My delicious mango... It was easy to see where and how the textures were, and I feel a lot more comfortable putting marks on the page. I also think that I need to work on shading and the shadows. 

This is a challenging exercise, especially when applied to objects other than a shiny sphere. The squint test is incredibly helpful. It has been so interesting to look at the world as variation between light and shadow.

This is always a tough one to learn. More practice needed.

This was a great exercise! I have never sketched in my life. I love nature, gardening to attract pollinators, nature photography and bird watching. I saw this course and thought I would try it to relieve stress and I loved the idea of journaling and sketching. So I decided to draw a single eye from a barn owl. It was fun and learning about depth of field is exciting. Thank you Liz for this course.

This is the ginger and garlic I drew. The light source is in the upper right corner. Through comparison, I found that due to the different textures of the objects, sometimes it is possible to distinguish light and dark quickly, but sometimes it is not possible. For example, ginger and garlic, the surface of garlic is smooth, so it is easier to distinguish the highlights and shadows on the bright surface; while the surface of ginger is rough, so the highlights are not particularly obvious, and it is also a little difficult to divide the layers in the bright surface. In addition, I also found that by adjusting the curvature and strength of the strokes, the objects can be better represented, but I am not proficient in this area. By the way, where do you start drawing first when you are drawing and what is the order of drawing? I sometimes don't know where to start. Practice makes perfect！Come on!

I liked this exercise, it was helpful.  I would still like to work on adding details to the drawing and the shadows.

Am feeling more confident committing to paper but making silly mistakes.  I still want to work on working quickly to get the concept of the shape down.    

this was a fun exercise! I don’t really draw realism ever so it was good practice doing something with light source and depth.

I feel like I need more work on my values, but this was a good lesson moving forward. I like crosshatching, but I have to be careful not to over-work it! Getting the reflective light was key to a 3D effect! I got inspired to try drawing my dog because she is black and white.

I'm much more comfortable with the more simple line drawings, and I'm having fun experimenting with the mix of drawing and writing.  

I'm not yet good at the light and dark ranges to get the 3-D effect, but it's fun to practice.

I chose to represent the curious Citrus medica var. sarcodactylis, or the fingered citron. The mark making techniques I used are top row from left to right: outline, side shading, contour shading; mid row left to right: cross hatching , watercolor pencils, stippling; bottom row left to right: scribbling, blending, side shading. Perhaps my outline drawing would have been better without the horizontal lines. I think I need to work on the contour shading because there are areas where I overlap lines and get crosshatching. And my cross hatching is never just bidirectional rather diverse. I like how blending using a blending stump turned out. I was taught never to use this technique in school, but it is described as a technique used by scientific illustrators in the Guild Handbook of Scientific Illustration! So I guess I will be blending away in the future. As always, I am pleased with the Faber-Castell Albrecht Dürer Watercolor Pencils. If there is lack of detail it is due to the brush I used. All in all, an interesting exercise and I look forward to the next one!

Feeling somewhat more confident, but there is still a lot of practice in my future.  I am enjoying what I am learning in this course.

trying out the chiaroscuro technique, biggest challenge is getting the light parts to blend with dark parts.

I tried to draw an orchid in a pot using the markings to create some three-dimensionality.  It was not a roaring success, but that was before I listened to the chiaroscuro lesson, which made sense of the marks for me.  Now I can see how to work with the hatchings, scribbles, etc. to create depth.  BTW, can anyone tell me how to get my photos from my google phone transferred here?  I'm android, not Mac.

I think I picked some difficult subjects for this task, but I love my collection of seashells and want to be able to sketch them a lot better. I had difficulty trying to depict the texture lines while also trying to use the hatching and dots to depict shadows.      

I'm getting more familiar with putting marks on my pictures. However, I'm still not very good at creating the 3D vision.

I feel most comfortable with depiction texture and dimension, however, placement of shadows on the object and at the base of the object need more practice. Study of light source and effect on subject matter will help with my drawing and my photography skill understanding and application.  

Japanese Maple Twigs

I am starting to feel more comfortable, and I'm certainly starting to see where all the different techniques can be applied. For the chiaroscuro lesson, I started with an apple. It was tricky because (in addition to me being a beginner) the apple had a variety of light and dark colors independent of the amount and direction of light falling on it. My wife suggested a lime, and I think that came out better. With the apple, I used a lot of contour hatching to try to get the indentation where the stem was that then shifted to the overall round shape of the apple. I tried to use some scribbling for the area around the light part on the bottom left of the apple. With the lime, I started with contour hatching, didn't like it, and then switched to regular/straight hatching. I figured if it worked to show the roundness of the ball, it could work for the lime as well. I liked the overall effect. I did some scribbling at the ends to get the hard/dark parts. I also tried a few circles to get the dimples, but that didn't seem to work very well. I used blending to obscure these...somewhat. I liked using hatching for the shadow, blending it, then adding more hatching. The blending helped smooth out the value shift from the darkest to the lightest parts of the shadows, and it softened the shadows' edges. For this birch round, I used a lot of contour hatching for the growth rings. I tried to overlay that with straight hatching to show the straight grooves left by the chainsaw. I used stippling for some holes I noticed in the outer dark layer of the wood. Scribbling seemed to work well to create the lenticels in the outer bark, and a little contour hatching helped with the curls of bark spiraling every-which-way around the edges. A little blending of denser hatching at the various dark spots on the surface seemed to help with the value difference in parts of the wood. I'm guessing these were formed by slight burning from the friction of the chainsaw when I cut the round.

• Trying to put in practice several `hatchings´ for this drawing, but when I took the draw´s photo, lights and shadows appears in the opposite distribution as you can appreciate.- I hope next time.