It’s great to be ambitious in your subject matter as you’ll do better work drawing something you are excited about as opposed to something you find mundane or tedious. But having said that, don’t knock the value of just sketching very simple shapes - Cubes, Cylinders, Spheres, etc.
Taking a little time at the beginning of your sketch session to bust out a few simple objects can help get you in sketch mode by letting you focus on the style of the drawing rather than the subject matter.
Theres no shame in going back to basics once in a while.
In the order that your latest sketches are posted, it looks to me like you are taking steps in the right direction. The bottom page looks a bit looser and I can spot some areas where the line weight difference is starting to add that “sketchy” POP that we all love so much.
You might like to try drawing cubes to warm up and then filling in the sides with ellipses like in the example below (actually just found the site but it has a lot of good info if you keep looking, is it from another C77 poster?). I noticed after doing only pages of ellipses that it was harder to draw an ellipse in the context of the rest of a sketch, but this helps that.
Robby-roy’s post is pretty important to learn because ellipses and cubes are building blocks for objects.
For instance, if you set a wheelbase for a car with ellipses, then you can use the box to find other proportions. If you use the cube then you can draw the ellipse etc.
Thanks for the post Robby-Roy, good stuff! I remember doing that exercise in first year but I was never really good at it so I think I gave up. Gotta get back on the horse!
Some more exercises I’ve been doing:
I like to weight the lines heaviest at the bottom and sides. Try more cross contour lines to show form. Get into the habit of putting down a quick axis before you draw any ellipse that needs to be oriented to something else.
remember, if your tool doesn’t allow line weight variation with pressure changes, like a pencil, you’re going to have to lay down multiple passes to get a heavier line.
Your ellipses are looking much better. Try to make your straight lines straighter. They have a wobbly feel to them. Learn to sketch lines to a vanishing point. That will help get the shapes be in perspective and also help you with short and long lines.
I tend to use my wrist for small lines but my entire arm for long perspective lines.
Practice making up more complex shapes. I made this a while back but it’s an example of what I’m talking about.