Learning to draw: sketches from 2011

I started taking an intro to drawing class around this time last year -- here are the sketches from my year of experimenting with learning to draw.

I ROCKED a pear, yo.

We did a lot of still life studies in class. This is pen & ink, not charcoal/pencil like the others.

It's harder to capture the white balance than I thought.

The best thing in class was seeing how many different ways people drew what they saw.
No drawings were even remotely similar. Angles & shading can change the entire picture.

Experimenting with different ways to shade.

Here I was trying to draw a body that contained a bit of a belly to see about different physical forms.

Another pen & ink.

I enjoyed trying to draw Edvard Munch's Madonna but it's on the flat side.
I need to learn good shading techniques to add dimension.

I struggled with the face here (and you can tell) but I was mostly concentrating on the body since
it was one of the first times I was branching out to a whole figure.

Here, experimenting with different postures.

Heart-shaped face.

I drew this after I came home from class itching to draw more. We'd been doing freeforms
all night and I drove home seeing lines and shadows in everything. It only took me 15 minutes
to sketch this out but only because I'd spent two hours "warming up" with freeform drills.

A quick 5-minute sketch of my hand.

Eyes are extremely difficult for me -- getting the right proportions is a huge challenge.

Charcoal drawing of fruit on a cloth setting. Capturing wrinkles in cloth is also extremely difficult.
Here I introduced color to add dimension.

I didn't intend for this to resemble Julia Roberts -- if I TRIED, I'm pretty sure it would have failed!
But kind of neat that it turned out that way.

Mug shot! Not really, but that's what this looks like.

This reminds me, in retrospect, of Mad Magazine's Spy vs. Spy series, for the outfit and rushing inference.