As someone in my late 30s learning to draw properly for the first time (printmaker), I am SO grateful to have done this lesson now. It helped me break outside of the "box" I was in trying to imprint reality onto the page. I made a psychotic looking crow with a head way too big for its body. It was fantastic, and honestly loosened me up a bit.

I am cracking up thinking about baby proko watching this video and being like… but he always tells me my drawings are great!! But fr fr all this is great advice and food for thought (for everything in life). Adding it to my proko wisdom, next to “don’t be precious with me!”

Well, I think the whole level thing can become a bit complicated, if you like me is very much self-taught and your skills is a bit all over the place. Like I mostly see myself as a level 2 student, but i also think that in some ways I might still be at level 1 and in some I might be better than you expect people who takes this course to be, but I guess that's fine. I'm mostly just here to fill out gaps, so far this course does seem to help with that, even if i'm then also being told some stuff i already knows as well. I'm fine with drawing from imagination for most part, but it depends.

Couldn't agree more with Stan. I am by no means as talented as Stan in both technical skill and drawing via observation. I am the one taking the course not teaching it! Although, I am a professional designer and do know a thing or two. Still, I've sort of identified as someone who needs reference material or I'd feel completely incapable, almost like its my Kryptonite . In fact when I signed up for this course, I did so to hopefully strengthen my fundamentals and hopefully give me that confidence to start drawing without reference. Since the purchase of this course I've fully transitioned my design career to hone in on UI design, something I've always had a knack for. This is probably due to the fact that its a lot more technical and strategical vs whimsical and creative like webdesign and other sub fields of design can be. Its so funny though. As I really sink my teeth into the latest UI trends I'm still catching myself up on, I realized something. There's only so much that can be done. You can have a round button, a square button, a button with soft edges, a button with hard edges. It's exactly what Stan is teaching us. I mean I always knew this, but never really had the realization. Its not like you are going to make up a new shape the world has never seen before, or use some color that's like a secret only the pro's know about. Its just the fundamentals pieced together. Once you realize this it all becomes way less stressful. For UI design, you begin to realize how little all the bells and whistles matter and how the structure of the page and size of elements matter so much more. Is the button going to be round or sharp.... Who cares. Will the user be able to read the text? That matters way more. So for drawing an animal from imagination, remember it doesn't have to look real, its a character. Just go step by step and establish what you want it to look like. For example, start with the head and establish, is it a circle, an oval, or maybe even a boxy circle. Then move on to the body, is it skinny or thick? That's all you have to do for each element. Just make decisions. It seems scary when you try to think about them all at once, and I think we all constantly tell ourselves, oh a circle for a head isn't cool. Some pro would think of some awesome shape I don't know about. But is that true? Not really, they just have better execution skill, a bigger bag of tricks, and stronger fundamentals. But they still just use rectangles, circles and triangles lol.

I would also reccomend, at least from my experience, to try and find examples of concept artists you like. There are a lot of them for films, video games, books, or just general art that is a concept of something. I have found observing these useful to work out the environments they chose for their style and the context for why they done what they did. You also get to see the colour grading (A bit advanced) and the design of characters to capture the mood and feeling. I look att he image and try to think about why I feel the way I do when looking at it, or why it looks the way it does and how the artists intentionally made it look like this. For some games I listen to the games soundtrack for specific scenes,sometimes the music gives me an idea of what kind of mood, emotion, energy or atmoshpere the image should have, if it's a track that is set for a specific scene or mood, character in the game. I would also suggest observing things in real life and questioning why it looks the way it does, such as why does the reflection look like the way it does on different parts, or when it's raining look at why the look and texture is the way it is, what makes a puddle different to everything around it, or what is the difference between a shiny surface and a wet surface (In this case a wet surface can look bumpy and shiny such as a rock pavement, but shiny hard objects are usually already smooth, water on a smooth object will create bubbles or puddles of water rather than scattered shine of a hard rocky floor, just as a singular, but not every example) I'm not an expert and this may not work for everyone and I may not be correct with everything but I found this to be very useful and fun for ideas, camera angles, composition of object placement to build the scene etc. I'm not the best at drawing hence why i'm doing this course but these things I observed stick with my mind until I'm good enough to replicate them better or I can arttempt replicate them now but it won't always come out perfectly but I slowly learn why my drawing doesn't look like what I observed. Most of my drawings are based from what I observed rather than any formal training and observation and imagination are needed, observation for me is learning why things look the way they do, and this can be used to draw from imagination, then imaginative skills allow you to take what you have seen in reality and draw it in any scene, weather, angle, distortion you can think of and you eventually can just make it up or improvise how it looks or make somethign that doesn't exist but still recognisable and accurate.

Probably should have watched this first, but here is a level 1 drawing from imagination. A flirty lobster.

I needed this pep talk! I've been trying to break into more imagination drawings and I always freeze up and go back to looking for a million references. I know references are great but I want to be less reliant on them! I want to be able to draw even if reference doesn't exist (like drawing fantasy creatures or mixing reference is a believable way). Also as someone who wants to design characters I'm ready for these projects!!

Stan, I highly appreciate this. I’ve had a bit of a sense of the “mystical” happen within me over the last decade where mystics, beginning in 2023, came out of the woodwork into my path. I won’t go into all of that, except to say that at one point, for months, I felt or sensed a “brooding” of a spirit or message that seemed to keep saying something to the effect of “consider the little children,” and “except ye become as one of these little ones ye can in knowwise inherit the kingdom of heaven.” Well, I started to watch the toddlers in my life and observe them closely. This was what I needed to figure out? What were their attributes? They (little children) live in the moment, they don’t think of tomorrow nor remember yesterday. They are spontaneous. They love fun and exploring, imagination. They are not saddled or schooled in dogmas. They are endlessly keep trying to walk, talk, and we adore them for it all. In my late teens I went to Spain to live a few years, as a Mormon missionary. I had immense insecurities (like most teens do, as opposed to their toddler selves), one of which was the fear of looking stupid or foolish. I loathed knowing I would be reduced to look foolish in speaking a new language. I therefore rarely spoke. I would labor in my mind trying to construct a message correctly before I would speak it. By the time I would have looked up a word in a dictionary or figured my sentence out, the conversation had gone on. My fear of looking foolish was a trap. Then, contrast that to my going to Europe in 2017, first to Spain for over a month. Gone were my inhibitions, my fears, my insecurities. I was now much more a child and embraced playfulness, embracing the childlike fun to speak foolishly and with lots of errors, accents, etc. In that different mindset, oh boy, what a difference. How fun. How much more fun I was to be around. (We all love to observe toddlers and how much fun they can be, playful and cute in their errors of speech, etc). As to my experience when a missionary, I was not fun to be around with my fear and insecurity. The missionaries that were rule breakers, who were Lackadaisical and east going, playful like little children, who just blurted out their broken speech, in all its glorious error, drew people in. Their personalities and playfulness were fun. They were successful people persons. They learned the language very fast compared to those like me who were steeped in insecurities and fear of looking the fool. Man, I’ve had fun traveling and being of a mindset of being playful and easy going, to be more like a toddler. What a difference So, your pep talk here is well received by me as I observe my very poor capacity to draw well, but I will get better and you’ve reminded me of that fact.

I've noticed something about drawing from imagination. I very occasionally draw comics, but really rough sketchy comics. Some times I just know what to draw and the lines just go on the page and I am happy with that sketchy nature. Other times I can't draw these sketchy comics at all because I feel I am missing the spark. Then I can't even force myself to draw comics even if I sit down to try. That's for this very rough style of comics though, so not sure if this is applicable in this context. For this task here I was definitely not ready. I think it is two separate things, and those are 1, to imagine something and 2 to make those into 3D shapes and fit them together in a convincing manner...

Drawing from my imagination.

My drawings from sketch from observation project

Hey Dad ! You always tell me my drawings are great ! Son

Drawing from imagination is very difficult for me. This is a big reason I'm taking this course. I have some cartoon ideas that I just can't seem to get out of my brain. Looking forward to more imagination assignments!

This is like daddy Proko putting a bandaid on our skinned knee lol. *Sniff sniff* I needed this one, Stan!

After your words I have a new art life! Thank you, Stan. I suffered a lot…

Yo also forgot to say, am really enjoying the course btw - soz I haven't posted much but looking forward to the next lesson!

Potenshh NSFW but here's a lil noodle I did recently from imagination!

Absolutely great ‘Stan the Man’, I haven’t drawn from imagination since I was in my teens, so this is a great way for me to pickup my imagination drawing.

I, too, suck at drawing from imagination. But the way I completed this project was just to draw my octopus a number of times until I could replicate it without copying.I guess it’s the same for everything. Like Stan says, you get better at drawing by, well, drawing!