About Drawabox

^{The photo above was posted by /u/uti24 to /r/ArtFundamentals to show a year's worth of work. It is an fine example of the dedication and tenacity of our community. While we may make a point of avoiding grinding, we still put in a great deal of work and mileage - but every bit of it is put to good use.}

Though I'm the one who's written the lessons (based on what I learned from Peter Han's Dynamic Sketching course at Concept Design Academy), who runs the website, who makes the videos and who manages the subreddit and discord server, Drawabox has always been about the community that's gathered around it. It started off as /r/ArtFundamentals on Reddit, back in August 2014, and gradually expanded into the drawabox.com website in March 2015 as a response to members of the community wanting to give something back. Turned out that reddit had policies against people being paid for moderating a subreddit, so building the website was essentially a way around that, and it came along with the patreon campaign which still supports my efforts to this day.

Much later, in October 2017, a student by the name of Jasper (who's since moved to Pasadena, CA to attend the same school as me - Concept Design Academy) opened an unofficial Discord chat server. After I poked my head around and found myself impressed by how it was being run, Jasper offered to hand it over. With that, another arm of the community came to be.

As for me, I'm just a guy with a lot of time and a lot of interests. I work at a game studio, where I was officially hired as a concept artist and illustrator, but over the years I've been responsible for anything from programming to UI design to 3D modeling to web development to cinematic sequencing to developing virtual reality and augmented reality experiences.

I'm neither the greatest artist nor greatest instructor out there. Despite this, I started all of this feeling that I had something to share, and that the information I wanted to impart wasn't as accessible as it could be. The lessons started out as rough, hand-written messes, and gradually developed over time. They are still improving, and I continue to release major updates at the end of every year, with smaller ones in between. All the while, my own grasp of the material and my ability to explain it has improved with every homework submission critiqued - a number now in the many thousands. What started off as a loose set of vaguely understood concepts being shared has turned into a much more solid curriculum, with pieces taken from the sources I've absorbed over the years, mixed in with a great deal of my own observations and determinations.

At the end of the day, Drawabox is not going to replace proper in-class instruction, but it's also not going to cost you an arm and a leg. It's here to get you started, to get your feet wet, and to help you develop some structure where you previously may have had none.