I finally put my drawings side by side with the reference, which really helped me to see the issues. I have a habit of making the faces too wide and not shaving down the sides enough. When there's a tilt upward, I tend to not make the tilt dramatic enough.

I really like this approach! Easy to remember, not so easy to execute, but I feel myself improving. I think I need to lean into more exaggeration of the angles and curves to get the full effect of the gesture, and also pay more attention to the curvature of the head and neck. I struggled a lot with understanding how to draw the ellipse at the base of the neck to suggest the curve of the torso. I really liked the suggestion to identify the pose by a word and write it next to it. I'm not sure that my sketch communicates those expressions but it helped to create like a mental visual taxonomy of how gesture and expression correspond.

The demo helped a lot! I first tried the subway and liked it so much, I drew my bedroom from memory (with occasional jaunts upstairs to take a quick look based on the POV). I admit that getting the ability to use the ruler to lay in the grid was too tempting to resist when adding my initial verticals and horizontals, such as the mattress, doors and door frames and the bookshelf. The remainder of it I largely did by hand but I found that removing that variable of having to create a straight line by hand, helped me to better control the other variables such as how to imagine objects in a three-dimensional space, which was challenging, but a fun brain exercise. Again, I did this from memory, which I don't usually do, but I really like getting lost in that process. It seemed to exercise another part of my brain that I don't usually.

Finally got around to finishing this project and hopefully will catch up with the class soon! I drew a library type of room and got a bit lost in the details. I also took the sketch into clip studio and did a lineart overtop to see how it'd look cleaned up. I used the ruler for the long lines digitally but practiced freehand for all the books. I feel it'd look better doing it all one way though and maybe using a textured brush. Regardless, it took a lot of time that I wish I spent just drawing more of these in my sketchbook... lesson learned I guess!

I don’t ever draw from memory but I enjoyed the process. Man I really wanted to use a ruler but I resisted! This took me a lot longer than I expected. Will try again and again as it was the first go.

L2 About 15-20min each, after adding more detail. I didn't have access to the paper and charcoal.

Hard to get good quality pics with such faint lines as I'm trying to stay light and loose. I found that the more I restricted my time, the more fun I had as it forced me to make quicker decisions and stay loose. I think this has been my favorite exercise even if I haven't produced my best drawings. I really love drawing bodies and I think I drew every one in the downloads. More diverse body types would be appreciated for this exercise as I discovered I particularly enjoyed drawing bodies that deviated from the ideal. Flesh is fun!

I picked up a charcoal pencil and attempted again. I had trouble with sharpening it, and it feels really rough and scratchy (is that normal?). I watched Stan’s video before sharpening, and I followed his technique. I’m using mixed media paper and not newsprint (I don’t have that).

This is really challenging as it's so much more conceptual than what we've done so far. But, I really like the challenge. The demo was really helpful as it showed me that the goal isn't reproducing what you are seeing but making an interesting shape. For example, I liked the idea of turning the seal's head below to the right to go with the flow of the rest of the shape, even though that wasn't happening in the reference.