To get you up to speed

During day one I checked out Art Academy. It told me to get some 8B pencils, and sharpen them using a double edged razor blade and coarse sand paper. I feel slightly more like an artist doing it this way.

The course begins by having you learn to measure proportions of rectangles, using a pencil or whatever to measure the narrow side, and seeing how many of these you need to form the long side. You begin by guesstimating the proportions, and then measuring to see how you did, and correcting by expanding or contracting the narrow side.

I did alright.

Next came non rectangular shapes. I didn't have the fancy artsy pencils at this point.

Now we're moving into day two and three. More shapes, and intro to shading using cross hatching. This means lightly drawing 8-10 lines in one direction, rotate slightly, do 8-10 more, rotate slightly, do 8-10 more, and move to the next region. This way you can gradually build up tone that looks pretty smooth, at least after smudging it with a pinky. I'm looking forward to when I'm good at this, because the Art Academy guy makes awesome looking stuff.

In this photo you can also see that started on How To Draw 101 Cartoon Characters. They're not very complicated, but it makes me feel productive as I can crank them out fairly fast.

You can probably expect more of these.