My simple animal portraits submission. I noticed I leaned more towards round shapes.

I had a lot of fun with this assignment, but I also found it challenging to simplify to only 10 shapes. As I did more animals and after I watched the demos and the critiques, I did better at keeping things simple. I'm level one but I just had to try some modifications, which was so fun! I would love some feedback on what to specifically work on if anyone sees something. Thank you!

Was a lot of fun. I'm pretty happy with almost all of them!

There was five more images but I can only upload twenty images. Don't know if I am drawing the objects correctly. There's definitely errors on the cat and the buffalo. Think I need to simplify more like I did on the other drawings I couldn't upload but wanted to know others' thoughts rather than me staring at it for too long.

Still find it really hard to just loose sketch without reaching for an eraser. Also had to rush line in/line weight this AM (will go back later) yet but I'm really happy I finally managed to apply some of the concepts. I will reattempt and move further away from designed shapes and more to realism as a second attempt which I think was more the point of the exercise? I wasn't sure. Only been drawing a few weeks so i found this exercise really REALLY tough. Attempted. Failed and floundered. Watched the livestream, and tried to research some references to help things 'click'. If anyone has seen the awesome 'Hey Duggee' you'll know they push simplified shape animals to the extreme. I dug through images to get some inspiration. I copied one or two to start to warmup, but then tried to loosen up and just apply the ideas of core shape choices more loosely. Ive tried to label the 2 or 3 here that are copies, not trying to pass them off as my own (1 lion, 1 buffalo, and a duck I think). Then once I'd got some confidence I tried to create / iterate by myself. Yes, I know they are bad! BUT for *me* it's a massive step after I flopped so hard on the first attempt! Here I used some initial reference photos but also just played with shapes on some other paper until I found something that 'felt' like a particular animal, the promoted it to sketch book to explore further. The wolf and dog were both just things that fell out of experimenting (i know nothing or gesture yet so I imagine I could really make the dog 'point' more if I flipped the neck angle to continue that strong directional feel The 'ooh' monkey and square bear are my favourites I think. May take these and blow up and detail neatly. Some are more detailed than they should be but you can hopefully see the core shapes I used originally to overlay

Most of the references I picked didn’t break down into simpler shapes as obviously as the 3 he picked. Well, I tried. My first dog looks kind of like a bear, as does my Tasmanian Devil and wombat. The wallaby looks demonic. Not sure why I did the hatching on those few.

Not sure I understood this assignment correctly

I liked the exercise... Hippo was challenging.

Really fun assignment!

I find drawing on circle basis way easier than on triangle and square ones :// anyway, it was very fun and helped me a bit with expressing my ideas via shapes

I tried using the colour coding from @justsev and did some variations. I found that it's difficult to keep variations interesting, and I'm glad that the exercise showed me that

Unrelated question, but, what do you think the best drawing setup is? I have a desktop easel and a regular desk but I usually use that for painting, while for drawing I end up hunched over the sketches on my bed. Do you think it’s a good idea to sketch on the tabletop easel? Or just a normal desk setup is better? Or should I get a drafting table? Any advice is appreciated! Thanks :)

My lv 1 project, started out pretty stiff, but I think it got better as I went, tho my line quality suffered a bit, I gotta get more in the sketch mode while doing this kind of stuff, getting to stuck about trying to get good lines in one try :(. Very fun project, tho I think I sometimes struggled to find the places where to separate shapes and where to just do bigger shapes.

Despite some uncertain lines, I think they meet the assignment.

This was my third attempt at the portraits. Mostly because it was fun and I kept feeling like I could do better after each set. I’m probably do a 4th after watching the demo video.

Got a bit overwhelmed because I couldn't stop thinking about the form of things in space instead of the actual 2D shape I saw. Not sure if the point was to actually draw form, but I tried simplifying to shapes. I will probably watch the demo and critiques and give this one another try

Here is my Level 1 assignments - I added 10 additional reference for practice.

First attempt before watching the demo. It was hard to stick to 10 shapes or fewer! I'm looking forward to doing more of these.