Lovely work! That's especially true of the lower right where I'm convinced you were drawing "white" lines between dark marks. Once you get accustomed to looking at the negative space rather than the lines you're drawing you'll find everything so much easier to draw.


Fair enough! I only do it that way to surprise those who don't realise what they've been drawing.

This is a very accurate result. As with Susan's, I flipped the left-hand half over onto the right-hand half... and apart from the longer nose, they're remarkably similar. Well done!


Good work, Debra, this is virtually flawless. Keep practising. Once you become used to seeing negative space, you'll find it's an incredibly powerful tool with a myriad of uses - especially when you have problems correctly seeing a positive shape. Switching to drawing the negative spaces around it almost always solves the problem. And the good news... it becomes progressively easier with practice.


I'm really pleased that happened and that it happened when it did. It is unlikely you'll make that mistake again, and this time is was of little consequence.

I once found a fingerprint of mine in an otherwise flawless sky. Fingerprints cannot be removed, so I spent two days painstakingly darkening the sky around the fingerprint until it disappeared. Never again will I cause that to happen!


That's one reason why I chose this fork. It's so easy to think you know what it should look like without double-checking to discover it's quite different. You have slightly exaggerated it, but at least you did really see its shape. The tops of the gaps between the other two tines are looking good.


Ultimately, just the result matters, not how you achieve it... as long as you are aware that what you think it looks like is not necessarily what it actually looks like. And having the ability to see the surrounding negative space is very often a great way to observing something for what it really is - because it's just an organic shape for which your mind cannot be storing any "recognition" or "recognisable features".

OK, first - clever me - I worked out that your image was upside down. That's because I vaguely recognised something that I think is part of a succulent. And then I read you description to discover it's a cactus. Or, I think, part of a cactus.

I did let Affinity's auto thingies do their magic to increase the contrast. And I'm imagining this is close to your original in appearance.

All that said, I'm not going to attempt to critique it, because you know much better than me if it's accurate or not. But also because of the lessons you learned, which are far more important than mere appearance.


And all of that means you throughly understood what you were doing. Especially because you began to recognise negative space within the subject. Once you learn to see negative space you'll wonder how you ever managed before.


And that tells me two more important things. First, you experienced you flat drawing as being something real and three-dimensional. And, second, if it wasn't for that experience, how else could you apply lighting? Whether or not the lighting is correct doesn't matter - only that you recognised the need to apply lighting.


Again, that's such a... I'm lost for words ... In my opinion and experience you cannot successfully draw what you do not understand. True, you can copy and make it look similar - but that has no life, and you've added nothing of yourself.


You had a go at it - successfully. And I suspect that searching for individual negative elements permitted you to break it down into manageable parts. Any time you believe you cannot do something you'll be proved correct. Just go ahead and do it, because, even it fails, you'll have learned from the experience, and be at least one step further forward to completing it successfully. I'm reminded of when I held a workshop in our local village hall for a dozen artists... and my next workshop was for far more artists in the huge conference centre of the Holiday Inn in West Yellowstone. I had no idea if I could manage that , just as you didn't know if you could draw your cactus... so just go ahead and do it.