Oof. That was hard. It took me along time - mostly because every time I sat down to draw I found myself measuring a whole bunch just to draw a mark that didn’t seem quite right - repeat, repeat, repeat. I even brought this into photoshop and overlaid the images to do a little self-critique - still not great. This literally took me days - it was getting hard to want to do this particular exercise. I’m posting this now before I rage-quit. I’m not particularly happy with the result but i did take some solace in the fact that my phone camera recognized the drawing as a face ;) I look forward to learning and practicing more so I can look back on this project and hopefully say “remember when I thought this was so hard I just wanted to give up? Glad I didn’t!“

Proportions assignment. It looks so easy - then I try it for myself and realize I need a lot of practice to get that level of confidence.

Even though my results were a little disturbing I had a good time with this exercise.

I’m really surprised I got the colors as close as I did - this is really the first time I’ve ever tried anything like this. I was intimidated by the glass sphere initially but it was easier once I just looked at the colors and shapes instead of thinking that it’s glass.

A Falco-octophant or Falco-elepus

I really, really tried to match the tones (and color) without resorting to using the color picker but in the end I just had to admit to myself that my eye is not quite ready for that. The color one was especially hard. I also tended to adjust the opacity of the brush so I could get intermediate values to sample and continue blending between tones.

Talk about jumping into the deep end - I found myself getting distracted a lot by the detail and had to force myself to focus on just the larger shapes. Not perfect but I'm actually pretty happy how this turned out. I really started geeking out when it came to playing with layers and exploring the different brushes. A note about the beads - I actually created each strand on its own later and created a shadow for each as well. Then I merged them all together before applying shading to better blend it into the body.

Some images were pretty straight forward and others were a nightmare. I’m beginning to understand the statement that drawing is more thinking than putting pencil to paper.

Ooof - That's a tough assignment! I could probably spend the entire year just doing this over and over again. I selected Kim Jung Gi and Glen Keane as my artistic "parents" for this exercise and boy I was not ready for what was in store. For Kim Jung Gi I selected just a small portion of one of his drawings (the pig body) - I ended up not focusing so much on the lines themselves but how to put them down like him, without guides. I didn't know much about him before this course so I was only exposed to the buzz around his ability to do these drawings without sketching anything out first. I'm pretty sure I bit off more than I could chew but I gave it a shot and had an ah-ha moment when I came to the realization that it's probably just like learning to write the letters of the alphabet - first you have the guidelines to draw your letter shapes then you eventually can write without the lines. I figured one of the many "letters" KJG knew how to "write" was "pig body". I don't know if that makes sense to anyone reading this but something clicked for me regarding understanding - even if my attempts at actually drawing the pig body leaves much to be desired. My second "parent" Glen Keane has a style I would really like to emulate. This one I think I did a little better with the actual drawing and line quality. I had a few false starts and the big takeaway I got from attempting it was that I really needed to focus on the overall gestures first then build up from there. My lines are a bit contrasty compare to the original - I'm still trying to get better control of my digital tools. I was a pleasantly surprised to see the "dragon head" shape in the tail after studying the drawing closely.

Here's my stab at the assignment. I have to admit that I cheated a bit to get the initial outline (and even then I didn't get it completely right) because I wanted to get to playing with laying in values and blending. I feel like I could spend forever tweaking this image and finishing more detail but I also want move on and learn more stuff.