I realized that until this assignment, I've treated value as lighting. It's very challenging to decide whether I'm looking at a light value, or a light colour. I took the reference pictures to Krita and used the colour picker tool to study where the colours settled on the colour selector. Is that cheating? It helped a lot and made me see how I was wrong many times. I was fantastically inspired by N.C. Wyeth's painting and wanted to just make a quick sketch of it. It's not the assignment, and I'm posting it here just because I really like it :). A year ago I couldn't have made a quick sketch like this, I think, so I'm happy that I've learned something. Then I thought I'd try out a two value study by adding a lighter value to a dark silhouette. That's something I want to learn well, making quick thumbnails with just shapes and value. What a perfect assignment for me, thank you!

As soon as I had a pencil in my fingertips, I forgot to remember that details aren't for this assignment. This demo helped me recall that, thank you!

I explored with HB pencil, full graphite pencils and charcoal. I find the full graphite pencil achieves the smoothest result and it was also the fastest. I like a little grainy texture, though, so the result I get with regurlar pencil makes me happy. I love the charcoal pencil, it's so rough compared to full graphite and gives a truly grainy texture. I tried both the over hand grip and tripond hold, and a curious thing... I found myself holding the pencil right at the end of it, just holding the end between three fingertips like I was about to drop it. This felt very light and more controlled than when I hold the pen near the tip, and put more pressure on it. Lovely assignment and nice experimenting. This is meditative :D.

I think my 7B pencil wasn't sharpened well enough and so I instead of a smooth value I got a bit of a melange pattern, but at least it's fairly uniform ;)

I tried to create a scale now that I have two extra pencils and I have some new learnings! I created two scales. Top one with 3 pencils (4B, 2B and HB) and a bottom scale with 5 pencils (4B, 2B, HB, 2H and 4H) It's really hard to get the value gradient smooth for 9 values. The pencils are different in hardness, but they have huge value overlaps. Meaning the lightest tone of 4B can still be lighter than normal pressure 2B. So to create the scale I had to apply a lot more pressure on the pencils in the darker end of the scale to push them further out. And at the same time use minimal pressure on the pencils in the lighter side of the scale to push them away in that direction. Only then was there enough "breathing room" in the center of the scale for the middle tone pencils. My previous presumption was that light pressure on 4B would still be darker than normal pressure 2B, but this is not the case. A lot of overlap in value ranges. What does it mean for me? I can't rely on my muscle memory of pressure and switching pencils if I am going to use 10 values. I will have to judge this by vision. Or I will have to just get more pencils and broaden the range of values I have available.

YES! Let's go :)

You can tell that Stan is expecting another child. The dad jokes level increased expunentially.

This was fun, and motivational. Game 1, first try, was eye-opening. I couldn't believe how easily and fast I forgot things I'd just seen. Page 2-3 I did Game 2, which I enjoyed a lot. Imagining these items from a different angle seemed very hard and my first tries failed miserably. Then I tackled it again doing little studies first, after which both visualizing and drawing came so much easier. I'm rather happy with how they turned out. Also loved the process so I'll keep doing these. Page four is Level 2, an attempt to sketch these figures from different angles and with different slightly different poses. Very hard. The hammer is Game one, I drew the different angle from memory, wanting to figure out the perspective without reference. I struggle with round shapes in perspective. And the last one is Game 1 with figures. I got totally lost with the hands positioning on figure 2, but that's ok? :D

Thanks for this demo, it was an absolute joy. I have to tell you it calmed me down, a lot. I love how it ties up everything we've learned so far on this course and after watching this I felt like yeah, I can do this stuff! Since frustration has not been a stranger to me during this year and a half, as I believe is the case with most students here. Along with what all I've learned since the beginning of this course, I learned from this demo that patience is the key. I was also reminded of Jeff Watts' demo in which he imprinted "think first, then draw" in my brain. I've gotten so much out of the perspective section of this course that... wow. I cannot wait for the shading part.

1st image are the first 5 poses Proko provided. 2nd image are torsos from sketchdaily.