I like the style of your painting! Personally, when I draw buildings I like to start by freehand drawing the biggest outlines of the building, while paying careful attention to what angles the lines have. Then I like to figure out where the vanishing points should be based on those outlines, and I either draw vanishing points on the paper or just mentally keep track of where the vanishing points should be. One thing to remember is that in two point perspective views like this, the two vanishing points will always both be on the horizon line, and the horizon line is at the eye level of the camera. In your apartment building all the windows and siding lines are converging well toward the vanishing point on the left, but the issues are with the lines that should be converging toward the vanishing point on the right (like the stairs and sidewalk lines). If you think about where the vanishing point on the right side should be (which should be somewhere along the horizon line) then you can make the lines in the stairs and sidewalk converge toward that vanishing point.

I want to join too! I drew some poses from line-of-action.com. It's hard to know what lines I'm supposed to draw and what I'm not supposed to draw. Looking at my sketches after the fact I think I should probably try to make lines of action more instead of drawing the outline of the figure.

@davidhohn I specialize in patents, particularly for chemical engineering related inventions. It's not something that comes up often on these forums, so I tend to chime in when people are talking about copyrights

I don't have very much practical experience with copyrights except for a few law school classes, but I am interested in it. I am always interested in your posts on the subject because you seem to know a lot about it.

I'm not sure if I like the outcome of the Boldly Go case or not? I wonder if the authors got a license from the owners of the Star Trek copyright. If not, I'm not sure how I feel about the prospect of anyone being able to take two things that they don't own and mash them up without having permission from either rights holder.

@davidhohn Thanks, very interesting - The Cat NOT in the Hat seems to have a lot of the same things going for it as Oh, the Places You'll Boldly Go. I wonder if the opinions in these two cases could be reconciled! Like you said, a "parody" must comment on the original work. Usually the point of a parody is to make fun of the original work itself. However, you don't necessarily have to be making a "parody" of the original work for your work to be a fair use. In fact, in the judge's opinion for Oh, the Places You'll Boldly Go, the judge came right out and said it is not a parody, but nevertheless it was still transformative enough. So, I guess the take away is you can either make a parody, which means you are making fun of the original work or otherwise commenting on it somehow, or you can just transform it in some other creative way. As long as the other factors of fair use don't weigh too heavily against you.

I love your truck and airplane blimp!

I like the idea of having James about to crawl into the hole in the peach. I was thinking about doing a cover for the BFG, another Roald Dahl book.

It's interesting that I saw this post on the same day that I read another news story about fair use. There has been an ongoing lawsuit about the book "Oh, the Places You'll Boldly Go!" which is a Star Trek themed book that mimics the style of "Oh, the Places You'll Go" and other Dr. Seuss books. Just the other day the judge dismissed the lawsuit and said that the book was a fair use. As has been said in this thread, fair use is complex (the judge wrote 33 pages explaining why she decided it was a fair use).

The court decision is a good example of how courts decide whether some is a fair use or not. The decision can be found here if you are super interested: https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/5766629-Seuss.html. The most important points were that the Star Trek book was "transformative" because all the writing and illustrations that were copied from Dr. Seuss were always changed to be Star Trek-centric; and the judge found that the Star Trek book would not likely harm the market for Dr. Seuss books. Those are just two of the four factors in the fair use analysis; the court said that the other two didn't weigh heavily in either direction.

As far as the Little Heroes book, it seems like it is definitely transformative, since the characters have all been creatively modified. So that would likely weigh in favor of fair use. But the market harm factor could weigh in the other direction if there are already Marvel publications with child versions of their heroes.

@demotlj I like the idea of reviewing specific SVS videos that are pertinent to a particular project. I've been thinking recently about how to study better too. I'm in the same boat of having full time job and not a lot of extra time to spend on art. I am going to do what this episode recommended about keeping a note-taking sketchbook to write and draw notes from the SVS videos, and doing assignments from the videos. That should help me learn a lot better than just watching the video alone.

I also really liked what this episode said about figuring out what your art goals are. I am just doing art as a hobby, so my goals aren't to get a job in art or make any money. Generally, I like the satisfaction of having finished something that I am proud of, so I have a goal of getting to point where I can finish personal projects like paintings, drawings, maybe short comics, etc. just for fun. Since I really only want art to be a hobby, I try not to feel guilty when I don't have a ton of time to spend on it. Thanks to Jake, Will and Lee for the episode!

@geoffrey-gordon Welcome! I’m a beginner here too. I have been watching the introductory SVS courses. The thing I know I should do better at this point is spending time practicing. I think I will start doing the monthly contests and posting work-in-progress images. I’ve seen that the forum users give great feedback on work-in-progress images. Since I’m just a beginner I don’t think I need a website now, but in the future I might be interested in your website design offer. Thanks!

@whitney-simms This watercolor looks beautiful, I like how you made the rider's face stand out more in the final version.