Ok, so I was unhappy with my Michelangelo study... so I tried a Mucha. There's a thousand things to fix, but I learned a lot from the observation.

Here's my actual attempts at this with Michelangelo. I first went with some line practice (only some shown here) where I tried to figure out what kind of pencil would work best - I eventually went with a 4B that was really well worn. Then I did a couple of thumbnails of the ear and the face just to get a feel of it. After that, I did a full head. I think my thumbnails caught some aspects of the line better than the full size one. Also, while I was doing the drawing, I found that holding the pencil a bit more like a paintbrush helped in some cases. Once I get to the tone and value section...I will have to really practice up.

On my first try, I got by butt kicked by this exercise. I tried an Eliza Ivanova drawing. What a mess I made of it. Then I watched a couple videos of her drawing and I realized that my innate knowledge of the human form and my eye-hand control over the pencil just isn't there yet. But, I studied her lines a lot, in the future I want to try again. The second time, again I think I overreached... I went with Michelangelo. :( It wasn't all for nothing. Actually I (re)learned something that I had not thought about since art history in Uni: Michelangelo's human forms were almost completely without straight lines. Unlike modern artists (Leyendecker, Malan and Eliza Ivanova for ex.) who use curves and straights to define form, Michelangelo used almost exclusively curved lines (at least in the samples that I referred to). Another thing that made me feel a little better every time I botched a line or a drawing was that - at least in his sketches - Michelangelo erased and re-drew, and sometimes just drew OVER some previous lines. In the gorgeous head study example below, the blue lines show erasure marks, and the red arrow shows a curious double pupil where Mich decided to switch his model's gaze. Maybe someday my mistakes will look that good.

Lots of fun, did my own redline just to get more practice at drawing animals. Here's my hierarchy of importance.

This was hard but fun!

I never know what brushes to use for these, I probably should have chosen something bolder. I didn’t label but it should be fairly obvious which ones were done in a minute 😁

Critique is appreciate

My first lvl.1 assignments. I did two and three valu version of the same picture. It was so challenging to keep the papier clean. Any advice how to avoid patches due to soft 4B pencil?

Level 1 and 2 attempts. This was a good challenge and really showed me just how unconfident I am in my lines. I tried to loosen up a bit on Captain Skully McSkullface, which worked in some areas but not in others. Overall, I enjoyed the assignment and it gave me some good areas to focus on in the future.

Here are the first attempts. Found the landscape particularly tricky as abstracting an already abstract wideangle lanscape ended up looking confusing to my eyes.