DrawingDad11

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.

If you have to choose between confidence amd accuracy, always choose confidence.

Accuracy is not in your bucketlist for now. Sure, it would be nice to have it, and yes, you will try to work towards it in the future, but it is not in your checklist.

Your first and foremost priority is confidence. You need crisp, straight lines, drawn from shoulder in a single decisive stroke after careful ghosting. Like a slash of blade, drawn fast and without steering midway through.

Just continue working through it, there are no "good" or "bad" results here, only if it follows the exercise rules or not. Get a clean, crisp line; and after that you will start calibrating your accuracy.

If your lines are wobbly, you are hesitating or you are still unsure where the stroke will end. If the line is straight but inaccurate, all you need to do is continue practicing. If it faints before reaching the point, you are lifting the pen/reducing pressure before it reaches the end point or using the pen at an angle.

Go over lesson 1 again, they talk more about this in more detail.

You would continue with the mistake, and see the construction through. There's a few reasons for this:

• Firstly, the exercise itself is less concerned with drawing the object you're referencing accurately, and more about using that reference as a source of information to help you piece together what is essentially a 3D spatial puzzle. The part that's most valuable to us is how you're forced to think through how the forms you're adding sit in 3D space, and how they relate to one another within it. Having to think about this over and over, across many different studies, gradually rewires your brain's subconscious grasp of how those relationships work. So a mistake may cause the end result to turn out looking different from what you intended, but that doesn't actually make the exercise less effective.

• Secondly, correcting mistakes can trick the brain into believing the mistake never occurred on a subconscious level, whereas leaving it as is and having to work with it makes it very difficult to ignore. And therefore we are more likely to learn from that mistake, to consider why it occurred and how we might avoid it in the future (often it's just a matter of taking more time, rushing less).

• Thirdly, drawing another form on top of the old form will severely undermine your own suspension of disbelief - that is, your brain's capacity to believe in the illusion you're creating - and that'll make the exercise as a whole less effective.

To add to Stulern, you can visit the Discord channel for a program called critique exchange, which is designed to help free track stuudents get critique

Your submission is not for the official critique track, so it is possible you won't get one at all. You do not need to wait for a gracious stranger to pass you to move on as you are following the free track. If you would prefer to have someone critique you more reliably, you should pay the $5 for an official critique to give you proper advice on what you should be focusing on.

But, if you really want to wait for someone to critique it, do 2-3 of the homework exercises as warmups around a 15 min time limit and the 50% rule in the meantime. Additionally, you can do other courses or look at instructional drawing books to learn techniques from other resources. Draw-a-Box does not teach everything, you should shop around to see what you like. But, most importantly if you are going to use another resource, stick with it to see what works and doesn't work for you.

Wow, I love this concept! I can't wait to see the others as you progress!

Hello Cornball, this is Canoe from the Discord server and I'd be happy to take a look at your lesson 7 submission.

Starting off with your form intersections, there's nothing about your decisions that strike me here as wrong, or at least wrong enough to warrant a draw-over. This is something you can expect to continuously improve on as you keep doing this exercise for your warmups. Overall, you show a good understanding of how these forms relate to one another in 3d space. You've also done a good job employing extra line weight to emphasize which edges go where. This greatly helps the readability of your intersections and shows a solid understanding of this exercise's purpose.

Your cylinders in boxes are similarly well done. You're employing the correction method according to the lesson and are placing care on how you put the ellipses into the box so that they line up with all three vanishing points. The only one that stands out would be the cylinder in the bottom right corner. The ellipses for that one should be much narrower than what you've drawn. However, I'm assuming you're using an ellipse guide here, so getting it "close enough" is fine for this lesson. Better than shelling out a boat load of cash for a set of master ellipse templates...

Speaking of boat loads, let's move on to the meat of this lesson: the vehicles.

Your form intersection vehicles do a good job of sticking to the principles of this exercise. You've stuck to basic geometric forms which you could then theoretically use as buidling blocks for a more complex construction. This isn't what we ask you to do specifically in this exercise, but it's an important step in the construction process that often gets overlooked for more of the finer details. You do get a little fancy with the rear view mirrors on the F150 and the Accord (AKA the greatest car ever made), but given that those are an essential part of what makes cars look like cars, I can understand why you did it.

I'll quote uncomfy here for why we do this step before the construction proper because his description of the exercise's purpose is far better than mine: "With our more detailed vehicle construction demos, it's easy to get the impression that we've turned the process on its head and changed it completely, from building things out from simple to complex, to laying out a forest of lines and connecting them into a concrete result only at the last step. This exercise helps us remind ourselves that we're still working from big to small - instead of building something out of toothpicks, we're still whittling down a block of wood, piece by piece, into something more detailed and complex."

Finally, let's get to the constructions themselves and frankly, there's not much for me to point out! You've done excellent work leveraging your orthographic plans in your constructions. It's especially notable that you use very specific subdividing in order to determine where a feature will go in your orthos so that you can more accurately transfer it to the finished construction. This is escepcially apparent in both the locomotive and the Toyota Camry. It's important to stick to our orthographic studies because it forms an integral part of this exercise, namely the sense of solidity we build up in our heads and how these objects exist in 3d space as we grapple with transferring our observations into our constructions. Sure, you can wing it and make adjustments on the fly in order to get a better image. But that's not the point of this exercise. Doing so ends up undermining that sense of solidity and, thus, the true prupose of this exercise.

To that end, I do have some very minor notes. There is a slight mismatch between your orthos for the Chevy Impala and the final construction. Your orthos show the hood sloping slightly upwards towards the cabin, while the hood in your final construction is flat. I recall you asking about the Impala in discord, so our best bet is to chalk this up to a small oversight.

Another area would be for the boat. I think what got you was having two different measuring systems for your orthos vs. the final construction. I noticed in your orthos that you seemed to use a bounding box for the whole thing a la lesson 6. However, the final construction uses the proportion measuring technique from this lesson. I can see you placing ellipses at the front corner of the bounding box and subdividing those in order to get the proportions correct. Because you didn't use this technique for the orthos, that it most likely what led to the poor boat getting a bit squished. Admittedly, it's hard to use the wheel proportioning technique on something that doesn't have any wheels. This is an instance where you would have to give your best guess on how many squares long vs how tall something is. I like to use definable areas like the height of the motor or the distance between the water and the top of the orange side as a base unist of measurement (and since we're using a square, the height will be the same as the width if you catch my drift).

One final note I have is something we both did for our submissions. It has to do with filling large areas with black. Uncomfy addresses this, but I think the real value of this quote are his thoughts on how this applies to the "rules" of drawabox:

"The only other thing I wanted to nitpick at is to remember that within the bounds of this course, we want to try and stick to reserving our filled areas of solid black for cast shadows only (another thing my demos don't stick to completely, as this is a slight shift in direction we've made over the last few years, with the demos for this lesson being several years older than that). The thing to avoid is simply defaulting to filling in predefined spaces with solid black, without actually going through the spatial thinking of determining the actual shape of the cast shadow (or at least whether the shape would encompass the entirety of that particular surface). A cast shadow's shape defines the relationship in 3D space between the form casting it and the surface receiving it. It is very easy to fall into the trap of filling things in just to differentiate between a surface oriented one way versus another (which is more akin to form shading), and we mainly want to ensure that when drawing as intended for this course, that they stick as much as possible to what brings their thinking back around to 3D spatial reasoning.

One exception - although we use some rather tenuous means to make it adhere consistently with our 'rules' and frame them as cast shadows anyway - is the interior of the car. Here we argue that being on the interior, the external structure casts shadows onto all of those surfaces, but this isn't strictly true since the window glass is transparent. Ultimately it just helps bring the construction together and flattens out the interior in a way that helps - but usually that's something we want to avoid (for example in wheel wells and in the gaps of the bumper area).

At the end of the day though, that's just how we approach our drawings for this course - outside of the course, you can make those decisions for yourself, as long as they are kept consistent within a piece (or as long as you have a particular reason for breaking that consistency). It's remarkable how many 'rules' we adhere to can be validly broken as long as you've thought about why you're doing it, rather than doing so without consideration."

But with all that out of the way, your work here shows a great understanding of this lesson, and I have no doubt in my mind that you're well on your way to doing great things! You've certainly entered an exclusive club not many can say they are a part of. I look forward to seeing what you come up with moving forward and hope you stay with us over on discord. To that end, I'll be marking this lesson, and the course as a whole, as complete. Congratulations on completing drawabox!

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.