Okay, wow!? this actually helps and explains a lot. a while ago I’ve been drawing from imagination a lot, and my first drawings looked really poor - but this makes me realize that I probably just didn’t explore my ideas enough with the searching lines, I just immediately jumped into the drawing after doing a thumbnail, without actually being sure what it is that I want to draw. I think that letting ourselves do a “bad” version of what we want put on paper first might give us a better idea of what do we actually want it to be. This sure is gonna change my approach to drawing!

Hands are honestly my kryptonite but i did better than i thought i would

This, was a fun one. Especially drawing the hippo. Nice sweeping curves.

most of what i’m doing now is “lost”, but every once in a while i a nice clean ellipse. i just fill each page of the sketchbook with practice and trust that progress will come. thank you for this insightful lesson!

This was very helpful because I used to get a sense of awkwardness, of not doing the right thing, whenever I had lost lines while i was designing a new character I didn’t really know yet how it was going to go, while I was still searching. It’s great to hear it is part of the process of figuring it out.

I kind of like the lost and found lines

When I was trying the Mario Mushroom exercise, all my line were lost lines it was very frustrating and disheartening…

My attempt at drawing some animals.

For Miss Robot, I first used a red pencil to rough in the drawing. I think she turned out pretty well, but got a little messy. I traced over the first drawing to better see the final result. She still needs work.

This is a good way of thinking about lines. Its nice to know they all have their place.

Fantastic bonus lesson Stan…just clarified my ‘searching thoughts’ about the various introductions of the different line exercises. I just stopped spinning and started dancing!

Dang, that was helpful. Thanks. I feel like spend a lot of time and anxiety in this space.

Sketching from imagination from a velvet work & a hat. A character for my 2 yr old granddaughter to color. I worked it out on my tablet, then sketched w/ pencil

Thank you Stan for confirming the use case of lost lines! That made me not so frustrated when I drawing down a mess to get my thoughts materialized. But in another case, if I'm not very good at drawing some kinds of shapes(especially ellipse), I tend to draw down "lost lines", even I'm so clear about which shapes they should be. I just can't control my arm and shoulder. Here is a typical failure below.

Looking back through my last few days of drawings I noticed I end up with "lost" lines when I have no idea how I am suppose to translate a reference to the page. Those lines help me stay ahead of any fear from a blank page since no stroke is precious in that mess. This gives me the confidence to keep making marks until I figure things out. If I am lucky enough to feel I know what I am doing, I start on "searching" lines. Otherwise it a second pass from the "lost" line scribble with a better plan of action. I still have to search because I'm not skilled enough to make clean lines without some under drawing. "Clean" lines either come after lots of deliberation, hesitation and ghosting or are an over draw based on "searching" lines.

I just want to say thank you Stan - I was kind of fixed in my head to have as clean lines as possible (but still drawing things loosely) and I was wondering if I am missing something. I think I found the answer in this video to utilize more "searching lines" because at the end at the current stage of the course, I should be sketching and learning to do it fairly quickly, not focusing on making my sketch look like the finished work.

So just to confirm, when you do the single clean line, you use tapered lines to achieve it?