This is my ultimate weakness. For whatever reason my brain will not let me draw simple. I feel like I had to power through this and got distracted with background textures. I want so badly to get better at simplification and more and more I find that its the hardest thing for me to do and is holding me back big time.

I would love some feedback please!

While doing this exercise I noticed that I got more and more carried away with the edges and later the small details. This usually happens when I find an exercise too fun. Eventually, I started timing myself to avoid overworking the faces but somehow it got a little worse. I only dared trying a different light source on the pouty mouth man. Looking at the demo video, I definitely can tell where I was too timid with my edge variety. I also drew some faces way too small and had to fight quite a bit with my charcoal pen to produce smoothness. On one of the poor faces I even forgot the eyes (I'm not happy with how I handled my eyes and often they confused me due to the lids on the reference, which I decided not to include). Grateful for all critique I can get!

My Level 2 attempt, and ngl, it turned out better than I expected! I was still experimenting with Shadows and Edges, and I've noticed that ... I have no idea how to draw a simple head at an angle, so that's something im going to work on for a bit. Any feedback will be appreciated!!!

Level 2 attempt.

Thinking of portraits as blobs makes it easier to imagine how light would hit the forms. Drawing a simplified egg as a lighting reference seems to make shading more complicated forms easier as well. I struggled a lot with where to put halftones and how light/dark they should be, but following along with Stan's thought process during the demos resolved a bit of the confusion. During this assignment I felt that there's an acceptable margin of error for shading organic forms, that makes them feel 'believable' despite not being completely accurate. So I got less stuck up on trying to make the shadow shapes 100% accurate as I did more blob heads, and I felt a lot more comfortable/confident with lighting them from imagination. I primarily used airbrushes to create soft edges for the first few blob heads, then afterwards used the hard round brush to practice controlling edges with pen pressure/opacity jitter.

Values and edges will be the end of me

Here are my level 1 and 2 assignments. Every new assignment I'm getting a greater appreciation for how much can be achieved with subtle difference. I'm going to keep focusing on improving my used of mid-tones

This version of this exercise made me realize that I am unsure of how to properly shade rounded forms. I also need to practice more with shading gradations.

I find the exercise one of the most difficult from the entire course. It's also the first time when i try charcoal creyons and charcoal paper. Any suggestions on how i can befriend this material?

This was harder that I thought! Simplifying it makes it easier and also a bit harder because I'm making my own decisions and not literally reproducing it exactly. That is what I want to learn, but it still proves quite difficult. I'm not sure if my edges and shadows are correctly done, feedback is welcome! But I'll also check all the demo's of course.

Another one... trying to improve the rendering of values and edges but still looks messy...

Im happy with the final result... As far as my knowledge goes this is a some what good representation of the lighting of the portrait and the edges. But then again, I might be very wrong... any feedback is welcome.