Great exercise. It felt like I’ve progress already through this series of drawing. I’m still not quite happy with my line quality.

That was quite enjoyable. I feel like my lines got more confident and fluid as I went along.

Started on the muskateer guy, but I didn't really like the image so I decided to swap to one I found. AFter I finished I matched it up on procreate and I could see that my bigger shapes were a lot more accurate than my placement of the features. The overall head/hair shape is good, the neck is correct proportionally, just slightly too far to the left, but the eyes, nose, and mouth are all wildly misplaced. Definitely the best face I've drawn so far though, so I'll take it as a good exercise and a step forward.

I found it quite hard to find reliable measurements. Looking at the overlay, my drawing is not that far off, except maybe for the collar. For some reason, I feel there’s still no likeness in the drawing. Not sure if that’s due to the linear drawing and missing shading or if the small deviations are enough to throw it off.

Level 2 Assignment with an Orangutan, all critiques are welcome

I’ve taken the buffalo and tried to rearrange the shapes to get some different variants.

I treated the 10 shape limit as a loose guideline :)

I’ve looked at two artists now to get some variety. The first one in Daniel Clowes, a comic book author. The image is inked so there is not much difference in value. He does apply stronger line weight in the foreground which is also the focal point of the panel I studied. He also uses strong lines to emphasize the contour of his characters as well as to indicate shadows, which is well visible underneath the jaw. The lines he uses for shading follow the form but are so short and even that the overall impression is still somewhat flat and static - his inks almost look like a linoprint. I’ve also noticed that to avoid to many shapes to merge he often does not lines meet but leaves white outlines around certain areas. I’ve tried to replicate his line work in graphite. The second artist is Dave Malan. I like his open line work and how he implies just that little bit of stylization to his portraits. He uses strong lines mostly for emphasis, in the jam line, the eyes and the side burns. His lines tend to be loose but come contained in small shapes or bundles. My proportions are not quite there.

I don’t think I’ve thought about line weight that much before. So far I’ve used it rather intuitively (aka randomly). This was certainly an interesting exercise. For the left image I’ve tried to make lines lying in the shade heavier. Sometimes the decision was a bit difficult when the line is marking a lit edge leading into a shaded area. For the second one I’ve used heavy lines for the outline to emphasize the mass of the rhino. I’ve used especially heavy lines for the head and the horns as these seem to be the defining features.

That was a lot of fun. Gotta love raccoons. I draw a blank when it came to a good concept for the final sketch (first image on the left). I think it could have a much stronger personality.