I primarily want to thank you for taking the time to teaching us. You are an awesome instructor with so much knowledge combined with a great personality! There is so much to get better at as a complete beginner! So many opportunities to learn it is very exciting! Just learning to control the pencil is so interesting. If you have time I leave some thoughts here: If you had your own school, when would you introduce if at all more knowledge? Like you said I thought about where I would like to see myself, and what speaks to me most is the imaginative realism of scenes like your western paintings or works of past masters like Repin for example. What trajectory would you suggest for students who are self educating? Personally I would do a lot more drawings like these taking lots of time and do self critiques on them... For example the right eye here is really whack... I want to avoid becoming too "enslaved" to my reference but also to avoid the pitfalls you so clearly outlined about letting "knowledge" lead to formulaic drawing. I have seen Head Layins with a more three dimensional approach and wonder about their place in the big picture..

Very interesting! I have been using a more "knowledge" based approach but you helped me understand why this is a superior method for accuracy. How would this be applicable to figure drawing, say on the scale of a normal drawing pad? The outside-in method there helped me to get the structure correct, but I can see the same problems as you mentioned here for example when the time comes to build up the head and you already have not-so-accurate constrution lines. What would be the "inside" on a figure? Since distances there tend to be a bit larger. Do you finish the head first for example and work downward?