Still on Week 3 of Term 2. I've just completed the portrait study assignment. I'm not impressed with my shading, but I hope in time I will get better at this technique. I am aware about the advantages of using "the full range of values," but I didn't implement that in this assignment very well.

But guess what? My proportions seem correct at least! I feel like I'm getting better at this!

The last assignment for Week 3 was to draw 5 character heads from imagination. I was able to finish 4, and I believe I've improved a little! I did realize, by the end of this, I'm going to have to study even more human heads from real photos.

Something I struggle with, no matter how much I practice, are those basic 3D spheres. Whenever I try to draw them, I get a flat circle with a flower pattern slapped on. Despite undoing and redrawing, it never comes out right. I end up moving on and later wonder why everything looks wrong.

I already started the next week's assignments on more perspective stuff, but it seems I am still not ready to proceed as I am completely missing some basic 3D skills that I'm probably going to end up needing for the 3-point, 4-point, and 5-point (good gracious, does it ever stop?!) perspective drawings. I'm gonna go back and get this MASTERED before moving on.

Thanks for the help, @Pattu_w and @snakker! Back to the grind now...

So here's what's been happening lately. I have this notebook that I use for both school and for writing other important stuff down. I just opened that, and for these past few days, I've just been drawing circles with those contour lines that give the circle the appearance of a sphere. I've filled pages with these drawings now. Up until now, they've been looking a lot better, and I think I understand them now. Today, I decided to test myself and create an animation of a rotating sphere.

I think I will continue to use this and try to build the face and the facial features--using basic shapes (e.g. a simple rectangular block for the nose)--on each frame. So far, does this look correct or do I need to keep practicing the 3D sphere more?

The animation was done in Clip Studio Paint. I tried Photoshop's animation feature and I didn't really like it.

I've got a lot of practice and hard work to do when it comes to perspective, but here's how it's looking for right now. Hopefully one day I can look back at these drawings and know that I'm a thousand times better at perspective then ever before.

I'm a little bit discouraged at how long I've been doing art and how quickly I'm being humbled right now...but...I WON'T give up!

From here on out, my drawings are going to be more simple--maybe excluding human drawings and studies. My time has been cut short as I recently started a full-time job. This, however, does not mean that my simple drawings will have less effort worked into them. I will always put in my best.
For example, this drawing would have looked a lot more believable had I added some windows to the wall, maybe if I gave the ground some grassy texture, or had I not rushed the cliff underneath the bridges (there were supposed to be two, but I guess it looks like one with a gap in the center), but I decided to just go ahead and stop at this final version. I still get the idea behind 4 point perspective.

I gotta figure out spheres in perspective...

Tiny update on my progress: I'm still stuck in Term 2 with the head studies and drawings. I'm still drawing them incorrectly (I check my work) and not making any improvements. I'm tempted to hire a temporary tutor to watch me practice and explain to me what I'm doing wrong and what I need to do to correct it, since I can't figure it out myself. I know I can find some professional tutors on Wyzant. I remember having a great experience with private tutoring when I was studying game development and programming. Or if Marc Brunet offers any sort of tutoring sessions, I would love to schedule a couple with him. I'd pay extra, of course.

I'm about to get ready for my next shift, so if I find some time over the weekend, I will post my drawings and try to explain where I'm struggling and what I'm still not understanding. I always appreciate the help, everyone!

I'm back. It's been about three months now and I deeply regret letting that time that I could have been practicing slip by.

Sometime after I recorded my last update here back in December 2023, some traumatic life stuff started happening. My life is in disarray right now, but I'm working toward finding healing and solutions. During this time, I either had no time for art or was just too depressed to pick up my pen. Every once in a while, I worked on practicing my basic fundamentals, but I haven't gotten much farther than that.

I'm ready to return and keep working towards my dreams, but I have a couple issues to resolve:

1) During this harsh time, my self-discipline was destroyed. There are days where I actually do have time to do art, but I choose not to. I'm not sure why I do this, or how to revitalize my self-discipline. Today I just found out that Marc offers ARTSchool + Feedback, which is something I think I really want to get once a spot opens up for me. Since I'm going to be struggling with self-discipline and trying to get myself to do art, I know having a teacher to report back to will hold me accountable and responsible for getting art practice done everyday--and I know that I'll enjoy practicing art more when I have a weekly purpose to achieve. While I'm waiting for a spot to open up, I'm going to try to re-learn self-discipline and practice art more, but does anyone have any suggestions or tips in regards to living in a more disciplined manner?

2) I don't remember where I am in regard to the ARTSchool weekly schedule (I remember someone saying something about I didn't have to follow it exactly, but personally, I like following checklists), but before I figure that out, I really feel like I should practice my fundamentals again before I practice something crazy like the human head. Major problem though: my fundamental skills suck. Maybe I didn't practice them enough back in Term 1? I wish I had caught that sooner, but, oh well...

So far when practicing drawing the sphere, I'm doing...all right. I figured out a trick to draw the 3D sphere's Z-axis/vertical lines correctly, but I haven't figured out how to draw the horizontal rings. Best I can do is guess where they are, but it ends up making the whole sphere look wrong. My main struggle right now is figuring out how to extrude a sphere. My first tackle to this problem was to create some reference pictures of an extruded sphere and practice on that. Here's how I did that in Blender...

Sorry about my poor lighting. I had to create multiple reference photos and I was not going to wait hours for these to finish rendering.

So I tried tracing over these, drawing from reference, and then I drew them from imagination. Well, that flopped immediately. I gave up on this approach pretty quickly.

Some days later, while I was on my break at work, I was trying to draw spheres again in my sketchbook, and somehow I accidentally stumbled on a trick to draw the 3D spheres vertical rings correctly (or at least, I hope this is correct. It looked accurate to me)...

*Ignore the perspective grid. I was trying to extrude the sphere and it didn't work out.

It's hard to see how I figured this out, so I'll probably have to record my steps another day, but after learning this and watching a video (can't remember the name of it) on YouTube by "pikat," I realized that in order to draw anything in correct perspective to make it look 3D, there's some rules and tricks to follow. For example, you can't just practice drawing the basic cube by just drawing a box--or it'll look like a flat isometric drawing. You have to use perspective lines and convergence points and all these other rules in order to be able to draw a 3D cube in any shape, angle, size, place, etc.

Now we all know the rules for drawing a cube in perspective: this line converges to this point and that line converges to that point and yada yada yada... So what's the rule or "trick" for extruding spheres? Is there a grid or line in supposed to follow? Because I'm not seeing it. For example, when I try to extrude the face of this sphere in the next following picture, I don't know how to extrude it STRAIGHT from the originating face of the sphere. Whenever I practice this, I end up with an extrusion that looks...angled...and not correctly aligned.

Also, I'm sorry this is a long post. I should have gotten straight to my question, but the reason I wanted to write all this is to get feedback on everything I've learned. Is everything that I've said I've learned correct? Is there anything I'm wrong about that I need to fix before I proceed?

Happy New Year, by the way, everyone! And thanks in advance for the help!

Thank you for your response! And thanks for sharing about your experiences! I'll practice what you mean in regards to cutting and pulling out the sphere. I might actually draw a literal cheese block as that's a great way to look at it!

I think I figured it out!

So here's what an extruded sphere would look like in one-point perspective. Sure, it looks over-dramatized, so I wouldn't use this often, except in over-dramatized pieces.

(I'm uh...gonna practice shading another time...)

And while this last drawing could be improved--by learning to control my hand better--I think I finally figured out how to extrude a face of a sphere properly!

None of these practice drawings are perfect, but hopefully future drawings will turn out a lot better because of the time I spent practicing fundamentals like this!

Next up: I'm practicing the human head...again.