I did a tin watercolor palette freehand. I started doing it with instruments but realized I kind of need a T-square to make it work. I'm going to pick one up and give that another go.

For method 1, I did not draw the entire second letter for the back plane. Most of it would be hidden by the front and the extrusion part. So, I only drew the edges that were visible and connected those to the front plane. I was struck by how tough foreshortening is to deal with. A small difference in distance from the vanishing point will have a large effect on how much an object is foreshortened -- i.e., it does not scale linearly -- which makes it much harder to eyeball. The other thing I thought was that this is kind of like taking the melted pancakes and rotating it 90deg so that the top (or bottom) is facing you instead of the side. I tried to do this in some of the sketches.

Level 1. I did two sets of the toga guy because I felt the first one was too samey same. So, I tried to mix it up some more to get some different effects.

Here are my submissions: a tin watercolor palette from direct observation and a hydra from imagination (multiple snake heads in different orientations). In both cases I found I had to sketch them out many many times to figure out the structure. Even with seemingly simple objects, it was not so straightforward for me to reduce them to simpler forms.

Here’s a glasses trick that works for me: if you use bifocals, stand about 2-3 feet from the reference and look at it through the bottom (near vision) part of the lens. That gives me a nice blur effect. It helps to reduce the image size a bit if you’re using a screen.

Level 1 three value studies:

I made this pretzel lookin’ thing. Sketched out the idea, drew it and then traced two versions with different overlap.

I did the level 1 version a bunch of times and just posted the last two attempts. I only had time to take one stab at level 2. It came out better than I expected, but I had pretty low expectations after seeing how much I relied on being able to see the other values on the scale when doing level 1. That said, I can see how this would be a super helpful skill: when doing an actual drawing, being able to identify where a given value is on the scale without seeing it in the context of the scale seems like it would be quite useful.

This was probably the most challenging exercise I'd done. It really forced me to work a mental muscle I'd rarely used before. Honestly, it was frustrating how you had this somewhat blurry image of the object in your mind but couldn't quite capture it on paper the way you pictured- whether from memory or imagination. Still, this project gave me a ton to think about! (And 3D models were very helpful) Some takeaways: - Need more practice with those primitive forms, particularly ELLIPSES & CYLINDERS! - Would've been easier to imagine different views if I knew how to rotate planes/shapes (and by extension forms) like a rectangle or trapezoid. Perhaps I need to find a way to practice mentally rotating planes? - One more helpful skill here was drawing through (i.e. X-ray vision), which wasn't always easy. Another thing to work on. I managed to do just the whistle. Hopefully I can do more later. Thanks for a great exercise and quality resources :)

I did pose #4 from the last project. Studied the image and drew from a different angle from memory. I compared the results, made some notes and tried again from memory. I couldn't figure out how to connect the upper torso to the hips so I just left it kind of floating there. I suspect that I didn't put it in the right position. I think it should be down and to the left a bit, but not too sure about that.