FiddlewheelX

A LOT of bread and Love it!(your art). I like the silly eyes and the pose, Great job!

Haha. I wasn't expecting that when I saw the thumbnail. XD

Unless you were gone for a really long time, it should be enough to just revisit some of the exercises as a refresher and then continue where you left off.

You should continue, exept do a 30 min warmuo to get you back on your feet. Don't redo the whole course as it is a time waste

I think all you need to achieve that is to play with all possible orientations and side lengths of the initial Y-shape. If you have too much trouble with that in the beginning, you may try using the online tool Uncomfortable recommends in the 250box challenge section.

Grinding is effectively just doing the same task over and over without any clear, objective end point. "Until I do it better" isn't objective, because it is entirely subject to how we feel about our work. Conversely, doing something a specific number of times, or for a certain number of days/hours, or allowing a third party to decide whether we should go back and do more (which we get by having others critique our work, which while still being subjective is at least not tainted by our own biases) provides us with a clearer point at which we can stop and move on.

From my understanding , grinding would for example be someone who doesn't attempt a lesson and submit it but instead does it over and over trying to get it to perfection. For example some people do lesson one over and over again before submitting it trying to get it to look perfectly like the lesson, instead of trying their best and getting what they need to improve on. Of course you should strive for this but in the long run. Each lesson in drawabox teaches a concept and once you understand the concept you have a lot of time to get better at it via the warmups. The warmups are where you try and imrpove on what you have been critiqued or see you need improvement on.

is it simply drawing too many pages on the homework assignments in a attempt to make the drawing look more appealing

I think this might do that yes. It takes a while to realise and although Uncomfortable reiterates it, it soaks in after a while that all the things in drawabox are exercises. For example lesson five is not about drawing animals, its about applying construction, conveying mass, organic forms etc. Animals are used as a tool to those elements.

but specifically attempts to get good at a certain exercise/concept

This I don't know but I do look over my attempts and rewatch videos to catch any concepts I missed the first time. So no I don't think this is grinding, understanding the concepts better is deffintley not grinding. Grinding would be taking months on a single lesson to make it look perfect when you already understand the lesson and what you need to work on. Instead of working on it in warmups you stay on that lesson doing it over and over again until you think its perfect.

Patience is, like everything else, a learned skill. You develop it one step at a time - but it requires you to take active control of your choices. That means recognizing the fact that the things we do, even the subtlest, most automatic habits are the results of choices we make. Either choices to take control of what we're doing, or choices to let go of that control and simply let things happen.

It won't be instantaneous, but the more you catch yourself giving up that control, and then reassert it as a result, the more in control you'll become, and the better you'll be able to control your base urges and tendencies. From there, you'll find it easier to be "patient".

The distinction between the two comes down to what's making the major decisions of the piece. When we simply copy a single reference image, it's making all of the decisions. We'd do this to learn from the image (because in doing a direct copy we're not exactly making something new), and it's very useful for that purpose, but as such it falls within the learning half of the 50% rule.

The use of different reference images, especially in the manner I demonstrated in my tiger/market example, uses those reference images as tools. We decide what we intend for the final drawing, not the images we use as reference. We decide what it is we need, then go looking for the best suitable reference image that meets those needs. We may not find a perfect one, but as we're looking for reference as a source of information and not a direct source for the entire image we're looking to produce, we can work with what we fine.

The fact that we are making the decisions and not abdicating rhat responsibility, is what makes the result an illustration and not a study, and is what makes it valid for the 50% rule.