Hey guys, a really useful pen and ink book imho is Alphonso Dunn's book and specifically workbook. He has some amazing excercises in there that I love doing. Peter's Dynamic Bible is excellent and my copy is getting pretty beat up from being carried around and read so much. Alphonso's soft cover workbook is a great way to fill a quick 15 minute break with an easy pen and ink session. I like that you do the work right in the book. I'll share the cover and some of my completed pages.

Hey, I wanted to share one of the pages I regularly practice before drawing. I’ve done plenty of warm-up exercises before, but Peter Han really emphasizes some crucial points that have completely changed how I approach them. What’s your take on the idea of using pens instead of pencils? The idea is that it forces you to be more deliberate with your decisions, which could help you improve faster.

Something I've noticed I have a lot of trouble with is that even though I know these types of basic exercises are important I always try to speed it up to get it over with because it feels like there is no end goal and I'm impatient to start creating. Then once I start trying to get that picture in my head onto a piece of paper I realise I lack the basic skills to be able to do so and so I always end up stuck in this cycle. I'm going to try to stick with the exercises and hopefully, I will be patient enough this time round.

Yessss ive been doing lines and drawing boxes and cylinders alongside gesture drawing as my warm up routine for months!! But this video really put into perspective that while I have improved in drawing lines, I'm not seeing results in my work because I'm not focused enough on controlling my lines and learning how to have that extra sense of confidence. The bit about controlling spacing and proportion is a game changer and I can't believe I didn't figure it out until now. From now on i’ll try to be more mindful about all the exercises I do because mindfulness in the beginning is what gives way to intuition

Sketchbooks filled since fall 2022. Another thing Peter emphasizes is mileage and I have found it to be helpful

Funny enough, the only other art class I have taken in 25 years is a sit in seat in Peter's Dynamic Sketching. These exercises are familiar from that course, but it is a great reminder to keep them up. I was pretty rusty even though I just took that course in spring! It's nice to hear from Peter again, I really like his teaching style and think it meshes well with Marshall. I wish their dual presentation at lightbox a couple years ago was online somewhere. Going through my sketchbook and engaging in this practice more again has made me realize how far out of the habit I had fallen. And how much more in the habit I would like to be. Time to start actively thinking of doing a bit of this before jumping in to sketches.

I just followed along with this video tonight with my brush pen on my sketchbook that I've been drawing on for this course. I haven't drawing or practiced on my line-work which seems like ages since I took my last drawing class at my local college a few years back. This was a very fun exercise Peter thanks for sharing with us. Any tips on how I can improve on my Line Work Marshall, Peter or classmates? I could defiantly use all the tips needed to get better with this.

I'm trying to make more of a habit of warming up before drawing or painting, normally I just jump straight in! So far I've found it's a good way to loosen up but I think it'll also be really helpful for working on weaknesses, in a small but consistent manner. I'm looking forward to adding some more warmups from this lesson, and as the course progresses!

I hadn't done these in a long while so I have to admit I was surprised how instinctive it still felt. What I did forget was that fountain pen nibs eat at the paper when you're going over a line that many times that fast. Oops. I just don't like how dry microns/technical pens feel compared to wet ink so I avoid them....I think you can see where I realized though and started to hesitate so I'll have to work on that. Anyway, I generally struggle with proportions so hearing Peter talk about how training spacing with these exercises can help, really resonated with me. I'll definitely continue to keep that in mind going forward. Also did the angles with the rulers thing on this page. This blew my mind for some reason and made me feel like I was robbed in HS geometry because I don't remember ever being taught how to use triangle rulers in this way.

This was a nice one. Tried to be disciplined and not rotate the page. I've done these exercises for little over a year at drawabox and got proficient but... I always needed to rotate the page, which is fine when I'm playing with dip pens and brushes, the problem is that I never rotate the page when I draw so I need to try to build the habit of drawing straight verticals and horizontals without spinning the page like a DJ. To my fellow older manual laborers with arthritis and hand injuries I would recommend picking up some foam grips at the dollar store they help me a good bit. Just coat the inside foam tube with a q-tip amount of vaseline and they'll slide right on. I did mark and cut the lid to the micron with a pair of scissors so I can get the grip closer to the nib.

I tried this for the first time. Definitely going to add this as a warmup. The longer lines were difficult and the curved lines were so much more difficult ;-;

I've been practicing this traditionally using a micron 08 pen, but decided to test this out in Clip Studio. I'm noticing there's a certain level of shakiness regardless of medium I use. Good exercise regardless though.

Line practice and an attempt at projecting isometric shadows

Nice with the framing with approach, mindset and reason for the excercise. Now then to get this into daily habit. Neither overdoing nor skipping it but just doing it in a moderate sense and with some variations and see what happens over time :). Not after perfect designer lines, rather beeing more comfortable all over without spinning the page. Also doing it going back and forth, backtracking same line in both directions, to free upp the ability. This also for it to carry over into painting, when it's cumbersome/not doable rotating the canvas

A little bit of both assignments. But I don’t know if it’s an optical illusion, more graphic probably.

On paper with cheap chotune micro pigment pen 03! Very fun exercise, will implement it to my daily warm up, very excited to see how this improves my line quality over time

Digital + traditional w/ micron I feel like the physical paper gave me more stabilization than my actual stabilizer setting! Maybe i should bump it up a touch.

I learned this as well from Drawabox (which im currently doing as well, on lesson 5 now) I really love playing with lines. In Drawabox its a lot more construted than this demo. Funny because the creator of Drawabox is a student of Peter Han. Maybe it was for simplification purposes. Who knows? :)

As others have already said, I remember doing a similar assignment on Drawabox and this gave me a good reminder to keep on doing these exercises as warm-ups. I'll be honest, I didn't really ghost a lot of these lines. It feels like if I ghost the line too much, I'll start over-thinking it and freak myself out then fray the line. Or maybe I'm just rusty, who knows ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.(The arrows are the directions I drew the line from)

Locking it, not talking it.