$159
Bundle discount Each additional course part in your cart adds 3% off all courses, up to 15% off.
Full course
You will be given unexpiring access to watch the videos online .
$159
Give a gift
Give a gift card for art students to use on anything in the Proko store.
Or gift this course:
About instructor
Founder of Proko, artist and teacher of drawing, painting, and anatomy. I try to make my lessons fun and ultra packed with information.
DOWNLOADS
project-simple-animal-portraits.mp4
183 MB
project-simple-animal-portraits-transcript-english.txt
5 kB
project-simple-animal-portraits-transcript-spanish.txt
5 kB
project-simple-animal-portraits-captions-english.srt
8 kB
project-simple-animal-portraits-captions-spanish.srt
8 kB
ASSIGNMENTS![]()
![Sean Haugen]()
![]()
![Bag of Snakes]()
![]()
![Patrick Bosworth]()
![]()
![Carlos Javier Roo Soto]()
![]()
![Patrick Bosworth]()
![]()
![Renato Besen]()
![]()
![Micah Flanery]()
![]()
![Sebastian V.]()
![]()
![@locksmith]()
![]()
![@locksmith]()
![]()
![@etin]()
![]()
![Rich Acosta]()
![]()
![blendraw]()
![]()
![João Rudge]()
![]()
![Selle 16]()
![]()
![@kotka]()
![]()
![Patrick Bosworth]()
![]()
![Márta Kovács]()
![]()
![@jgroeschl]()
![]()
![Juan Albarracin]()
![]()
![Ronald Moss Jr]()
![]()
![Rachel Dawn Owens]()
Deadline: Submit your assignments by 06/15/2023 for a chance to be featured in the next critique video!
Level 1:
Create animal portraits using basic shapes. Try to simplify the animal using 10 shapes or less. Keep your shapes organic and simple. Simple shapes could be stretched, bloated, indented, or curved to capture personality. Don't worry about perfect proportions. Instead, focus on creating cool, simple designs. No details or shading! Use the three reference photos I provided and find 5 to 10 more.
Level 2:
Take Level 1 assignment and push them further. Play with your basic shapes and size relationships to give the animals different personalities. Don't hesitate to experiment and look for additional references to understand your subject better. Now, go have fun!
Here is my level 1 attempt. I tried to keep the shapes simple and hope I at least captured the essence of the lesson
Mixed results for this one. Some I am very happy with. I definitely learned as a I went. I think I would benefit with a bit more observe-and-plan before putting pencil to paper.
All feedback welcome
•
1d
Great work, I love how wild some of the chihuahua portraits are! Keep it up!
I had a hard time understanding the big bulk that is on the back of the gorilla, and I guess is hair? But let me know what you think. And I think I overcomplicated the Lv. 1 portraits.
Feels like I didn't played enough with the shapes, what do you think?
•
4d
Excellent portraits! I love your level 2 exaggerations, great expressions and shape design!
This was hard, but fun! I tried each animal a few times until I thought they were good enough. I'm proud of the rooster!
This assignment was great because it forced me to look at the subjects in a different way than I typically would. It was a tad difficult at the start, but applying the knowledge from the previous lesson helped steer me in the right direction.
Went ahead and did this one twice.
Had A LOT of fun with it. Breaking things down into simple shapes was hard at first, especially with the animals that weren't looking directly at the camera or were a side profile. Took me a bit to figure out a good way to take the perspective into account with the shapes.
My First attempt I had the images on the canvas as I drew and found it to be a bit distracting. I think I was trying to hard to match proportions and exact placement of things. I also had to draw things a little smaller which didn't help.
On my second go, each page was dedicated to a single animal and I think I did WAY better! I plan to incorporate this as something to do just after my warmups since it's a lot of fun trying to figure out what shapes work and I think I still need a lot of work/practice to nail some of the harder animals/shapes.
Had a blast, and excited to do more!
I was thinking about splitting the portraits into both non-overlapping 2d shapes and others into overlapping 3d shapes. I know the latter one was more the focus but somehow I needed to process them in both ways when I tried to decide how to turn them into shapes, and which shapes to use. I was at first worried about using shapes that are too complicated but I later relaxed a bit. The first attempts turned into some sort of cubism exercise for me, which wasn't the point I think.
Slowly I was able to play with proportions more. At first I was a bit stuck on the original proportions too much, until I think I started to get the idea. Round shapes seem easier to stretch around without losing too much likeness and turning it into a different animal altogether, like the bunny.
After watching the next videos, I think I get now what the idea is. Overlapping, but mostly paper cutout -shapes rather than fully 3d.
Hello! Here are my level 1 drawings done before looking at the demo. Had many questions while working on some of them, of course often not quite sure what to keep as a simple enough shape. After checking out the demo I think it's clearer :)
OK, tbh I'm hoping I did this right. I tried to not use forms at all and literally just use simple shapes. I intentionally didn't worry about proportions or making them match the reference pictures at all. They came out looking silly, but I expected that. I love doing the projects before watching the demo/critique to see how close I was, mindset-wise.
Here are my drawings. I took some time for this task to really understand the different shapes and their significance. I think the lions turned out pretty well.
some feedback would be great :)
Really happy with my final result. Very simple, some personality and the chance to put to use some line weight. I let some of my studies aro7nd the final piece .
Outline on Level 1, Shading around Level 2.
I thought it would be funny to tilt the entire head of the buffalo and keep it's lower jaw straight for lvl 2 compared to lvl 1 where just the jaw is tilted... maybe not that funny..
Any critique and feedback on my attempt will be greatly appreciated :)
Man, this was hard. I have actually never done anything like this before. It took over ten shiba faces to become more brave and start exploring and I still feel like my results were a bit timid. I decided early on to go from the most angular and basic to more softened and distorted versions. I also thought about the great variety of dog faces even among the same breed. Some of these almost look like cats.
I have discovered I have a really hard time moving away from what stuff look like. My mind is so set on looking at proportions and producing likeness that inventing cartoon characters and modifying shapes to extremes is the toughest assignment yet. Any tips on how to improve apart from doing more of this assigment daily?
•
18d
These are great explorations! It takes some time to start moving away from drawing the thing in front of you, and start designing your version of it. "Design, don't copy" is a great mantra from @Rachel Dawn Owens that helps keep me in the exploratory zone. By your third page of iterations I can see you starting to break away from the reference, I LOVE the third Sheeb on the top row with the teeny eyes! You're on the right track! By observing the proportions, and studying the likeness, you start to internalize the shapes present in the reference, so it's easier to apply some design principles to your shapes. Try varying the sizes of your shapes, find a balance of small/medium/large, maybe exaggerate the features, like a HUGE smile/tongue, teeny-tiny eyes, and a medium nose, or make the snoot the biggest feature because it's super close to us, and the other features fade back behind it, or focus on the eyes and make them the prominent feature, and make the body and head smaller to exaggerate. Remember these are explorations, and try to have fun with them. Keep up the good work!
Sorry for the low quality photo. Looking at how others did this assignment I think I might have over simplified it...anyways I'll try again after watching the demo. Critiques are appreciated!
I honestly think this one was a harder challenge for me. Every other lesson I was SO focused on details that I ended up taking far too long on each assignment.
This time, I made it mandatory that I utilized KISS, and spent less than 8-10 minutes on each drawing.
Actually following rules of no shading etc.. XD
I struggled a lot, this looks awful, BUT I stuck to the goal and got the entire assignment done in about 20 minutes using the most basic shapes I could.
Thanks for pushing me Stan, this class is great :)
did a full sketch page with these, i'm most proud of the orb shaped chicken and the lil foxes at the top (do not ask me why the buffalo ended up how it did though).
For some reason I was unable to upload the pictures of the actual Hippo, cow and rooster. But I tried identify the shapes as best as I could.
•
27d
These are super fun drawings! Keep making more of a these. I like what you got so far!
