DatKexMonster

https://imgur.com/a/rD6GYwr

https://d15v304a6xpq4b.cloudfront.net/lesson_images/061ed3b6.jpg

https://d15v304a6xpq4b.cloudfront.net/lesson_images/d878b8b2.jpg

One thing I would suggest is that you spend some time looking at the images here and picturing in your head how these sausages have a volume, follow in your mind the whole contour trying to feel how they are not flat, they express volume, the marks are not random, you don't just copy them without thinking why the contour is like it is shown here. Later you can just try them out a little to see if you could grasp and reproduce a form with volume. I hope it helps :D

In my experience, the skill you're talking about is "design". Not design in the sense of graphic design, but design in the sense of identifying the large overarching problem you're attempting to solve through the design of a given thing - a character, a prop, a vehicle, a space, etc. - and breaking it down into smaller problems (especially through the identification of those smaller problems), and ultimately using the tools at your disposal to solve it. Those tools can range from your "visual" library (a collection of visual and/or spatial information pertaining to the various objects and things you've studied from what kinds of hinges exist to achieve different kinds of mechanical motion, to motifs and patterns employed by certain cultures), to a particular combination of shapes, proportions, etc. usually referred to as shape or form language.

Each of these things can be practiced or developed. For getting used to the idea of viewing design as problem solving, give this video a watch. It's a preview for a larger course, but for the purposes of what I've explained here, the video is sufficient and the rest of the course talks about other related things. For developing your visual library, doing drawing/painting studies of a wide variety of things is the best way to absorb and process things in a way that will actually help you retain bits and pieces that you'll be able to pull out later. And the matters of form/shape language and proportion comes down to much the same (studying how other people leverage shape/proportion/etc in their own work) and experimenting with its application in your own work.

I don't know if this is cheating but one thing that really helped me see what I was suppose to draw was to take the reference image on photoshop, put it in gray scale, go to image, adjustments, posterize and put in 2 values I would just turn it on and off to clean up the distractions and see it as simple as two values. Also, I know that we want to grow fast and do it perfectly at our first try, but don't allow yourself to feel overwhelmed, instead just spend some time looking through the texture gallery and admiring how beautiful the patterns are, why are they so appealing to your eyes, what makes them beautiful, analyzing and taking in information like this is not a waste of time, we should always remind ourselves of the fun of the process. Texture is awesome and that you can represent it in your drawing is really cool too.

And last but not least, remember to make sure you are your best friend, your best friend would never say: man, this is garbage, it looks horrible, you suck, you should give up. Instead say: wow, that was hard but you did it anyway, good job! I'm proud of you! you're moving forward! learning can be tough sometimes but you can do it! :)

Oh and one last tip, if you start to feel tired or heavy or anything just take a small break, do something else and try again later when you feel better. No one is pressing you to be perfect, it's your process, your journey so just enjoy it! s2

It isn't possible for a normal box. You're getting this in this case because the form you have is more of a trapazoidal shape, making it seem like there's a vanishing point on the bottom. If this were a box and all the lines converged properly that vertical vanishing point would be on top.

When it comes to going back over drawings (in the sense of starting with pencil and inking them, or taking a rough sketch and cleaning it up), this is something I struggled with a great deal when I was younger, and I ended up shying away from lineart as a whole as a result, gravitating more towards painting instead. As I've been teaching Drawabox however, the reasoning for why it didn't feel right became fairly clear.

It comes down tracing as a process. Tracing requires us to focus entirely on the lines we're trying to recreate, which in turn makes us pay attention to them only as lines on a flat page. Two dimensional things, without flow or fluidity - just stiff, lifeless things. And so, we may be working off a lively, energetic sketch, but the end result lacks those positive qualities.

The solution is not to shift back to drawing from your wrist because that is the only way to maintain accuracy, and that is for the exact same reason that we stress the confidence of our strokes as our main priority in this course as well. Sacrificing confidence for accuracy simply won't give you the results you want.

Prioritizing a confident execution helps a great deal in pushing us to think about each stroke as the edge it is meant to represent in 3D space, and to think about how it actually moves through that space instead of focusing on them as static, stiff marks on a flat page.

Now of course, continuing to draw with confidence and accepting that your accuracy is going to suffer won't result in pretty drawings, and will likely result in plenty of smaller mistakes - but that's what practice is for. Continue investing your time in the planning and preparation phases of the ghosting method, so that you can reinforce your eventual confident execution with everything you can to increase your chances of executing the stroke you want, and as your experience and mileage increases, you'll find those chances naturally increasing as well - but only as long as you apply that process.

That said, I should reiterate that what we do here in Drawabox is intended to provide you with plenty of mileage and experience to have those principles sink in deeply, to the point that you end up employing them in your own work whether you mean to or not (assuming you are at least being mindful of their use as you work through the course material) - but of course, you mentioned that you're almost finished with Lesson 2. That's good progress, but you're still closer to the beginning of the course than the end, and will have plenty of additional such mileage of using the ghosting method for each and every one of your freehanded marks ahead of you.

I definitely struggle with this as well. I suggest to not get too caught up on being perfect, submit what you have and see how it goes from there. Get feedback and move on. Some of the lessons are introductions and you will have the opportunity to reinforce these skills along the way. Its a journey, I also did the assignments along with the Scyla videos and it help me with understanding the time frame to complete the projects. I definitley submitted homework for feedback not feeling the best about it but was given very good direction on how to move forward. I'm thinking the point is to make sure you understood the skill introduced in the lesson and move forward, we are all a bit of a ways off from being perfect. Give it your best effort, submit and move on. Don't over think it.

Not too bad for your first 30 or so. There is a point where everything just clicks, the boxes start looking better, and it becomes easier to see in your head what the box will become. For me, that happened about box 150. Here is what my first three looked like: https://imgur.com/v1HhDBK

One thing that helped me early on was to examine each box after drawing in the lines for checking vanishing points and make some marks to show me where that line should have been. I would do about 20-30 boxes in a session (they get faster), and I found that each day the first ten were crap and the last ten looked decent. Here is what they looked like about 70 into the challenge: https://imgur.com/adzUXPP

Warm-ups help a lot. After the first couple sessions I started to warm up with some of the exercises from Lesson 1, and I would draw a couple boxes at the end of the warm up. I would also look at the most common mistakes I was making the day before, and try to concentrate on fixing those... or at least not repeating them as badly. Here is where I was at by box 200: https://imgur.com/I8tpjhk

The back-side lines and back corner are the hardest to place, but there is a way to plan it. THere is a good post in this forum about how to plan a box (I will try to find it and insert a link). Basically, the first six lines are pretty easy. Those are the frontside lines... the three you start with and each side extending off those three lines. Instead of jumping right into drawing a back line, shadow possible lines a few times. One will be easier to predict and place than the others. Once you decide where that line will be... don't draw it. Set a dot down where you think that line will hit the back corner, then shadow the other lines over that dot. If they are not lining up correctly, that dot must be moved... tap a new dot. Dots are fine! Once you find the dot that works best for all three backside lines you can draw them in. Here are six of my last seven: https://imgur.com/LjLRuZV

I finished all 250, but was instructed to draw 15 more boxes with more variation in foreshortening. I was making my vanishing points too far away from the boxes. Here are some of those corrected boxes: https://imgur.com/IK42qFj

I enjoyed the 250 Box challenge. I wish that I had asked for some feedback on the first fifty or so, which might have helped m to reach that mental click faster fix my vanishing point issue.

Re read all previous critique and make sure to write down physical notes on paper all the things you want to remember and the things you need to work on.

It's probably just that you're so used to chicken scratching that it's become ingrained as a habit. Habits take time to break, keep resisting the urge and overtime you'll feel it less and less.

Great job on completing lesson one!

Your accuracy is very very high. Super impressed by your rotated boxes – very great result! But with that comes a warning as well: your lines are very wobbly, especially the ellipses in tables. It’s sometimes extremely hard to let go of accuracy in favor for confidence, but that is really something you have to do for this course. Increase your speed, draw from your shoulder and in one fluid and continuous line. Don’t course correct for the line to be accurate. This will make your lines less wobbly, which is your priority first. Your accuracy will definitely go down, and that will likely be discouraging and frustrating, but with practice it will go back up. That is just annoying phase to go through first.

I can also see that sometimes when you get to the end of a line, there is a small curve right before you take your pen off the paper. This has to do with the same thing: confidence and speed, so even if you draw with confidence for most of your line, make sure to not slow down as you get to the end of it. It will be harder to stop exactly at the endpoint, but that overshoot is also part of practice. Eventually you can stop at the endpoint even without slowing down or course correcting.

Confidence first, accuracy second! In that order, you will master both.

Other than that, there are some technical things: make sure to trace over ellipses two or three times, preferably two, and make sure to never trace over a straight line unless you want to add lightweight – never correct a missed line!

Lastly, when it comes to your organic perspective, you have a great variety in sizes and that is really good. Next you could try to do the same with rotating them in wildly different ways as well.

Other than that, I really don’t have much to say, all the exercises are looking very very good. The only thing to work on is line confidence. Don’t underestimate it, though, as it is also the most important part!

I will mark your submission as complete, but I strongly advice you to do the exercises again as part of your warming up (of course, spread out in small pieces), this time favoring confidence over accuracy. Your results may end up looking very different, so if you want to, feel free to send pictures in this thread and I'll give more feedback!