Cornball

yes please!

You should definitely draw a shrimp. Then post it, I want to see some skrimps. Show me them sea bugs.

In all seriousness I can't speak to the efficacy of that method in particular, but from what I can tell it's really just drawing from reference, which is a core tenet of this course. Regardless of any differences, trying the tackle the same problem with different approaches can be an extremely effective method of learning not only how to do the thing in different ways, but learning what works and what doesn't work for you in particular. Everyone learns at difference paces and in different ways - the more ways that you try, the broader your understanding can become.

So yes, draw a shrimp. Try the shrimp method. If it doesn't work out to your liking, try the DrawABox way (starting from simple forms and building up complexity in multiple passes). Then try another method, and another, until you find something that works for you. Just don't forget to have fun!

As I understand it, the 50% rule is just about drawing for the sake of drawing - if you're drawing from life as an exercise in practicing a specific skill set or building out your visual library, then I would consider that deliberate practice and not part of the 50% rule. If you're drawing from life just because you're in a cool place and you're having fun drawing what's around you (and the result of how it turns out is not the focus of the drawing) then I would consider that part of the 50% rule.

The point of having multiple references is to help avoid copying any one specific reference, and instead pulling information from what you can see in front of you. If you're having fun trying to copy a scene exactly, then that's totally fine - ultimately, the 50% rule is about learning to have fun regardless of the outcome. If your piece turns out poorly and you still enjoyed the process of making it, then you're doing the thing.

At least that's my understanding, anyone else please feel free to correct me. Good luck!

Thanks for the feedback Fable! All very valid criticisms - I definitely do tend to add line weight in segments on curved lines because whenever I try in a single line it always ends up diverging and looking like a separate line rather than line weight, even with ghosting. That's not a justification, just my reasoning - I understand that this is a bad practice and that I should try adding weight to curves in single strokes, even if they end up looking like separate lines (these are exercises, not finished drawings).

I didn't even think to vary the degrees of my contour curves - I did for the ellipses but for some reason thew that away for curves! Thanks for pointing this out - I did ghost through the entire ellipses for the curves, but failed to vary the degrees properly. I will pay attention to this in the future.

My gradients definitely leave something to be desired - I hope to improve on blending them more with the 25 texture challenge. Some of the textures for the dissections I found difficult to draw with purely cast shadows, but I probably should have just picked a different texture then.

Overall very helpful feedback - thanks again!

I'd be happy to clarify if anything I've said is unclear, but unfortunately "?????" is about as informative as a dog's head tilt, so I'm a bit unsure of where the confusion lies lol

1. This is normal! Accuracy will come with time and practice, and even then it will falter intermittently - the most important thing you can focus on at this stage is drawing confidently with your whole arm. It sounds like you're taking enough time to plan out your lines, so just keep doing that. If you miss, don't worry, you have plenty of practice in your future!

2. It can be quite tempting to compare your work to that of others, but this is a false benchmark of your progress. The only true measure of your progress comes from comparing your work to your previous work - a week ago, a month ago, a year ago. Here you can see meaningful, measurable, specific improvement which you can point to. Not only does this help you understand what you've improved on mechanically, it also helps to highlight changes in your ability to evaluate art, which itself is a separate skill. Your best drawing that you were super proud of a year ago might look much worse after you've learned more about perspective, lighting, color theory, etc. That doesn't mean it was a bad drawing, it means you've gotten better at perceiving and evaluating your own work, which is something to be celebrated.

Keep up the good work and don't let mechanical errors stand in your way! Take your time, draw them boxes, and be proud of what you've accomplished! I think you'll find that your first 5 boxes will look quite different from your last 5. Good luck!

Thanks for the feedback! I would definitely agree that I'm still struggling with back corners, but from what I understand that is somewhat of a distraction so I think I'm okay to not focus on it too much at this point in my journey. Also, now that you've pointed it out, I can see how my lines on boxes with shallow foreshortening don't converge quite enough, and I'll keep that in mind as I continue to practice.

Thanks again for the quick reply!

Thanks for the feedback, Chy! I definitely agree that there is much room for growth in terms of my mark-making. I will continue to practice executing lines more confidently - specifically by spending more time in the planning phase so that, during execution, I can be more confident that I'll end up making the mark I intended to. I'll probably also give the rotated boxes exercise another go, I can see where my furthest boxes failed to converge more rapidly than my inner ones.

I can only offer the general process I've been running through and issues I've been struggling with. After I finish a page I'm generally asking myself the following questions in no particular order:

1. Are your marks well executed? Did you miss, fall short, or overshoot the points you were aiming for?

Typically I have some mistakes here, but at this point in my journey I'm not too hung up on it; this will improve over time. Just draw confidently and try to draw from the shoulder.

2. Are your marks well planned? Does the box have any strange proportions or misaligned corners/edges?

If anything stands out in this way, something went terribly wrong. At this point, I should be taking enough time to choose the locations and orientations of my corners appropriately. If this is a problem, it's usually because I rushed the process after creating the initial "Y" and didn't mark enough "potential" points when deciding "where am I going to put this corner so that my edges converge and the faces of my box are appropriate sizes?". If the boxes are oddly shaped that tells me I should have spent more time in the planning phase.

3. Are your 3 sets of 4 colored lines converging well? In particular, how much faster do the inner-two colored lines converge compared to the outer two? Do any lines diverge at all?

Usually when I make errors at this stage, what I see is my inner-two lines will either coverge with each-other way too early, or diverge from each-other (and converge with the outer edges) too early. The edges likely won't all converge at the same point, but I don't think that's the goal - we're approximating here. I think the goal is to make it so that the 2 or more points that they do converge to are far enough away from the box that the colored lines don't actually intersect. If this is a consistent problem, it might help to stick with shallower foreshortening.

I've found it helpful to, before drawing any edges, ghost through and beyond them (as if I were drawing where the colored lines would go, without marking the page) and check loosely how accurately each line in the set converges with each other line in the set. This means I'm making 6 comparisons (4 choose 2 = 6) for each colored set:

i. front edge close to me + front edge far from me;

ii. front edge close to me + back edge far from me;

iii. front edge close to me + back edge close to me;

iv. front edge far from me + back edge far from me;

v. front edge far from me + back edge close to me;

vi. back edge far from me + back edge close to me.

Yes this is tedious, but if you're looking for specific areas to improve and your covergences are off, this is a good place to start. Take your time with each comparison. If you planned well enough and are executing your mark as intended, then the lines should converge well enough. Remember, we aren't looking for perfection here, we're just looking to develop and improve our intuitive understanding of 3D space. "Well enough" for our purposes really is good enough.

This is all probably very obvious but hopefully you found something I said useful, if not then I'm sorry for wasing your time lol. Good luck and remember to have fun!

Thanks for the feedback, DCP! I would agree with everything you said, and I think most of my issues stem from not enough time spent on the preparation phase when ghosting my lines.

In the re-do of the funnels exercise, it may not look like it but I really did try to focus on keeping the ellipses aligned with the minor axis - I seem to have a hard time aligning them perpendicularly. I also have a much harder time when the degree is very narrow!

As for the rotated boxes, I think this one shows marginal improvement... still very flawed, but I was at least able to keep them somewhat consistent in size this time.

https://imgur.com/a/dCvU1e2

I hope I linked that properly - if not, the URL is https://imgur.com/a/dCvU1e2