Here's my first hands for this assignment. Have to keep reminding myself to focus on boxes and not the natural details/taper of the hands themselves haha. To that end, feel I find myself not thinking enough about the convergences at times. Hopefully will improve the more I do these though. Also keep catching myself drawing way too small for these... maybe I'm unintentionally trying to hide mistakes in the hands lol

Here's my level 2 attempt! I like portraits so I'll for sure continue doing these with more references. Most of these I did before watching the level 2 demo so I perhaps was thinking too mathematical with trying to fit the head into an actual box. While some forms do match well, it gets tougher around the face since the head tends to taper a bit toward the front. I was also trying to map in planes I learned from one of Andrew Loomis' books. Maybe a good exercise but I realized I wasn't really observing the actual model sometimes! As with my level 1 drawings, I mapped the box to just the height of the face as it's easy to split into thirds that way. However, going forward I think I'll map it to the entire head as blocking in the whole shape seems like it'll be more useful, especially when moving on to full figures. That way I can also use the info that the head is (on average) as wide from the side as it is tall (going by Loomis). Again though, that may be being too mathematical instead of relying on observation/intuition haha Anyway, the last four here were done after watching the demo. For these I tried to draw more organically while still adhering to the perspective of a box. I think they came out better as a result :)

Here's my go at level 1. Pretty confident I can jump right to level 2 as I have been drawing portraits for quite a while but it never hurts to go back to basics first. Main issue I dealt with was whether to make the height of the box represent the entire head or just the face instead. I decided just the face worked better for me as it becomes very easy to split it into the thirds of the face in this way. Anyway, I think it was pretty smooth sailing overall. I started adding some minor details to a few of these but I tried sticking to linear constructions at least lol.

Unfortunately I've been busy the past few months but finally I am able to start catching up with the course. Here's five portraits, first of the musketeer, second following along with Stan's demo, and the remaining three from google/pinterest. I'm pretty fond of portraits so I didn't mind this project / it didn't feel overly difficult but there's definitely still improvement to be made. I like stylizing faces when I draw so I wasn't shocked to see I'd often enlarge the size of the eyes. When I was checking my work there were a few times I was really surprised at the placement of facial features compared to how I see them! Anyway, I kept each one to about an hour long but I'm thinking I could honestly slow down a bit to measure things twice/thrice.

My level 1s and some level 2s. Definitely will do more as it's quite fun. Went over 10 shapes quite a bit but they add up fast when you need two eyes, two ears, etc. Also it's funny how some animals like the squirrel don't really look right without the bushy tail or buckteeth.

Circles have always been the bane of my existence, especially trying to draw them from the shoulder digitally. I also find I give my pen a death grip when trying to draw circles so I'm focusing on breaking that habit before I injure my wrist. Anyway, here's another warmup idea in the same vein as the Mushrooms. Kirby! I think he's great for this because... he's really just a circle and a bunch of ellipses (or ovals if you want to complicate it). Plus if you can nail the shapes it's kinda rewarding on its own.

Here's a set of master studies. My main art interests lie in video games and comics with very stylized/graphic art styles so I focused my attention mainly there. First is of my favourite artist Shigenori Soejima. I was debating this choice because I think the appeal of his drawings often come from other elements than line quality, but I felt it would be stranger to omit a study of my favourite artist lol. Luckily, there's videos online of his work so it was easier to get a better understanding of the process involved and how you can "carve out" an illustration digitally. Second is a quick study of an Adolf Hirémy-Hirschl sketch. I think I first saw a painting of his in a book by James Gurney and I just really like how he captures the softness of the body. I got into shading a bit unintentionally here -- it's pretty cool what he could do with subtle lines. Third is a study of the lines of a comic cover by Pepe Larraz. I really like his lines and how he shapes the body. I figure his work was done (at least in part) digitally but I decided it'd be fun to do it when a 0.5mm pen. Think I did an alright job but then I really scuffed it by lazily trying to put in a background haha. I did a quick cover up of that which I think worked out well due to the graphic visual style... but I included both since the original shows the lines better :)