Today I’m featuring one of my drawing students, Abby (age 13). I started teaching her last August in 2016, and she has made significant improvements over the past half year. What’s unique about Abby is that she is fearless, taking on new ambitious tasks and powering through them with flying colors.

(Just a quick note, these drawings are my screenshots of her holding up her work to her webcam on Skype.)

Here is one of the first (if not the first) drawings she showed me:

The demonstration of her improvement is pretty mind-blowing to me. Here is one of her drawings of the same guy (Zayn) from just a few weeks ago:

I remember in her first lesson, she mentioned wanting to get better at shading. She now has a much better grasp of how to use the pencil in controlling the different values and hard/soft zones in rendering portraits. She has also achieved a much higher level of likeness of the people she illustrates.

Here are some more of  her earlier drawings:

Another unique habit I’ve noticed is how she shows a sense of confidence and polish to many of her illustrations.

Here are some shots of her work I took during the lessons:

Generally during lessons, between each progression, I take screenshots of students’ work and digitally mark them up like this:

Here are Abby’s results within an hour and a half, and this is the first time she tried drawing an entire human figure:

I’m excited to see how far Abby takes her skills! It’s been a true pleasure teaching her.