Thank you kind words!

Hot D***, I am marveling at the power of daily practice right now. Well done, as usual, Marco! Hard work keeps taking you far!

Accurate. Good gesture. And very clean lines. Quite inspiring!

Wow! I can tell you my 2 min sketches do not look this good. If this is your warm-up, I am eager to see what your longer pieces look like (or will look like).

Great to have you onboard, valerioshi! It is, indeed, quite brave to put your work out there for others to see, but I am looking forward to seeing more from you. I think my favorite is the guy who is sort of waving to the people to beside him as he walks by.

Congratulations Marco! I hadn't seen the one hanging on the left before. I am really admiring your rendering in physical media. Fantastic pieces! Right at home in a museum exhibit!

Good to see you working on Med's map. I am both excited and curious to see where a course like this will take your art.

Super cool. He looks like a shady character from a cyberpunk universe. I feel like he is gonna hook me up with some premium augments at a reasonable price... I just don't want to ask where they came from... Or be late with a payment.

I think that every individual will learn at their own pace, in a manner suited to their unique situation and learning style. If you mastered gesture, then it would certainly be appropriate to move on to the next lesson. However, it is unlikely that you, me, or 99% of other students would master a topic after only one lesson and a handful of assignments. Therefore, I think it more reasonable if we just try to learn the gist of it before we move on: learn the concepts, practice the concepts, until we see growth. In some cases, even this might be unreasonable. If you are getting bored with your current lesson, then you risk losing motivation to draw at all, if you don't feel you have permission to move on. Or, to suggest a more positive scenario, you might be genuinely curious about what lies ahead. Why not take a peek and then have a crack at it!? Lastly, there could be some skills that you are going to find too difficult to master in a short period. You might have to continuously practice them for a long time before they stick. Or maybe, in some rare cases, you find that you can get by without them, or make do with a workaround. (e.g. Maybe you never get good at 30 sec gestures? You can still make an excellent figure drawing. You just might not be as efficient at identifying the gesture in the initial stages. i.e. the gesture is essential but the time limit is arbitrary outside of its instructional benefit.) Anyway, those are just my thoughts, and I am only another student and not an expert. If an expert has a differing opinion, I suggest that we give hers/his/theirs more weight. Nevertheless, I see a lot of fellow students seeking someone else's permission to move beyond extremely basic lessons. I just don't see how someone could stay motivated to keep drawing, if they think drawing is about torturing themselves over the ineffable mystery of the draw-a-box for the rest of eternity. Recap: it is okay to finish a lesson or course, without having mastered it.

Very happy to receive my first Steve Lenze draw-over critique! Great feedback, as always, Steve! The major takeaway I am getting from the value rearrangements is that I should not hyperfocus on replicating the reference. It is important to look for ways to improve the composition when interpreting it. It is useful to see how much better the portrait looks with the highlights pushed farther, as well.

Thank you for the encouragement, Christopher!

Hi Crimson, judging from your previous work and apparent strong work ethic, I am confident you will get this if you keep at it! I am hardly an expert at the torso bean exercise, myself, but maybe you can try doing the beans in various sizes? Particularly, you might benefit from doing some larger beans. I would suggest even doing a bean or two that take up an entire page. (In the video lessons, Stan himself is drawing beans that are the same size as his hand.) I think that if you drew bigger beans, it would be easier to see whether your bean has the degree of twist, lean, foreshortening, etc. that you want. Working at that size would also give you an opportunity to make big gestural lines by drawing from your shoulder. I would also give yourself permission to do some beans without a timer. No stress, just see if you can get one or two right on your own terms.

I really like these lines. Very clean, and I can tell you are not drawing from the wrist.

As you improve in your knowledge of anatomy/figure drawing, your boxmen will also improve. However, the exercise isn't necessarily supposed to look good. It is intended to be a way to get your pencil moving, without stressing out about the result. When I posted my assignments for this course, I tried to make what I showed publicly meet some minimum threshold for quality (which was, by the way, unnecessary), but to really do the exercises in the spirit that the instructor intends, you should have someplace, like a sketchbook or a stack of cheap copy paper, where you feel comfortable making a mess of things. You don't have to show what you draw there to anyone else. Nevertheless, drawing there will help you grow and build skill. I hope this helps. I look forward to seeing what you make, if/when you feel comfortable posting your work.

Fantastic!