Bragg]()
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![Carlos Javier Roo Soto]()
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![Patrick Bosworth]()
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![@kotka]()
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![Carlos Javier Roo Soto]()
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![Alexandre Frazao]()
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![Melanie Scearce]()
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![Ronald Moss Jr]()
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![Patrick Bosworth]()
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![Clément Douziech]()
Level 1
Simple Blobs: Visualize how cross contours wrap around random blog shapes from different angles (add eyes and limbs if you want to make it more fun!)
Ginger Root from Photo: Start by drawing the ginger root from the photos provided in the downloads and then try to invent your own. These are essentially blobs that grow other blobs, like bloated tree branches.
Simple Creatures: Draw seals, sea lions, fish, worms, snakes, sharks.. any simple blobby creature from photo reference. Find your own photos on pexels.com or unsplash.com
Level 2
Complex Creatures: Draw more complex creatures like lobster, shrimp, beetles, etc.
- First do the lobster photo I provided in the downloads. Then find your own reference on Pexels or Unsplash.
- Start with simple dynamic shapes. Remember what we learned in the Shapes section!
- Add the cross contour lines to show the forms. Simplify, but not too much so you don't lose the essence of the form.
Change the Pose: Change the pose a little from the photo to force yourself to imagine the forms instead of only copying.
Deadline: Submit by 05/31/2024 for a chance to be in the critique video!
Had a hard time with this one. Started with primitive blob forms before going onto ginger root images, forgot to save the images i used....i think ill need to get a real life subject to study. Couldn't get the volume right. The ammonite and the tortoise shell are 3d scans of real life specimens from museum collections found on sketchfab. The shell wasnt even close.......
ignore the huntress wizard doodles thats for an upcoming project.
Links to the studied models here:
https://sketchfab.com/3d-models/puzzle-4d-ammonites-perisphinctes-97369beae61a4cf899ae4ab95df81889
https://sketchfab.com/3d-models/sea-turtle-carapace-38049843f829430391048f1e4648cf26
Long time since I posted! I kept going at a very slow pace and for a while I wasn't confident in my results, so I just kept going privately. Felt good about this one (especially the bat) and wanted to post something again!
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20h
I love them!
I think I need to watch some demos to see what do when different cross contours meet (if that makes sense). There are a few areas in here where I feel like forms were interacting in a weird way and I didn't know what to do. Something to practice, I think.
Looks pretty great. I would suggest doing a bunch more to build up Your intuition for where forms meet.
I did these practices, I found it really funny to do but I think I'll do more practice because it's my first time doing this. Any kind of advice is welcome!
Had some fun with this - thought I'd share all the project sketches I did. I think the snake funnily enough is a great exercise if you find a photo which plays around with depth as well.
This exercise made me think about how much I focus on mere contour instead of thinking of the overall form. I always though form came from shading, this is certainly an amazing exercise.
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19d
Really nicely done. And to your comment, form can come from many things! Shading / rendering is just one of those methods. Even a simple line drawing can suggest form with the way lines overlap. Or sometimes we understand form by the shadow it casts. The great thing about this cross contour exercises is that if we can imagine form, we can use any of these techniques to express ourselves.
And again, really nice job!
A couple of level 1 attempts. I found it hard to sell the transitions between blobs, but I think I started to get it with the larger ginger root. I need to tighten up the cross contours, as they are a tad messy and don't sell the illusion as well as some other folks have.
Here is my level 1 project submission! I had a lot of fun doing the cross contour and it really made the drawings feel like they've come to life
A couple of practices before I move on to the Gestural Architecture. Done after watching the critique video. They turned out very sloppy, I don't don't why is harder for me to do clean lines with the mechanical pencil and the texture of the sketchbook didn't help. And I kind of force my way through the crab, guess I should have stick to blobs instead of planes.
Next I'll do a couple more of ginger root people and move to the next topic. Any advice? Do you think I captured the forms correctly here?
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30d
These are looking great! That crab is fantastic, if anything I'd say bump up the lineweight a little around the main crab body to separate it a bit from the rear claw and legs. Your organic forms are all great too, your cross contours wrap like rubber bands, you're paying attention to the way the cross contours move in perspective, excellent work! What size mechanical pencil are you using? A thin .5mm mech can be somewhat unforgiving because it gives such a thin uniform line. Lines can easily get hairy if you go over them a few times, and if you have heavily textured paper that can really deviate the tip of a thin pencil. You might want to try using a thicker pencil for your outlines, either a regular woodcase pencil, or a 2mm clutch mech pencil to give you some more variety to your lines. Even a .7, or a .9mm mech can be a handy addition to a .5mm when you're trying to focus on lineweight or clean tapered finishing strokes. Hope this helps!
I really like sea animals so after the lobster I just kept going with the water creature theme. After reviewing the demo and critique video I realize that I spent way too much time on the lobster - but it was fun and meditative! I find myself enjoying organic shapes and cross contours a lot more than boxes.
Here is my first try to this assignment. I don't know what happened. I feel like the cross contours were wrapping well with the blobs but, they start getting worst and not wrapping properly.
Maybe is my carpal tunnel and/or the fact that drawing live caricatures for 3 years on an easel make me lose my habit of rotating my paper. It doesn't help that my sketchbook is to heavy to hold with one hand.
And I was trying to do these very lightly but the color pencil is too dark and short.
So, what do you guys think? I guess I'm gonna be in this lesson for a while.
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1mo
Great idea to ghost in the cross contour all the way around the object. Your cross contours wrap nicely round the form. Great work!
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2mo
Nice work, Ronald! Bears are complex creatures, great choice for a level 2 assignment! You simplified your shapes and cross contours here and paid closer attention to the curvature of the forms you're describing, it's looking much more round and 3D, great job! In the video "How to Draw Cross Contours on 3D Forms" Stan mentions "Don't Get Lazy With The Ends" around 13:45 into the video. You have a great wrap right under the belly of the bear that makes it look fully round and like that cross contour continues on to the other side of the bear, but look at the top side of that same cross contour which abruptly ends without continuing on to the other side. It makes it feel like the form pinches sharply at the top. Try to WRAP the ends of your cross contours as if they are a rubber band hugging the form. You could even blow up a transparent balloon and put a rubber band around it to study how that looks. Try to draw through the forms like you have x-ray vision. Thinking of how the cross contour continues on the other side will help you keep the ends of your contours rounded and wrapped tightly across your forms. Take a look at the Mario Mushroom Warmup for some ellipse practice for those cross contours (I love this warmup!) it will really help get you in the groove for wrapping cross contour lines. Also revisit the "How to Draw Cross Contours on 3D Forms" lesson and the lessons on drawing animals with a few simple shapes (don't forget the critiques!) Aaron Blaise's demo on animals is a good one for simplifying bears, he's the bear EXPERT! Hope this helps, keep up the good work!
https://www.proko.com/course-lesson/warmup-mushrooms
https://www.proko.com/course-lesson/project-simple-animal-portraits
https://www.proko.com/course-lesson/how-to-draw-cross-contour-on-3d-forms
https://www.proko.com/course-lesson/how-animators-use-basic-shapes-with-aaron-blaise
I consider exercises that develop your ability to understand cross contours & planar analysis of 3d forms to be the most important to me at my current stage, so I raised the complexity of the assignment a little by attempting to think in planes. I'd like to work with tone and render in the near future and this seemed like a fundamental prerequisite to doing just that.
I hope I'm doing these correctly; I tried to find the points of the form where it turns the most and focused on placing my cross contours around those plane breaks. A lot of them weren't so obvious (especially on round forms) so I struggled to guess where to place my cross contours. Right now most of them look like the forms have a webbed texture on their surface, rather than those webs indicating their plane changes properly. I think it'll be a while until this clicks, or hopefully Stan gets into planar analysis in the edge section later on and it'll be cleared up then.
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2mo
These are sensational!
Second attempts after seeing the critics, but it's a bit tricky to make the shapes looks good
