Proko Pears

Fundamental’s. One thing I never really buckled down on during my drawing bursts was the fundamentals. I’ve been doing Proko’s Drawing Basics class alongside Draw-A-Box (more on that in another post). The very first project Proko has us do is drawing a very simplified pear. There’s also a “level 2” portrait, which I attempted and will keep to myself… the result was horrifying.

For the pears, it’s a simple but challenging exercise. All lines must be straight. The values are simplified into five basic values. Generally, two dark and three light (including the highlight). I attempted the first one without watching the demo and then cleaned up my mistakes afterwards.

The idea with simplifying the forms is to imagine that this pear is “chiseled” out of stone. Instead of a rounded surface, you get planes. These planes are easier to identify with a simple value scale. It’s also easy to spot mistakes. For example, in the image above, I struggled with that weird area in the lower left of the pear. The dark shadow kind of hooks up, however, I didn’t really make the lighter values feel like a plane that made sense. Specifically, that Nevada looking piece.

I did about five more of these pears, which is overkill considering this is the very first project in the lesson. The point isn’t trying to master anything but I had fun with it. Above is my final attempt. Not perfect, and definitely still some work to do. The next project in the lesson is a “CSI” project. CSI stands for c-curves, s-curves, and i for straight lines. Maybe because a capitalized I looks like a straight line? I don’t know. I’ll explain more in the next post about these.