When I first began figure drawing, I wanted to render as realistically as possible. Wading deeper, however, I found that, when drawing from life, especially with a time limit, you cannot truly capture every single piece of information, and sometimes it is not a good idea to do so either. A lot of decision-making goes into which details to include, which shapes to merge, etcetera, all which combine to capture not only shapes and values, but an atmosphere; a story.

It has been immensely satisfying to document my progress. I think, over the past 3 months, my line strokes have become more confident and organic, I have learned how to merge shadows and shapes, and I now have a sense of how to draw attention to one body part. Small improvements, but, still, they make me happy to see :D. I still need more practice to gain a true understanding of human anatomy -- it'd be nice to draw figures without a need for reference photos.