Finally done! Feedback is welcome :)

I don't want to see another skull again lol Looking back, I think the biggest improvement I made was the cranium and jaw proportion and positioning. I was also finding it easier to visualize the skull in more extreme angles. Still making mistakes (particularly with the face features), but I think I've gradually improved To check against reference I used 3d skull (thanks Nio@): https://sketchfab.com/3d-models/male-skull-1e54622b84ab46fd9f4518c47fa60929 For anyone interested in seeing my notes and comparison to reference: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1BP-_OFwXHfBikhXLyK_b-HNfNM8_WqYm?usp=sharing (google drive cause this site compresses images quite heavily and it might not be readable)

Here's my skulls! I think I got decent at rendering the planes and overall forms but I still have a lot to learn with all the little anatomical details and the organic shapes I also tried doing the hard mode challenge but I'm far too inefficient to do it under 5 minutes and struggled even doing it in 10. I think I'll come back to it when I'm a little more efficient/better at simplifying

That was hard! I'm usually quite slow painter so learning about brush economy and becoming more efficient was really challenging, but I managed to dramatically improve my time by building big to small. It's cool to see how much you can simplify but still convey form and also seeing how repeated painting helps with designing and simplifying

Colours are fun! I liked the tetris piece exercise quite a bit, imagining all the shadows and different colours of reflected light was a nice challenge

:)

Draw along in digital! That was pretty exhausting to be honest but patience pays off.

Follow along with the free videos from the course and decide if its worth it yourself! $140 is a lot of money and I'd highly encourage you to try out free learning material (not only from Stan) before you consider a paid course. It will help you see if you're able to commit to a course which you seem unsure of. It'll also help decide if paying for a course is worth it for you, maybe you'll be content with the free materials, maybe you'll be looking for more. In my experience, I've generally found that paid courses are better put together (not that free content is bad) because lets face it, being paid gives them dedicated time to design and create quality content. Creating a course is extremely time consuming and not many artists have the time to make one for free. I've taken a couple of Stan's courses (figure drawing and portrait drawing) and have been really happy with the quality. The courses are planned out well and I think Stan's a great teacher who's clearly passionate about art, he distills important info well and communicate effectively. That said, no art course is going to teach you everything there is to know or magically make your art amazing, you still need to put in the work and there will still be a lot to learn by the end! So yeah, start with some free material and go from there. There are a lot of great courses out there (both free and paid) and Stan's courses are some of those. Hope that helps :)

Last one!

Phew, awesome seeing everything coming together :)

My lips protrude a bit too much. Or something is wrong with… something.

Been looking forward to this exercise! Hair is generally super detailed so breaking down the core shapes and shadows made it way more manageable. I feel like I need to work on observing and designing shapes

A few ears at different angles. I've avoided drawing ears in detail for a long time, but this wasn't as daunting as I thought it'd be. I think I could use some work designing the shapes to emphasize the forms as 3D like Stan does. Anyway, feedback is appreciated!

Few lip drawings with references, any feedback is appreciated :)

Some draw alongs with the videos and a couple extras. Any feedback is appreciate! :)

The whole approach to shading is super helpful, I normally have trouble managing values but focusing on just shadow or light area simplified things greatly. Personally I feel a little weak on identifying and simplifying shapes but let me know if you have any other feedback, thanks :)

Here are some eggs! (In charcoal + 1 graphite. Might have a go at digital later). I haven't had much practice with charcoal or the overhand grip so these came out a little rough. Plus I think the paper was too textured or maybe the sandpaper I used was too coarse cause the lines ended up being roughly textured. One thing I could work on is hatching. I tried following the contours to some degree but ends up looking a little sparodic. Any other critiques are appreciated!

Measuring practice! It was kinda tedious but a great exercise, I really learnt a lot especially by checking against the reference and re-drawing

Last ones! First set is with reference, second set without. I remembered the male chest proportions wrong on the front facing drawing and the figure looks a lot skinnier as a result. Also there's less detail and more anatomical inaccuracies in the second set but that was kinda expected given my lack of knowledge :) Any feedback is appreciated as always!

Week 16: Continue with the drawabox lessons. I've had some awesome feedback from @elkad @James Hicks and @Danet . I think that i have a better understanding how ellipses and cylinders work. Getting them correct on paper freehand with a fineliner is a different story :) . Anyway, i'm 115 cylinders in the 250 cylinder challenge, drew along with the plant examples and drew some construction plants and mushrooms to. Also did a longer portrait drawing for fun, and did the branches exercise again.