Decided to have a go at the level 2 assignment and see what comes of it. I actually enjoyed it, although I don’t think a quite achieved the goal, I’m quite pleased with some of these. My struggle is to not get caught up in detail and my perfectionist tendencies. I need to work on letting go of that strong desire to make it look “real”, and play more with shapes and sizes. Still, it feels like progress was made with this.😀

Enjoyed the exercise, any feedback appreciated, I struggle with bird feet

I had a hard time loosing up with the robot girl compared to the organic lines of the penguin. I was way too focused on the clean outlines of the robot girl. One made pre demo and a second attend after watching the demo

It’s been great looking at everyone’s homework for this. Lots of great work, and very helpful to see the range of different subjects and approaches. Anyway, I followed Marshall’s advice and just focused on very simple things. Baby steps, I guess. Aaaahhh! Posted this in the blob lesson by accident, but, meant it to go here. Sorry for double posting.

Had some long overdue home DIY before I could start this project. Fixing a leaky bathroom tap led to a cosmic resignation that the replacement valve cartridge was as good as anything to draw. Pretty dry subject matter (sorry). Studied it for a few minutes then copied Peter Han process in demo of steam train and started with an ortho to eyeball up the proportions of different sections. Then simplified to 4 forms, then a blob. Next, drew a load of blobs in different orientations. Cross contours were used as markers for the tops of each different form as a rough proportion guide. Thought about different degrees of foreshortening whilst blobbing these out. Converted to boxes with a messy pencil phase, then stuck some tracing paper over and inked with some line weight variation. Finished with some ellipses in boxes practice from the Drawing Basics course to create the lowermost form (1). Learned a few things… i) Overlapping forms create an appearance of offset from centre. Saw Peter Han do this with the cow guard of the steam train, I understood why, but only once I saw him do it. I’d never have done that if I’d been drawing cos I would not have known to. Constructing forces it to happen. ii) After drawing the ortho and simplifying to four boxes, there was zero need to revert back to the object itself - which was both revelatory and practical…cos it’s round and does not sit still on my sloping desk. Again, constructing means you just needed to draw some boxes. iii) I used a fat, blunt, soft lead mechanical pencil for the messy blob to boxes part. At first I thought I should switch to a hard, fine point pencil due to the smudgey mess…but actually the blunt soft lead meant I felt much looser and the lines were more forgiving so it was way easier to construct. iv) some viewing angles produce boring drawings! v) Hard to be perfectly consistent with proportions for all orientations done free hand but guess that is not the point here. After I finished the blobs, I could not be sure that they were gonna be at all useful but they actually were. Trust the blobs! (But ignore the bits that don’t perfectly match the subject)

Much to learn...

First attempts. I think I’ll watch the demo for these, and then attempt the camel and skull.