Pax's Progress

[Pax]

good amount of studies going on, if you're after crits/advice, i'd say some of them look a little rushed though - like you might benefit from taking a little longer perhaps observing, then laying down a more confident line.

I'd also focus some time on observational stuff from life to help train your eye a bit, this will improve everything.

You need to be careful with this approach though because it's easy to fall into just drawing 'what you see' and forget about thinking in terms of forms and depth, but...

And I hope this doesn't sound patronising!

it's worth trying some simple blind drawings of stuff, grab a mirror and don't look at your paper, at all, not at all! - just let the pen follow your eyes around your face, follow each line you see, the shape of shadows, eye brows, hair, lines wherever you see them - really concentrate on looking and getting down every scrap of visual information you can.

The drawing will look like shit, but you'll see little gems of accuracy there after a while.

You can do the same with hands, feet, anything.

These are great for warming up and getting out of drawing things the way you think they look, rather than how they look.

You can move to glancing at the paper every say, 15 seconds and taking that opportunity to move the pen to the correct place, so you get a more ledgible drawing.

As I say, this is not a substitute for constructive drawing, and a good understanding of anatomy etc, but it's a good exercise to do.

As you say in some of your posts, perspective is worth starting on too, everything is in perspective, and then you can start combining that with your other knowledge, like the eyes line up, head is turned, farthest eye will be smaller along lines to vanishing point, that sort of stuff.

Anyway, those are my thoughts, and I can see improvements here already so you're on the right track.

It does not sound patronizing at all. In fact, stuff like this is exactly what I desire. Recently I've moved away entirely from life drawing until I'm actually drawing from life (hopefully going to a biweekly class soon) and I've been focusing more on still life and hand studies, trying to understand more about form and what you've mentioned. I'll definitely start doing more blind contours. Thanks a ton for the advice.