Ervi10

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.

While im not Uncomfy, I may have an answer that can help.

About drawing through things:

See, we draw "through things" because it helps us to develop our understanding of 3D forms, and how those forms sit in space.

For example, when drawing boxes, drawing "through them" as if you had x-ray vision, gives us a good understanding as how that box sits in 3d space, its hard to say, but it gives you a really good sense of how your forms is constructed, drawing through a box also happens to be very useful at understanding our mistakes with the convergences of a box.

While not related to Drawabox, drawing through things can also help to solve draftsmanship problems, like for example, say you are drawing a head inside of a box, it is really convenient and useful drawing through that box in order to fit for example the ears, or another example would be when drawing hands, when you want to draw a hand you need to know where each finger is located, and so, you need to draw through your forms in order to get a good idea at where are your forms placed in 3d space, if you were to just simply draw your hand without drawing through it, you could potentially get wacky or wrong placed fingers.

About the contour exercise:

Note: I will be refering to Lesson 2 "Organic Forms with Contour Lines exercise" as i think is a simple and good way to get the point.

Now, when it comes to the contour lines exercise,it may be kind of weird that we only need to draw the portion that is visible, but i personally like to think of it as 2 exercises aimed to teach you different things.

The first one, where the draw the entirety of our ellipses is meant to show you how the degree shift of the ellipses changes relative to the position of the viewer, and in doing so, it prepares you to think more about how your forms and ellipses change as you or the object moves in 3d space, it also teaches you numerous things like, fitting your ellipses within the sausage form, fitting your ellipses with the minor axis, developing your muscle memory to draw entire entire ellipses, etc.

However, there's a problem, drawing through ellipses in my opinion its not really that helpful when we want to convey how exactly is our object facing us, and so, the second exercise comes in handy, see, contour lines are incredible powerful at conveying how the object is facing us, because we can tell 2 entire different stories depending on how we place our contour lines, if you draw the visible portion of the ellipse, you could be telling the viewer that the sausage is looking at a specific direction, if you however, draw this portion of the ellipse the other way around you could the telling that the sausage is looking at a completely new direction, and it doesn't stop just with the direction of the sausage, depending of the "visible portion" that we are seeing from the ellipse, we could be telling that the object is facing us or not.

This is a good example of it notice of we are telling to the viewer that the sausage is changing directions depending of the portion that we draw of the ellipse, this is something that you couldn't do if you draw fully through your ellipse, unless you use line weight.

Also, in my opinion, overshooting your ellipses like the exercise ask you to do, makes you think a lot more about the turning of your forms and it will come at handy later on.

And ultimately, it is also more flexible to just draw a portion of your ellipse, later on when you tackle more difficult things you wouldn't want your construction to get messy by just drawing full ellipses, but i guess it depends on what you are doing.

(PD: also a reminder that what we are doing is just an exercise, outside of drawabox, you can draw in any way you like)

While you are not required to have all your boxes match any particular proportion, I would be weary about specifically making all of your boxes so flat. Just be sure to include lots of variety to the kinds of boxes you're drawing, rather than limiting yourself only to such a specific set of proportions for all of them.

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.

Catch up with your 50% freedrawing part or just take a small breather, critiques usually dont take that long

You'll definitely want to review the material you've been through already. Go back over Lesson 0 in it's entirety, then for each lesson, review the content and do some longer warmups. Also, review any feedback you've received thus far.

While you don't need to strictly start over, you should commit a few days, even a week, to this sort of review.

U spend atleast 30 mins just doing one biiiig warmup. From that point you continue. There is no need to restart

There's 250 for a reason. Even if it's the most horrendous thing in the world (sorry to contradict you slightly on this, Scooby), complete it, identify your mistakes through the extension of your lines, and continue on. The goal is not to produce perfect work - it's to make the attempt, see it through, and learn from it.

I wouldn't recommend it. There are a number of challenges that we face throughout this course that students struggle with towards the beginning. For example, the very fact that we draw "through" our forms results in a lot more visual clutter that can be confusing at first, but in pushing through it, holding to the instructions, and making plenty of mistakes in the process, those students gradually get more comfortable as their brains attune themselves, learning what to focus on and when. As such, changing the prescribed approach in order to make it easier in the short term, will likely just rob you of the opportunity to get comfortable with the issue at hand.

from what i'm seeing you should take your time in the ghosting phase to get a better results also you need to focus on using your shoulder you will get a better elipses if you did this