Before watching the level 2 demo, I wanted to try it out. It turned out better than expected. I am still lacking in terms of design - I don't think any of these drawings have a specific design that really stands out. I tried out the "psychology" of shapes by drawing the wasp with a lot of straights and triangles while the bumblebee was all about round shapes. I really encourage anyone who is at level 1 to try out level 2. It was a lot of fun, I will probably do a couple more of these later.

These are my initial drawings. I struggle a lot not only with the shape design but also as to what constitutes as a "shape" If the "shape" is not fully enclosed - is it still a shape? For example, if you draw something similar to a U - is it a line or a "shape" that looks like an U? it is hard to explain but I'd love to hear everyone's opinion This was the main struggle I had when drawing all of these since I wanted to make sure to keep it to 10 shapes or less

Here's my assignment, it really enjoyed this one. I dont really like the way the hyena looks (looks a bit on the clownish side) and i kinda of messed up the ellipse for the elephant's trunk (and it doesnt help that the tusk was in the way of the silhouette of the ellipse either), but working with shapes really helped me breakdown what im seeing and also make it look more 3d!

Here are all my simplifications, found it kinda hard to just simplify. My shapes ended up looking bad I feel like.

Project - Simple Animal Portraits | Tiger

Did my first two from Glen Keane. Happier with Pocahontas than Ariel, who ended up vertically stretched and a bit off in the face. The bigger problem is, while I can carefully construct something that's reasonably close, doing it so slowly and bit by bit makes me feel like I'm missing out on what actually drew me to Keane in the first place, even if I am managing to pick up some things about line weight organization and general observation and whatnot. Trying to emulate his confidence just goes so wrong that it feels pointless, especially working in analog at this small size, going back and forth with the eraser ... for now I'll probably end up picking someone else when I do more studies. Could also go for simply tracing his work instead to take some of the work off my plate, I suppose, trying only to get better lines down without hesitation until I'm more comfortable with it. Forgetting about resemblance would probably make the results look too demoralizing even for exercises.

While looking for masters that lines really standout for me, I landed on Peter Han. His drawings are the ones that I can stare for hours This was already pretty overwhelming so I took the advice from Stan's video to focus on parts of the drawings rather than the whole thing. In retrospective - I wasn't ready for this at all. I have never gone through a study so it was hard to try to focus on trying to imitate how some of the lines "feel" rather than just copying the drawing. There are a A LOT of taper lines in this drawing, plus a complex line hierarchy. I couldn't come close to it at all but it was fun and a good experience. This took probably around 2-3 hours - yes I am slow :( I will probably re visit this and do more studies from this drawing but I want to watch the demo so I have a reference for how to approach a study.