I am also taking "Learning to Swim" with Sara. The work is here.

After practising with the Pen Tool practice sheets, I continued and really got a good understanding, should say 'fee;ing' for creating and altering curves . The images to the left are some of the practice which I hope to eventually incorporate into custom brushes.

I found that using a grid gave a very good indication about how far to pull a handle in order to match up the sides of something symmetrical as can be seen in the heart below.

The plate is using the idea of the Outline Stroke learned from the heart.

I wanted to make some blueberries and then to further enhance them in Photoshop or Painter. I ended up using Painter because I wanted to try out the idea of a painting starting with the Illustrator drawing.

I really had fun with this lesson and had to force myself to quit so that I could do other things needing to be done!