Thanks! A lot to learn with this technique, but I'm having so much fun.

The pen is a simple plastic thing with interchangeable calligraphy nibs. My black is Windsor Newton India ink. The white is Rotring ink that's been sitting on the shelf so long it's started to sediment out, making it useless for technical pen. And the paper was 250 g/M2 grey. I loved the feel of it.

Thanks!

Well I think YOU'RE fantastic.

Thanks!

Thank you!

Very nicely done! You've captured the movement well.

Pencil first, then ink if I have time. I'm getting better at going straight to ink for the detail work, but for gross body positioning I still need the pencil.

Two seats down from me was someone doing pictures twice as good as this one directly with a fountain pen. I am in awe.

Apologies -- done.

Thanks! After three years drawing from photos, I was surprised how much harder this was. I'm better at hands and feet and general anatomy than I used to be, but working at speed is something I'm hoping to get a lot more practice of. I'll definitely be back next week!

Thanks!

These are really nice! I like the cartoon style. I think the work would benefit from cleaner linework.

My workflow is to draw pencil outlines, ink over, then erase. I'm trying to lean less on the pencil for detail and go directly to ink, but that's for the future. Inking is always done very carefully and slowly -- if there's speed, it's at the outline stage.

I use a fine propelling pencil for outlining, and a Rotring Isograph (0.1 mm nib) for inking.

Without seeing some example anatomy it's hard to say -- and I wouldn't feel comfortable telling people to work on anatomy when mine is so wonky!

I don't think I've ever made a piece where I've thought, this one is for practicing linework or this one is for anatomy. They've never been separate. There have been some where I've thought, in this piece I'm going to try doing my shading like this, and then I've experimented with that and it's either worked or not.

With linework, one of the things I've noticed is that hesitation punishes you more than inaccuracy. Nothing looks more obvious than an attempt to fix something that wasn't perfect. Do it once, don't worry if it isn't perfect. There are also times when I've ignored precision in anatomy and just focused on speed -- draw things as lively as possible, even if the proportions are wrong. I think for that, you need good linework to carry it off.

What tools do you use for this?

This was fascinating! Thanks for it.

Thanks, this came out really well!

Thank you! I should upload more of my old portraits...

Goat goat goat!

Thank you! The actual act of drawing so many closely spaced parallel lines is somewhere between Zen meditation and the sheer terror of bomb disposal. One false move...

Thanks! I like these little snapshots of people's lives.

All freehand!

What a lovely thing to say! Thank you, that's my day made.

This is where I come for all my goat content.

And so much fun to do!

It means to pointlessly take something to a place that already has it in abundance.

Why thank you!

Look to Windward is my favourite. The Ways of Dying monologue is hauntingly beautiful.

Excession, by Iain M Banks.

Genar-Hofoen felt the Diplomatic Force officer's kiss through the few millimetres' thickness of the gelfield suit as a moderately sharp impact on his jaw followed by a powerful sucking that might have led someone less experienced in the diverse and robust manifestations of Affronter friendliness to conclude that the being was either trying to suck his teeth out through his cheek or had determined to test whether a Culture Gelfield Contact/Protection Suit, Mk 12, could be ripped off its wearer by a localised partial vacuum.  What the crushingly powerful four-limbed hug would have done to a human unprotected by a suit designed to withstand pressures comparable to those found at the bottom of an ocean probably did not bear thinking about, but then a human exposed without protection to the conditions required to support Affronter life would be dying in at least three excitingly different and painful ways anyway without having to worry about being crushed by a cage of leg-thick tentacles.

Gorgeous.

No disagreements here! What you're doing here is recognising that the waste incurred from storage is less of a problem than the waste incurred through Transportation, or Waiting for resupply. In this case, inventory is waste worth doing. Any workshop needs to keep SOME spare parts, every house needs to have SOME food in the freezer. But that doesn't mean it's not a kind of waste to store stuff -- a fact people acknowledge when they choose not to rent a warehouse to store even more.

What I'm saying is that it's a trade-off. In fact it's a pretty bland statement, obvious when you think about it, but putting it into words like this can be helpful when making processes more efficient.

It's an idea from Lean management. Everything you need to keep, prevents you from keeping something else; requires you to remember where it is, where you could be remembering something else; takes longer to move when you have to move it; takes longer to organise than having less would. It poses fire hazards that having nothing wouldn't pose. Blocks light that having nothing wouldn't block. Keeping stuff is inherently wasteful.

None of this is to say that keeping stuff is bad. It may be very useful to keep it. But you should always recognise that doing so incurs a cost that you need to trade off against its usefulness.

While we're on it, inventory is one of the eight kinds of waste identified in Lean. They are:

• Transportation
• Inventory
• Motion
• Waiting
• Overproduction
• Overprocessing
• Defects
• Skills (misuse of)

Remember TIM WOODS.

All of this is meant for running a factory, but I've found a lot of them useful in other bits of life, especially the idea that Inventory is a form of waste.

Inventory is waste.

How was the Graeber? I loved Bullshit Jobs.

This is poetry.

My favourite part is that he uses the modulo operator in his Python script to generate the C code.

I finished this one recently. It was brilliant and utterly horrifying. Have you read his previous one, How to Be a Liberal?

This... sounds kinda awesome.

At last, something achievable.

But I was hoping to be done with all that...

His book is THE best book on statistics I've ever read. Thoroughly recommended.

Really like this! It's such a lovely, natural, unforced pose that they must have held for the sixteen hours needed to paint it.

And just like that, a rewatch is triggered...

Wow, that's awesome! Thanks!