Some takeaways from the demo: 1. The first "rough" sketch is waaayyy more rough than mine was. Mostly staight lines and Stan says that this is also slow for him and that he would ultimately be doing them in 30s 2. There are some lines that are too complicated for one stroke (the upper C of the snail shell). I tried to just force these lines, so it's good to know that that may not be realistic. 3. Curves don't have to be exact. If the curve doesn't add something to the drawing, it doesn't have to be perfect. (e.g. removing the "M" like curve from the bottom of the snail shell). 4. A clean line shouldn't prevent us from a confident line :) 5. A big difference between an "easy" and "hard" subject is how intuitively we can spot proportional errors. The Camel and Skull are hard because if the proportions of a skull are wrong, the human eye is very good at picking them up. Even if the boots are misproportioned, they still look like boots. 6. I could be wrong about this but I think when Stan is putting the initial rough lines down he draws a lot of them longer than where they may actually end. I'm guessing this gives a bit of a mental flip where we focus more on the positioning and angle of the whole line versus focusing on small details. 7. If you have a lot of 1 kind of curve shape the others will pop. The boot has a lot of C and S curves so the striaghts in the heel will pop. If you have a lot of 1 kind of curve its good to find the other curves and make sure they are included.

A very fun project! I wasn't completely sure what level of detail would be considered the contour, so I attached a couple of photos from along the way. I think I was most happy with the work from the 1st or 2nd progress picture. I tried to use some of the ideas of the "gesture" or "rhythm" lines that Stan was talking about. In the very first picture, I started from having 1 very large C curve from the top of the boots and 2 straight lines for the back of the foot down to the heel and then through the sole. This helped with getting the proportions pretty accurate to start with and I think the final drawing does hold onto the flow from the original outline more. I also added 1 "rhythm" line at the start in the boot on our right (I think), where it felt like there was a connection between the line from the back of the boot up along the part where the zipper connects the two pieces of fabric. I'm excited to see how Stan solved this problem and to go throught the critques. I might do another one tonight, or if I see something interesting today, maybe I'll take a photo of it and try drawing that. - Andrew

I think I nearly spit out my coffee when pear face came up. Great sense of humor by whoever submitted that, and Stan immediately just going into critique mode without even questioning it made it so much more funny.

I tried a one more pair after watching the demo. Some improvements and some a little worse. I think I did a bit of a better job of not doing too much in the shadows and keeping it a bit more of a shadow. But In this one I was having trouble getting getting the light tones differentiated. I maybe needed to use a sharpener to get more of the lead down. Aesthetically, I think I like my first attempt more but there was a quote I liked in the demo that we're learning to draw not how to draw a nice pear, haha. I think in the demo or critique he suggested crunching the whole shadow to one so that there would be more to work with in the light which I think might have worked better for this pair.

Haven't done any drawing in awhile. I think it started okay but I didn't plan the edges of the different shadows too well. I might try one of the other pears keeping that in mind before moving on. My immediate thought from the example in the next video is I drew this waaaay too small, haha. Bigger is better I guess in terms of fitting detail.