Couldn't agree more with Stan. I am by no means as talented as Stan in both technical skill and drawing via observation. I am the one taking the course not teaching it! Although, I am a professional designer and do know a thing or two. Still, I've sort of identified as someone who needs reference material or I'd feel completely incapable, almost like its my Kryptonite . In fact when I signed up for this course, I did so to hopefully strengthen my fundamentals and hopefully give me that confidence to start drawing without reference. Since the purchase of this course I've fully transitioned my design career to hone in on UI design, something I've always had a knack for. This is probably due to the fact that its a lot more technical and strategical vs whimsical and creative like webdesign and other sub fields of design can be. Its so funny though. As I really sink my teeth into the latest UI trends I'm still catching myself up on, I realized something. There's only so much that can be done. You can have a round button, a square button, a button with soft edges, a button with hard edges. It's exactly what Stan is teaching us. I mean I always knew this, but never really had the realization. Its not like you are going to make up a new shape the world has never seen before, or use some color that's like a secret only the pro's know about. Its just the fundamentals pieced together. Once you realize this it all becomes way less stressful. For UI design, you begin to realize how little all the bells and whistles matter and how the structure of the page and size of elements matter so much more. Is the button going to be round or sharp.... Who cares. Will the user be able to read the text? That matters way more. So for drawing an animal from imagination, remember it doesn't have to look real, its a character. Just go step by step and establish what you want it to look like. For example, start with the head and establish, is it a circle, an oval, or maybe even a boxy circle. Then move on to the body, is it skinny or thick? That's all you have to do for each element. Just make decisions. It seems scary when you try to think about them all at once, and I think we all constantly tell ourselves, oh a circle for a head isn't cool. Some pro would think of some awesome shape I don't know about. But is that true? Not really, they just have better execution skill, a bigger bag of tricks, and stronger fundamentals. But they still just use rectangles, circles and triangles lol.

Probably should have watched this first, but here is a level 1 drawing from imagination. A flirty lobster.

Here are my pre-demo drawings for the level 2 portion of this assignment. Although I went back and drew a second around last assignment, I do feel pretty confident in my line skills going into this one. If I could critique myself, as always, I over complicate everything. I definitely spent too much time on these and obsessing over proportions. I do like the line weight I added, but after seeing the demo, I do see it added time and detail that kinda took away from the point of the assignment.

Really far behind in this course, but here's my post for level one assignment. This was done pre-demo. So far I've been trying to draw every reference photo provided, but I really struggled with the boots. So only the snail this time. Fortunately I have a pretty good handle on line quality, so I added some line weight to things.

1 just reference then after watching video

Here's my first and second attempt at the intermediate level portrait. Similar to my pear drawings, the first attempt (pre-demo) was way too complicated. For the second attempt, I followed the technique Stan showed us where we block in the whole shadow shape with the second to darkest tone and then layered the darkest tone on top of that.

Since I'm doing this months behind schedule, I'm going to just post my first and second attempt together. First attempt was done before the demo and used pear-1 as reference. After watching the demo, I realized I over complicated many things. The second drawing referenced the pear-3 image.