Well I did want to finish it sooner rathat than later as 100 boxes seem like nothing to me now that I have done over 250 plus whatever else the course threw at me. Two months is the longest I have ever taken and its just for 100 boxes so you might understand my frustrations haha
I've put some thought into it and concur, I don't plan on stopping Drawabox but I should probably put it on hold at least for a month or two and then see how I am feeling. Or maybe I just draw a box a day for now and come back in two months when thats done. Whatever I do, I think its in everyones best interest for me to take a breather from here.
I don't quite know what to do now, I suppose I can finally go into Bernt Evistons Gesture drawing series, but I also want to draw for myself like you said. Its hard for me to do that tho. Maybe I find a loose course that mainly makes me draw for myself with specific tasks i that. Or maybe I do what (I think) Dio suggested once and chose a subject that I draw everyday and try to make it unique everytime.
Whatever happens, be sure that'll return with a better mental state towards art and that for now I am just greatful for the great resource this course is, while not always pleasant, I doubt I would of grown or continued drawing as much if not for it and I am very thankful for that and the kindness shown here.
I have went through numerous amount of therapy, clinics which I stayed at for months; slept in them as well and I am currently getting help as well.
I think the real thing that causes me problems is the nature of the task being such a time toll, mundane and overall feeling of either not understanding the challange or not thinking its giving me anything of value in return.
I know for a fact that if I finish this challange everything would be okay, challange 6 seems extremely helpful and not very hard considering I already drew a lot of objects, 25 wheels seems not fun but the small amount of wheels plus being able to change them up would make it more than doable and challange 7 seems hard but helpful again.
The pure stress and anger from drawing a box, messing up a line or doing it well only to have to draw a cylinder in it and then not getting the ellipse in well at all or drawing a few in a row to make them fit better and not knowing which one is which and doing that over and over again for hours is exhausting.
I was honestly considering quitting and just doing lesson 6 and 7 without reviews to skip the challange but that seems unfair to you guys and also, again, if this challange wasnt there I probably would of finished the course by now so it also seems ridiculous to throw the towel over drawing 70 boxes.
It also made me draw far less to none in other courses the past two months because touching anything drawing related triggers a bit of PTSD at this point as silly as it sounds
Yeah, just not a fun situation for me right now haha. At this point my only two options are to push through and get to the parts I want to get to (probably just one awful week) or to quit and not get the last lessons which I think look really cool and helpful.
I suppose I will have to think it through. Thank you, I know this isnt the kind of question this board is for and I usually dont like to drag this into here.
Thank you, now I get it, sorry for misunderstanding, next time I keep that in mind.
Have a great day or night ^^
Hey hey, thank you for the feedback, I just have one question.
In your first reply to my lesson 5 homework you said:
"noticed on this (https://imgur.com/DxSzMSz) elephant that you appear to be wrapping the mass on top of the back around the rib cage and pelvis masses. I appreciate the 3D thinking that went into this, and you're not far off, but if we think about the structures that are present here, the rib cage and pelvis are already fully engulfed by the torso sausage, so they do not protrude and cannot be used to introduce complexity to additional masses. The shoulder and thigh masses do protrude from the torso sausage, so they are better suited for this purpose."
But here you tell me I should of wrapped forms around each other. I actually went against my instincts of wrapping them over each other in these last four pages, so I am a bit confused on when I should be wrapping and when I shouldnt.
Thank you
Hey hey, I asked on the server and was told to send the extra pages here, I hope thats correct. I hope they're better now. :)
Hey hey, thank you for the indepth review.
I hope its okay if I ask a question or two. Yesterday I completed my first of the four pages, a bat, here is the picture and reference:
And I noticed a few things.
Firstly is it okay if I maybe do the next ones on A3 paper instead of the recommend A4? The reason I always drew a tad small was because I am really bad at judging sizes, this is normally not a problem with pencil and eraser, but it is here, even when I take measurements beforehand I often make mistakes like here where the wings are way too short, especially the right one. You also said my squid is too small, I personally disagree as it almost takes up the entire page, the only way to make it bigger would be to make it wider but then I also have to make it longer which is impossible with the page size. So either I use A3 paper to have more room or we have to accept weird out of proportion creatures. I know that proportions arent really the point of Drawabox but I think you can understand that its not nice to be limited like that.
Also I had massive problems when it came to the head thanks to it looking straight at me and not to a side. I think I did okayish almost but I didnt really know how to connect things.
The same also applied to a lot of the additional masses. The almost triangle shape on the circle (Oh yeah, I hope its okay I just made one big circle for the whole body, the structure of the bat just fit better for it to me), the wings themselfs, a lot of it is infront of other stuff so again I didnt how to really do that and improvised. I also felt bad for not being able to do the feet better like you said but the bat really didnt offer itself for that.
Kinda regret not taking something simple like a deer now haha.
And I am also not sure what you meant with "drawing 2D" in my elephant example. I mean I understand what you mean but how are the lines you highlighted more or less 3D than any other?
Sorry for all the questions, I hope thats okay. If you have any other things against my bat please tell me. I swear I wont send a message like this after every construction, I just wanted to write you before doing the others so I can see my mistakes more clearly in one recent drawing instead of doing four wrong and not learning anything.
Thank you for reading and have a wonderful day- ^^
Hey hey, I have some questions, I hope that is alright.
1, do I draw plants as potential warm ups too now? I find it very hard to start and stop a long project like this and treat it as a warm-up, I have a lot of problems with doing warm-ups that arent the tables of ellipses and straight lines actually (I replaced the straight line warm-up with form intersection now tho), I havent done anything in texture for a bit because of it haha. I try but my 15 minutes are up before I am done looking at my ref or before I have done more than a few strokes so I never really know what to do haha
2, I dont really understand how shifting ellipses works. I understand what is meant but I dont really know from what angle someone is looking at it. I mostly shift them when an object goes away/towards the viewer, bending away from it. But otherwise I don't know how I am supposed to make them bigger or smaller, considering that if something stiff and round is just infront of me, the ellipses will barley change, except if the object is like super long or I am looking at it from a not straight angle, but again, I dont know where the viewer is in relation to my object, which makes that subjective, I suppose? You can see me using different degrees here https://i.imgur.com/uUeYdnw.jpg for example because the bamboo and vase go down, so I understand that the ellipses go wider the further down it goes. But with a stiff stick there isnt really much to do, the ellipses change so little that its very hard to really show them change, you know?
3, I didnt really leave my daisy open, its going outside the page because I didnt want it to look cut off, is that not allowed?
4, I didnt draw through my forms at point because I ironically I wanted to understand my object better. I did a lot of mistakes because I couldnt tell which object was infront which and it threw my understanding of the form either off or made the form look so confusing that it became a mess to work with. I know we are supposed to make edges thicker where the objects overlap but I was told to do that with the same speed and confidence as with any other lines and when the line is either very small or curvy it becomes a real mess to make the line perfectly match up. And if I mess it up too much it becomes even more confusing to look at. I dont really know how I will do the insects and animals with that problem haha
And lastly,
"The leaf structures present in this construction are much looser than they could be, that's because you're not respecting the boundaries laid down by the initial construction, which flattens and stiffens your structure. When leave structures make it so that it's impossible to construct it without cutting back into your initial structure, you can still respect the solidity of your construction by still abiding to the same principles of edge detail, this informal demo shows how this can be possible."
I am sorry for being a bit slow here, but I dont really know what you mean by that. How do I respect the structure? Because the other demos also went outside the shape of the leave and when the leave is really edgy and big its impossible not to go very off structure. I am also still not sure what the flowline is haha. Like if I can make a stiff flowline still with a curvy leave and a bend parts of the leaves as I please then whats the point of the flowline? I thought the point was to have something to closely follow and so I can focus on one problem at a time, but what problem does it solve? Again, sorry for being a bit slow here, I just dont really understand what it means haha
Sorry for the long message, please do take your time responding, I wont do Drawabox for a week (break time) so you have all the time in the world to respond. Thank you and have an amazing day!
Thank you for the quick answer, cant wait to get onto the boxes!
Quick question before I leave you alone, in lesson 0 its said that I should do 10 - 15 minutes OVERALL and not per exercises, right? Otherwise that would be 30 - 45 minutes of warm-up lol
Sorry if this is obvious, just wanting to make sure.
Let's be real here for a second: fineliners can get pricey. It varies from brand to brand, store to store, and country to country, but good fineliners like the Staedtler Pigment Liner (my personal brand favourite) can cost an arm and a leg. I remember finding them being sold individually at a Michael's for $4-$5 each. That's highway robbery right there.
Now, we're not a big company ourselves or anything, but we have been in a position to periodically import large batches of pens that we've sourced ourselves - using the wholesale route to keep costs down, and then to split the savings between getting pens to you for cheaper, and setting some aside to one day produce our own.
These pens are each hand-tested (on a little card we include in the package) to avoid sending out any duds (another problem with pens sold in stores). We also checked out a handful of different options before settling on this supplier - mainly looking for pens that were as close to the Staedtler Pigment Liner. If I'm being honest, I think these might even perform a little better, at least for our use case in this course.
We've also tested their longevity. We've found that if we're reasonably gentle with them, we can get through all of Lesson 1, and halfway through the box challenge. We actually had ScyllaStew test them while recording realtime videos of her working through the lesson work, which you can check out here, along with a variety of reviews of other brands.
Now, I will say this - we're only really in a position to make this an attractive offer for those in the continental United States (where we can offer shipping for free). We do ship internationally, but between the shipping prices and shipping times, it's probably not the best offer you can find - though this may depend. We also straight up can't ship to the UK, thanks to some fairly new restrictions they've put into place relating to their Brexit transition. I know that's a bummer - I'm Canadian myself - but hopefully one day we can expand things more meaningfully to the rest of the world.
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