Cornball

Oh, I think I understand your concern now. So for that, I would recommend you actually go out and draw a bunch of boxes using that method - deciding that the first point is always completely 100% correct the first time, no matter what, and hinge every other decision based on that singular point. In principle, if that point were placed in the mathematically correct position, then sure, it might work out.

In practice, I think you will find boxes constructed in this manner to be misproportioned, wonky, and in need of adjustment. Crucially, the needed adjustments will be obvious, and if you took a second pass at the box you would know exactly what changes you'd make, but you didn't give yourself the freedom to make adjustments during the construction process, so it came out poorly.

Due to the nature of the exercise being that we approximate every point (and thus every line), each decision will be slightly off from what we envisioned. In isolation, these small errors are nearly imperceptible, but in aggregate, they compound to a noticeably incorrect box. By placing points and ghosting lines to imagine where that line would actually go if we were to pull the trigger on that vanishing point, we give ourselves a second chance to catch mistakes and push our corners around until they are closer to what we intended.

The typical workflow for me looks like this:

1. Pick an arbitrary first VP (don't mark it on the page, just imagine it). Ghost two lines (one for each plane) to validate convergence. "Seems reasonable - I'll place two points (one along each imagined line I just ghosted) where I think the corners should go."

2. Pick a second VP (imagined, not marked). Ghost one line to imagine the plane constructed by the two VP's we just established. "Oops, that point I placed earlier is a bit misaligned. I'll place a second point along that first imagined line that more correctly converges to the second VP." Repeat for the other plane and mark a point for the corner.

3. Pick a third VP. "Oops, if my third VP sits here, I would have to adjust the other two VP's slightly which would change all my corner points again. I'll move my third VP closer/further to minimize the impact it would have on the points I've already placed." Mark points for the corners.

4. You should now have a collection of points marking the approximate locations for each corner. Continue to repeat this process as many times as you feel you need before you're confident in your corners.

For the Organic Boxes exercise, just go at it and learn what you can - don't worry too much if things are off. You'll be getting a ton of practice with this process and actually checking your convergences during the 250 box challenge.

I actually would recommend ghosting much further than your intended point. It's not always practical (or even possible) to ghost all the way back to your vanishing point since these can be way off the paper, perhaps even out of arms reach, but I find it a good practice to ghost your lines at least to the edge of the page. This helps your line to not only come out more confident and straight, but it helps in estimating the proper convergence since you can ghost your hand closer to where you imagine the vanishing point to be. Just lift your pencil at your intended point, but ghost the line all the way through.

Nicus is right - we're not guessing, we're approximating. If we wanted to follow the strict rules of perspective (which do exist and are strict), then we would break out the ruler and compass and grid everything out mathematically, but that process is laborious, time intensive, and better handled by a computer. What we're doing as human artists is following those rules to the extent that they are useful, but not letting the minutiae of "my convergence is off by half a degree" get in the way of us creating. It's more important that we create, make mistakes, and learn from them. 250 mildly inaccurate boxes will be more useful to your artistic endeavours than 1000 carefully plotted out boxes drawn with rulers and grids.

For this exercise specifically, once you have two edges, you have concretely decided the "convergence you want to apply". There can only be one intersection point between those two lines, and that imagined point is the vanishing point you're shooting for with your third line. Once you've picked a Y, that second line you draw for each plane is the only real "decision" you're making. Once that exists, there is only one possible vanishing point you should be using for your third line. (But obviously you repeat this process for each plane, so 3 times in total.)

TL;DR: Just draw :) follow the rules to the best of your ability, but don't get bogged down in the details. For the purpose of these exercises, "close enough" really is close enough. If there are any serious issues in your understanding, they will show up in your critique.

I'm fairly certain that's not just a "you" issue - every person will have a preferred stroke for making strong, confident marks, and most people have the easiest time doing this with strokes going away from the body like you described.

The way I see it, the exercises in this course are meant to be done to the best of your current ability. If the exercise demands that you make a strong, confident line as straight as you are able to freehand it, then you will want to employ every advantage you can get, which includes using your preferred angle for mark making.

In work outside this course (or even during your 50% work), you are free to make marks however you choose, and I would encourage you to practice making marks in different ways when doing so. As an example, I find that making a straight line vertically while using a tripod grip tends to be more difficult than when using an overhand grip, so when I find myself needing to do so, I either rotate the page or switch my grip to accomplish it. I'm not worried about grinding out a bunch of vertical lines using a tripod grip to improve my ability to do so, that seems kind of silly to me. If you can make a mark comfortably and well, then just do that.

The important thing to focus on here is that for work in this course, make your marks as comfortably as you can. If that means using the same stroke at your preferred angle over and over again, then do that. You will get plenty of practice outside of this course making marks in different ways, so don't despair that you're not practicing them in this course. For the purposes of these exercises, focus on making your marks comfortably and confidently.

As a brief aside, I would strongly encourage you to give yourself the freedom to watch the instructional videos - they are not just supplementary materials, they are integral to this course. It's not the same information as the text but packaged differently, they tend to expand on tougher topics in a way that the articles don't.

i love this so much xD

Thanks so much for the thoughtful critique! All very valid criticisms - I definitely goofed up on the Impala but by the time I realized it, it was too late T_T

You're so right about the boat - thanks for pointing that out. I figured the proportions would translate well enough between the two techniques, but something clearly went awry. I'll be more deliberate about picking a measuring technique and sticking to it in the future, rather than swapping between the two.

And yeah, I regret filling in the back of the train with black the way that I did - if I had spent more time analyzing what I was seeing, I could have built out the door and the lower portion of the driver cab more clearly, but I was so unsure of what I was looking at and had already spent so much time on it I kinda just gave up and defaulted to filling it with "shadow" to save my sanity xD It's definitely worth being more conservative when filling in areas with solid black, which I'll keep in mind moving forward.

Thanks again for the unprompted critique! I'll definitely try sticking around in the community, I've had only good experiences here and I hope to pay some of that generosity back as best I can!

Hey Simon! Thanks for the unsolicited critique again! Greatly appreciated as always :)

Yeah, the overall structure on some of these (17, 4, and 21 in particluar) got really screwed up early on in the process, but I figured I'd push through anyway. I think your second point is also right, I was losing steam toward the end of this challenge and rather than take some time away and come back when I was feeling motivated, I pressured myself to grind through to the end because I was eager to start on Lesson 7. This was surely a mistake, and it's good to know that the drop in attention is easily noticeable.

And yeah! The sides of the wheels I really didn't know what to do with. Most of the time they're fairly featureless, but I could have at least included a few more ellipses to help indicate that the side bulged out too. Ultimately, I didn't think I had enough room (small ellipse guide and whatnot) to preserve the ratio of tire/hubcap while also indicating this side bulge, so I just left them alone for the most part.

You're so right about watching the degree of the interior ellipses - I should have been more careful about that. There were a few that I even deliberately chose different degrees since I thought it looked more correct, but of course this turned out to be wrong for the same reason that having "parallel" lines converge to different VP's is wrong. Just one of many lessons I learned through this challenge!

In my defense, I really was trying to stick to purely implicit shadows on all of these, but some of the larger tire treads were difficult to imply without explicitly outlining parts of their form. 21 was just wrong from the start, but for the rest that was truly my best effort. It's hard to admit for tires like 11, 8, and 21, but I really was trying my best xD

Thanks again for all the feedback!

YES PLEASE.

I know Imgur sucks at ordering your uploads - if you do it all at once, they upload in a random order and the "rearrange" button often stays grayed out for no reason, but doing it one at a time sucks. I feel ya, but it makes it waaay easier to see your progression.

This is a screenshot of Uncomfortable's reply to a similar question on the Discord.

Basically, review all of the lesson material (instructions / videos) starting from lesson 0, but don't work through the homework exercises. Just focus on doing the exercises in your warm-up pool (for you, this would be all the exercises from Lesson 1) for 1 week per year you spent away from the course, then resume where you left off.

I'm gonna have to disagree with Stulern on this one - I definitely agree that the purpose of using different colors is to provide clarity to yourself and to the grader when assessing your work, but I don't think that using a single color per box is "wrong". Either can work, and in fact I found that as you begin to get more bold and add more overlap to your boxes, having separate colors for each set of edges makes things less clear than having a single color per box.

Take this page from my submission as an example. I used a different color for each set of edges, and the whole thing is a muddled mess. Unless you have 15 different colors of pens, you're going to end up re-using some colors, and since we're extending to the edges of the page, you're going to have some of the same colors overlapping, sometimes to very similar vanishing points, and it just makes the process of identifying which lines belong to which plane more difficult. Not impossible by any means, just harder, which goes against the purpose of using different colors in the first place.

Contrast that page with the last page of my submission, especially toward the top and bottom left. There are four distinct sets of lines that are all overlapping and converging relatively close to one another, but because I know that each color corresponds to a single box, it makes it much easier for me to follow that color back to the appropriate plane - I only needed to use 5 different colors of pen, so there are no repeating colors to get confused with. Each color goes back to the same box, so even in the mess of overlapping lines, I can always quickly pick out which lines go back to where.

TL;DR, do whatever makes it more clear for you. I started out using one color per set of lines, but found part way through the challenge that one color per box ended up being much more clear, especially as you begin to overlap your boxes more.

Thank you! I haven't been drawing very long, at least not seriously. This course has helped a ton, not just on the fundamentals of form and perspective but on shifting my mindset on the practice. I'm sure if you follow this course, you'll be where I'm at soon! Honestly I'm not very far along in my art journey :P

It wasn't until about a year and a half ago that I started to take art more seriously as a discipline. I never had any formal training or took any art classes in school (I studied computer science at uni), so having this course start with the baseline assumption that you have zero experience or knowledge really helped for me. I would draw intermittently throughout my life whenever inspiration hit me, and spend like 6 hours on a piece that was super amateur but I still felt pretty good about for someone with no idea what they were doing.

I think there's a lot of valuable aspects to this course, but the core of its value stems from its focus: developing spatial reasoning skills through exercises in building believable forms in perspective. This is a convergent instrumental goal for any artist - no matter what artistic goals you have, or what branch of art you intend to explore, this will help you anywhere you choose to take your practice. That's what makes this course special - it's an effective on-boarding process for literally any type of artist. This course doesn't pigeon-hole you into a specific style or medium - you can take this knowledge anywhere and everywhere with you, and you will still find ways to benefit from it.

I hope you're able to derive some value out of this course! It's hard work but it's fully worthwhile. Good luck with your journey and happy drawing :)