AgesLABS

I'm also a beginner at drawing, so take my advice with a grain of salt. To draw the human (or humanoid) figure, you obviously need to study anatomy. But anatomy is complex and can be overwhelming for a beginner. If you pick up the anatomy books that are generally recommended, you won't understand anything (well... I didn't understand). There are two books I recommend, although I don't know if they are cheap.

I advise you to study the human figure starting with gesture drawing. Michael Hampton's "Figure Drawing – Design and Invention" covers the gesture drawing of the human figure and anatomy BUT… only study the gesture drawing part. The rest will be complicated if you have no knowledge of anatomy. Hampton also has a YouTube channel that explains this gesture part with several demonstrations of how to do it.

Hampton teaches you how to demonstrate rhythm and movement with your lines and how the main masses of the human body balance and relate to each other. The coolest thing is that his method allows you to draw various poses from your imagination.

After studying gesture drawing with Hampton, I recommend starting to study anatomy with Michel Lauricella's book "Simplified Forms" (it's the second volume in the "Morpho: Anatomy for Artists" series). In this book, Lauricella teaches anatomy based on a mannequin constructed with basic geometric shapes, but he adds some masses and muscles that don't fully encompass the human anatomy, but already greatly improve your human/humanoid figure (maybe this is enough for you). If you understand what he teaches in the book, you'll finally be able to better understand other anatomy books that you didn't understand before.

IMO, the best way to study Lauricella is to read the book (it's very short and to the point) and copy each drawing to understand its three-dimensional form.

Hampton's gesture drawing + Lauricella's simplified anatomy are just a start in the study of anatomy, but with this knowledge, your art will already improve greatly. I've been doing this, studying both of them along with Drawabox, and it has worked very well for me.

this is very helpful. thank you

Great analysis! And your comparison to solving it like a game of clue is spot on.

Starting with your form intersections, I can see quite clearly that you're making a good bit of progress in how you're thinking about the spatial relationships that you're defining - though as is entirely normal, there is still plenty of room for further improvement. Generally the plan is that we introduce the exercise and the problem in Lesson 2, then Lessons 3-5 students play with combining different forms in 3D space, albeit with more organic matter which tends to be much more straightforward to think through, and finally here we're put in a better position to discuss the theory a bit further.

First off, I'm going to share this diagram with you. It may be fairly clear to you now, or it may take some time to fully digest (that is, going through it, then coming back to it periodically in the future), but the core of it is about how each intersection is made up of many parts - each part being the intersection between pairs of surfaces, and how that can change the way in which we think through defining those relationships on a more granular level. That is to say, it's about chaining intersections between different pairings of flat surfaces, pairings of rounded surfaces, and pairings of flat-and-rounded surfaces, rather than thinking of them in terms of "this is how a box intersects with a sphere". Understanding how to break them down can give us more concrete purpose and understanding to those decisions.

It is worth mentioning that with a problem like this, students are quite prone to overthinking things. While it is necessary to come to some kind of a decision, and but some manner of line down, it's not uncommon for a student to panic and ultimately put something down without necessarily being able to explain the why of it. They end up working off instinct, hoping for the best, but if someone points at an arbitrary corner and asks "why did you go about it this way, what was you reasoning", the answer will generally be "I don't know".

What matters is that you have a reason for every choice you make. That reason doesn't have to be correct, and it doesn't have to make sense to us. But if it follows some string of logic to you, then we come to a place where we can discuss it and explore why that thinking was incorrect. If however we can't speak to them in terms of specific decisions, then there's not much room to move forward one way or the other. This is as relevant when reflecting upon your own decisions later on, as it is when being critiqued by another.

The second thing I'm giving you is these notes on your second page of form intersections. I picked it because most of the intersections on your first page were correct, or at least close to correct, whereas the second page seemed to have more of these instances of "overthinking" where you ended up placing some corners rather arbitrarily, deciding that the trajectory of your intersection had to change at a given point, despite not hitting an edge on either of the relevant forms (and thus having no real reason to end up with a corner). I also noted some places where the logic behind what you were depicting was inconsistent - like the cylinder piercing through the box, and the pyramid towards the upper left which I still can't entirely make sense of (although in writing this now, I'm starting to see that you didn't fill in the wrong face with hatching, but that the far side of the pyramid is larger than the closer end, leading to visual confusion in terms of what I was looking at).

Anyway, I don't expect you to glance at these corrections and be able to make perfect sense of it all right off the bat - like the previous diagram, it'll demand some reflection and revisitation over time. Fortunately, we'll be able to discuss this exercise further, as it is also assigned as part of Lesson 7's homework.

Carrying onto your object constructions, your work here is honestly very well done. There are some points I want to call out to keep you on the right track, but as a whole you're generally holding quite well to the core focus of this lesson - precision. Precision is often conflated with accuracy, but they're actually two different things (at least insofar as I use the terms here). Where accuracy speaks to how close you were to executing the mark you intended to, precision actually has nothing to do with putting the mark down on the page. It's about the steps you take beforehand to declare those intentions.

So for example, if we look at the ghosting method, when going through the planning phase of a straight line, we can place a start/end point down. This increases the precision of our drawing, by declaring what we intend to do. From there the mark may miss those points, or it may nail them, it may overshoot, or whatever else - but prior to any of that, we have declared our intent, explaining our thought process, and in so doing, ensuring that we ourselves are acting on that clearly defined intent, rather than just putting marks down and then figuring things out as we go.

In our constructions here, we build up precision primarily through the use of the subdivisions. These allow us first and foremost to separate the planning from the execution, where we identify the positions between an element should exist in a given dimension prior to actually adding it to the construction. In making the decisions beforehand, we're able to make those decisions separately, allowing us to focus more of our attention on how we're thinking through it all. Taking that even further, we can lean more heavily on the kinds of orthographic plans introduced in the computer mouse demo, to make those kinds of decisions even earlier, while only having to worry about two dimensions at a time, instead of three. This is something you're doing a great job of, as we can see here. Alongside the basic quadrant subdivisions that help us eyeball the positioning of certain major elements, you also went through the trouble of ensuring that the elements on one side were mirrored onto the other - while the specific spacing of those elements were still somewhat approximated/eyeballed, ensuring that they're symmetrical has considerable benefits, and you've used the tools well here to achieve that.

For the most part, the issues I want to address (which I'll do so fairly quickly) are minor oversights that pertain more to the decisions made in the moment, rather than any overall misunderstanding. So, really just things to keep in mind going forward:

• On this speaker, the side panel with the buttons looks off. I can see from the reference that this may be somewhat harder to specifically identify - the top edge of the speaker is definitely slanting downwards as we move farther back, whereas the panel's edges appear more straight (perhaps parallel to the base, and thus parallel to the bounding box as a whole), but it looks like when you drew it, you actually had them slanting more downwards, rather than less.

• Also, remember that you should be limiting yourself to only filling areas in to establish cast shadows, not to capture local surface colour or form shading, as discussed here. Generally you'd stay away from hatching in this area, and stick to filling cast shadow shapes in solidly, and leaving everything else blank. Hatching does have a use here, as demonstrated in the bluetooth speaker demo, although it's really only to help provide additional information to convey that the surface is curved in space, where one might not automatically expect it to be so - so you might use it on a rounded edge, but not necessarily on a clearly primitive cylinder. Either way, it's not a decorative tool when used in this course. You can read more about hatching in this course here.

• This spray was for the most part constructed really well, but it's how you tackled the finishing touches that I want to address. Here we can see some prominent areas where you've rounded those areas out not by adhering to the structure you'd painstakingly constructed, but by treating that structure more as a suggestion, and instead redrawing the edges more completely - similarly to this point from Lesson 3's leaves exercise. At no point should you, especially when constructing geometric objects, shift back to drawing as if in two dimensions, putting lines down with a looser relationship with the existing structure. Every action should be performed in three dimensions, and so every step should be grounded in what precedes it.

That about covers it! I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete.

Delete this please

Go over the lesson material and practice a bit to get back into the groove of it, then continue where you left off.

Excellent idea, I am actually trying to force myself to do it even more , it really cements the key points in your head.

In terms of slowing down the process, I would say what process ? Filling in pages for homework ? Probably yes, but remember it is about learning and in that case I would say it is not slowing the process but accelerating it.

Cheers

(I wrote all this before checking to see if anyone else had already answered your question, but I'm gonna reply with this anyway because it's already written)

All the vanishing points should be treated the same, regardless of what set of lines they're applying to.

On your boxes, your red extended lines should all converge to the same point, your green lines should all converge to the same point (but a different point than the red lines), and your blue lines should all converge to the same point (but a different point than the red and green lines).

Where those points are is entirely up to you, but as you're drawing the box you should do your best to get the corresponding sets of lines to meet up at the same, imaginary points.

Hopefully that made sense, and good luck on your journey!

Personally I wouldn't worry about horizon lines or anything for the 250 box challenge. Just treat the third vanishing point like the other two. You've made most of the decisions by the time you've drawn your Y, so the only question is how close you place each point. It's an exaggeration to say there are no wrong answers, but there's such a broad range of right answers that it's more useful to approach it with the attitude of just getting a feel for how your boxes turn out when you place the vanishing points closer or farther away. I.e. you place the vanishing point close it looks one way, you place it far it looks another way and which one is "right" will depend on the specific drawing.

Now obviously you posted this because you aren't happy with how your boxes are looking, but the truth is you're having difficulty making your lines converge to a single point and that's why they look the way they do. This is normal, and part of what the 250 box challenge is supposed to help with, but there is no solution other than practice.

You're on the right track just keep going.

It varies a lot, not only from exercise to exercise but also from person to person, to the point where there can't be a specific recommended amount of time that works for all or even most situations. It comes down to your own intuition on whether or not you feel you've grasped what you needed to. If you haven't then ideally that would be identified in a critique and then you'll know what you should work on that more.