After this rich journey with Patrick, I have now created my own fantasy figure. As I drew, the story took shape, which is another new fantastic approach I learned in this course. Once again my warmest thanks @Patrick Jones and thanks to @Proko for those amazing Reference bundles Dumped in the mud and castaway, A young girl finds herself discovering, What wonderful powers she was covering - A delicate creature but she could array Her beautiful wings, as if to say "A soiled body and a broken mind, Cannot cause injury enough to grind, A woman's spirit and her dragon heart - They give me wings so that I may Soar high and fly far far away" my dearest niece Maia Helmbold has expressed my story so wonderfully in these lyrics

Patrick, I like your teaching style, how to handle the charcoal stick is excellent, thank you.

Great to see such great art here, guys! Thanks for your support of my teachings :)

There's a lot to keep track of in these first two courses. Between what he's saying and drawing and the reference changing or disappearing I'm never sure where I should be focusing

This is a strange course, so far. Topics and informations are thrown there,wildly, which is totally different from Stan's lessons that are very structured. But I like it too. Just seeing Patrick drawing live can make me learn stuff like a sponge. So I tried drawing a female figure from imagination, starting with very strong gesture lines, and trying to keep them alive. And well, I failed. In the end, adding anatomy on top made me lose the nice flows I had at the beginning, no matter what. I especially feel bad for the left shoulder which doesn't look right at all. I'll try again after watching more videos, and we'll see if my drawings can get more stylish and gestural.

Here is my attempt to mimic great artist ))) I made it digitally. I like the result but i still don't understand how to keep drawing so light and soft and voluminous at same time. When i try to keep drawing light it becomes blurred and lose texture. And it is easy for me to make drawing too dark very quickly without adding much volume.

Here is my follow-along. Pretty happy with it, especially liked the arm and hand demonstrations - the anatomy there is kind of crazy so looking forward to the following lessons to explain it in detail. I did it digitally, and it definitely felt a bit more limiting than what Patrick was showing - I really want to feel that charcoal on newspaper, the iPad screen felt very small and slippery, especially since I kept it all at fixed zoom level, compared to what looks like an A3 or A2 paper - I take these lessons after work in the office so charcoal or any messy materials aren't really an option. I also don't really have any experience with charcoal so a bit scared of it :) I don't think I've ever smudged this much in my life, that felt awesome, I didn't use undo at all - just smudged everything I didn't like and then drew over it, I did use the eraser a couple times for highlights since the smudging made the areas too dark. It all felt very natural and unconstrained, and I think the smudging added a lot to the values and shadow tones later on. Great lessons so far, thank you Patrick!

Here is my drawing while I was following along, it was nice to see the work on the arms and hands before jumping into the full figure. I made it with graphite pencils on my sketchbook. I'm taking notes from comments you make throughout the videos as a reminder. Still a lot ahead to learn and I'm happy for it, already going through a daily thought process of learning and it's great. Thank you Patrick.

I am done, and I am exhausted. Took the entire course in one week. Very happy with the last piece. I learned a lot from it about how to actually finish the drawing. It's always very hard to think of what to add after the initial structure sketch. The detailing in this final lesson is fantastic - it feels much more finished and alive without feeling over-detailed, like it doesn't have every strand of hair drawn detail, but the atmosphere, the ornaments, the stylistic choices, the background add so much more than strands of hair ever would. This last lesson felt pretty fast, somewhat hard to follow, I think it took me 1.5 hours instead of 1, with all the pauses and rewinds when trying to look at what @Patrick Jones was doing and then focusing on replicating the same. Thank you so much for the podcasty feel, definitely calmed me down, as I felt quite nervous going into the last piece - something about it being the last piece added the pressure of wanting it to be good and not messing up. All the suggestions really helped with not feeling as anxious about my work, and it was awesome to see how you managed to fix and change pretty major parts of the artwork. Here are my final pieces - the one from the previous lesson, the final one, and my small SFW variation, as I plan to share it with friends who might not be ready for the nudity. Thank you SOOOOO MUCH for this course, it was phenomenal - I'll be rewatching it a few more times to really digest all the information.