It's easy to think of perspective when you're drawing cityscapes, buildings, and simple objects, but it's nice to see its use broken down for nature scenes. I've looked at a rippling lakes and waterfalls before and felt flabbergasted about how I might draw every detail, but it's good to think of perspective as a tool for simplifying and organizing complex scenes that are constantly moving. If you combine what you're seeing with how you know the elements should go on the page based on perspective it begins to seem a little more manageable.

Marshall, thanks for the short analysis on Hiroshi Yoshida’s Rapids . 00:45 seconds in you mention "Rhythms of dark and light areas" and explain "That's composition and not perspective". How do you define the difference between Compostion and Perspective?

Got a few more animals in. Tried focusing on pushing the shapes more. This is a good reminder about the importance of iteration. Even when I felt like I didn't quite understand the way the shapes of my reference animal was worked the more I played around I eventually found cool shapes and ways to make it work a little better.

Went through the reel twice with a few practice sessions using poses on my computer in between. I think my second go through fits the action better with a bit better proportions, but I was focusing on light lines better on the first go.

I'm back again! I have a bit more free time at the moment so hopefully I can get some work in on my drawing. Had a lot more fun with this assignment this time around. I feel like I get what you wanted us to do more with the level 2 assignment better this time around. It's definitely easier to make a new character and give an animal a different personality if you understand what the important base shapes that make up that animal. I'll play around with some more animals before I move on.

Went through the practice reel twice. Comparing to the images I can see how some of my lines are still stiff and I can push the exaggeration more, especially when the endpoints are further away where I tend to be too conservative. My instincts were pretty similar both times so I'd like to go through again and try to pick out different action lines that may not necessarily be my first obvious choice

Something that comes to mind as I think more about elements of perspective that I find interesting are the kinds of illusion-style artworks that only make sense when you look at them the right way. Which, I guess technically is any perspective drawing, but the puzzle would be how do people design elements that need to be looked at from an angle that's not straight ahead on a wall or monitor?

I think this assignment has already uncovered a severe deficiency. If I'm struggling to come up with more than a couple of artists that I can say are an inspiration to me and can act as a high-bar for perspective. I get self-conscious when I hear people list off all these great artists whose historical context they understand deeply while I have a couple of obvious choices that I can pull out of my back pocket to try and hold my own in a discussion. Of course this is a good opportunity to see what people consider a high standard and find some new artists to follow. I want to learn perspective so I never need to think about perspective. Or at least think about it as minimally as necessary. I feel like it's a bit of a roadblock right now to the things I really want to do with drawing. I want to be able to create impossible things and make them believable and filled with life and I want to be able to more consistently reproduce them in different angles and positions and even impossible things still need to be represented as the human eye would perceive them. I want to be able to draw scenes from dynamic and unusual angles and make everything look right. I want a better way to make landscapes and backgrounds and not belabor every detail because it requires so much fiddling to get it to feel right rather than knowing what is right. I don't want someone to look at something I've drawn and get that feeling of "something's not right here" because enough little perspective errors are adding up.

I don't see why you'd want to toss any drawings. They're a record of where you've been and where you're going and they can give you valuable insight into what you do well and can expand upon and what you need work on. One day it might be nice to look at them and get some perspective on how far you've come. I keep my basic warmup line and circle exercises in a separate sketchbook and I don't mind tossing in those although even then it might be nice to see how much you've improve at those over time. If you're working digitally you have the benefit of not needed to worry about sketchbooks taking up physical space even if the trouble of choosing how to organize comes into play.

Worked on a few more and then I checked out the demos and realized how much I was pushing away from the spirit of the exercise. I did a few more trying to keep to the restraints of the exercise. In a lot of ways it's harder than trying to draw contours as accurately as possible.