Tygerson

So long as you did your best with those 21.75 boxes there's nothing to regret and no reason to be hard on yourself. This course asks you to perform to the best of your ability with every line you put down -- that's asking a lot, but what it isn't asking for is perfection. When I was doing lesson 4, there was a time about halfway through drawing each bug when I felt like scrapping it and starting over, but I fought the urge every time and finished the bug and I am very glad that I did. It's best to build a habit of finishing, not restarting. In later lessons, you will inevitably make more mistakes, and those mistakes will be opportunities to learn how to course correct and make the most of what you have on the page. I think that's more valuable than restarting every time you put down the wrong line.

It might be a little cliche to say but there's no objective BEST way to improve. The most important thing is to not over analyze and stop drawing. If the 3 Week cycle thing doesn't work for you then you can always stop and try a different method. If you're in the middle of the 3 weeks I'd say ride it out and see how you feel afterwards, see if it's helped you improve. And if it's not for you then hey at least you learned you need a different method. The only guaranteed way to get better is to just keep drawing.

1. Honestly, it can go either way. If you work based off the corners, you're focusing on the corners you'd decided upon earlier, so you're working off conscious intent. If you adjust as you go to account for overshooting, you're giving yourself more "live" experience, where plans rarely survive first contact with the enemy. So either one works, but I would advise you to be consistent in which one you choose within the same session or page of boxes.

2. Yes, the line extensions should be done through the start and end points, as they are always going to be more useful when used to analyze your intent, rather than your ability to execute your intended lines. The ghosted lines exercise talks about arcing and how to combat it - that exercise is better suited to addressing that particular issue than this one, so if the issue comes up here, I wouldn't immediately focus on it, but instead take note that you may want to allocate some time for more basic ghosted lines practice.

3. As mentioned in the video material, it depends on the situation. In the example you provided, taking an average of the red points (so in other words, your purple point), fits best. In other cases, one red point may be a better fit, so you would use that, based on your best understanding. There's no one size fits all strategy.

Hello, hello, Fable, Once again, I’ll be critiquing your submission today; if you have any questions, feel free to ask below. With that said, I’ll go ahead and review your submission.

Organic Forms with Contour Curves

Cases of pinching or bulging make somewhat less appearances compared to your Lesson 2 submission; however, I would like to stress the importance of keeping your sausages as simple as possible. It's easier said than done, but simplifying the sausage is integral to building a solid structure. Continuing on comparisons, the degree shift is definitely more apparent for the most part. Especially on the sausages with a little more bend, it's clear for the viewer how the forms turns in space.

Insect Constructions

Now for the insect constructions, once again, I think you've followed the instructions and methods of construction fairly well, so unfortunately, I won't have much to add, but I'll try to reinforce any concepts that may have been missed.

If we observe the reference images, the legs suggest there are more complexities at play that go beyond just a simple sausage. Rather than using a complete form to represent the change in form, we can start with a simple sausage and build out the bulk to establish a new form. For example, at the mantis construction, the forelegs present the opportunity to convey our understanding of additive construction. This concept for leg construction isn’t as heavily enforced as in lesson 5; however, being aware of the mass from the reference image allows us to sell the believability of our constructions. Not only to the viewer but also to ourselves.

The method of leg construction is followed pretty closely on most constructions until they tend to appear like stretched spheres on the dragonfly, mantis, and mosquito drawings. As the lesson stands right now, it's not really about creating a perfect 1:1 reiteration of the image but to capture the gesture and solidarity with chains of sausages using the reference as a blueprint to do so.

Following up on the details, some restrictions are outdated in Lesson 4, so stick to the blue excerpt on the Lesson 2 dissections page and try to ignore reflections and local color whenever you decide to add texture to form. Moving onwards, I also suggest avoiding adding cross-hatching to the ant and mosquito eyes. For the ant eye, the light appears to be casting a shadow onto the small bumps. Take this chance to imply the presence of those forms. Unfortunately, I don't think the mosquito image quality is high enough to perceive the eye texture, so you can just add some cross contours like you've done for the previous insects.

Okay, I think that just about covers it, so I'll go ahead and send you off to Lesson 5. Keep up the good work.

When it comes to the 50% rule, the focus is never going to be on the results you produce - so for our purposes in the play section of this rule, worrying about the actual quality you achieve is immediately going to suggest that you may not be applying the rule entirely as intended.

What the rule does talk about is aiming for the things you want your future self to produce. That speaks to what it is we attempt to draw, not how we attempt to draw it. If you recall from the "Changing your Mindset" video, I tore up my drawing when I was done. In doing that, I wasn't asking students to destroy their own work, but rather to remember that what we do for the 50% rule is all about what's happening while you're drawing. What you end up with outside of that - what skills you may have improved, what fancy end products you may end up with - none of that matters as far as the 50% rule is concerned.

Setting the 50% rule aside, it's pretty normal to have a limit in terms of how long you're willing to work on a single piece, especially if we're talking about in a single sitting. Lots of students don't even realize that you can always come back to a piece the next day, the next week, etc. - so setting something aside is not inherently the same as calling it done. But there are also going to be plenty of pieces that will just end up feeling stale, that will no longer speak to you as they once did.

There is value in training yourself to push past that (again - we're not talking about in the context of the 50% rule, but more generally), to shift your motivation from coming from that sense of inspiration to having it come more from discipline (this is especially useful if you intend to pursue a career using these skills), but that develops with small steps.

Regardless, your capacity for patience will expand. When I started out, I couldn't take a drawing past 15 minutes. Then 30 minutes. Then an hour. I believe the longest I've worked on an illustration was upwards of 40 hours (across many sessions, of course). These days it's largely irrelevant - my deadlines tend to come up much sooner than the end of my patience.

But again, that's not what the 50% rule is about. So if you get bored of a particular drawing when playing, feel free to jump to another. You can always revisit those sketches and consider whether they're worth exploring further later on - but not as part of the "play" portion of your time.

Whenever he uses words you don't know, like perpendicular and parallel, you're going to have to look them up. If you are at the rotated boxes section then you should have already gone through a lot of material on boxes and perspective as well as plotted and rough perspective. Looking into parallel and perpendicular should have been done a while ago, course wise.

Perspective is hard for a lot of people. It takes effort to understand. Rewatch the parts that confuse you. It is good you are asking for other people's explanations. Whenever I am having trouble with something I often find it is helpful to hear as many different people explain the same concept as I can.

Proko is a good resource

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BYlW8XC0MlI

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9-Y4K4hqZwo

David Finch

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5lPfz3BFxCM

The Virtual Instructor

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bjhkxFDvD78

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Fcbk_K5qWA

Plainly Simple

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rkp1xfWJ9n4

The Drawing Database-Northern Kentucky University

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLMXbAPr21di8DjTKCE3EoS4KFtNZ-FDnP

There is also Marshall Vendruff's $12 course on perspective. It is 6+ hours long and has a ton of good information.

And of course there are a ton of great books books on perspective.

The spirit of the 50% rule is to influence the way we think about how we engage with art and creativity, to balance out the constant need to improve and to be doing something "worthwhile" (in other words, not wasting our time) with the opposite. It's not about timing yourself, or anything specific - it's about ensuring that first we rehabilitate those students who've developed extremely unhealthy relationships with learning through traditional academics, and those who see drawing as only valuable if other people value the result.

I'd say you can "stop doing the 50% rule" once it has fundamentally wormed its way into the way in which you engage with your creative pursuits. If you find yourself drawing for the hell of it regularly, without resistance, but rather actively wanting to do it, and if you find yourself not being frustrated with things coming out poorly, then the 50% rule has done its job. At that point, you're in a good position to decide how you divide up your time for yourself.

I would however continue to hold to it intentionally as long as you're working through this course at the very least, because those habits, and the damage the expectations and factory-production-line strategies traditional academics impose, are not easily undone.

I'm not quite sure what you mean by "does the 50% only counts for when drawing at home".

As a side note, I noticed that you appear to be posting each individual page of your Lesson 1 homework as a separate submission, resulting in a ton of partial submissions. This isn't really how the website is intended to be used - you're much better off just waiting until you're done a Lesson in its entirety, submit all the pages to a single imgur album, then use the link to the imgur album to submit a complete homework submission as explained in this video from Lesson 0 (at the 13:56 timestamp).

Do you still have the work from when you did it last time? All the boxes?

I think it would be a good oppertunity for you to compare where you are now to where you were a few months ago by redoing a little now and seeing if they look similar or better. Maybe even asking others to evaluate. If last time was retained at all, then chances are you'll perform somewhat better this time. If not, then- well, yeah, start over.

If I were you, I'd reread the lessons in Lesson 0, and then redo Lesson 1, becuase if you didn't do the 50% rule last time, I feel that you didn't really understand why it was so important AND necessary. Its really the one huge part of this entire program that makes people grow, its not optional for a reason. Its not just about your mental health, its about "playing with your skills". People who are most skilled at something, can play with those skills. Mathmaticians can make games out of equations, coders can do personal coding challenges, arcobats can parkour. Its the idea that- your skills are most mature, and most adept, when you know how to play with them. You'll not only be capble of applying skills in ways you didn't know where possible, but playfullness produces mastery far beyond what a class can teach. Playing with your skills makes you a master at them- that 50% rule isn't as simple as "keeping you mentally well" its doing half the job of teaching you.

Its incredibly important, I think, that you reread things and listen to the videos and absorb them. Don't speed through with the mindset of "I need this done"- do the tasks with a mindset that disregards time all together. If you are putting deadlines on when these skills need to be mastered, chances are, you aren't going to master them well. Mastery can't be made in haste, it has to be made slowly. I used to think drawing was something your hands would just do and that I didn't have to think through it, it would just happen. But, later I realized- the mind is doing almost all the work. Being delibrate, focused, concentrated, slow, and patient every time you sit down to draw- helps you master the skills better than anything else. If you are worried about "getting it done" - you'll be missing out on half of the training these exercises provide.

Adjust your mindset, and if you chose to do them all again, I think you'll gain from it, if nothing else, you may gain the patience to exist in the moment with what work you have in front of you, without feeling the "urgency" to escape it. Its a mindfullness technique, and it will serve you the rest of your life, even outside of drawing. Getting to that point- will help you never burn out again.

That's just my thoughts. Please feel free to do what works for you, and if another's advice is better, take it instead.

Good luck, you got this.

If you have all these techniques down, then it should be trivial to do in fairly short order. If you are certain you know everything then you could try to get away with skipping the reading/videos and just doing the exercises/challenges. I would definitely check in with the discord as often as possible so they can tell you as soon as you start diverging from the instructions.

I'd argue you'll be doing yourself a disservice though. If you go into a course thinking you already know better than the instructors you are definitely setting yourself up to overlook things you never considered. It is always best to approach learning from a place of humility - to go into it thinking you could find something you didn't know before. Otherwise it just becomes a self-fullfilling prophecy of sorts. You'll probably only ever get what you expect to get, and that is next to nothing. As long as I've found something I usually feel it was worth the time - no matter the amount of care I've taken or nearly how small the take-away is.

If nothing else, it is good mileage. Everybody can always use more practice with the fundamentals.

Those are just my thoughts. I am just a random guy. That isn't official guidance in any way.

Hey PattyRain,

Oouf, do I hear you! The 250 Box challenge is grueling. It took me twice as long as I had scheduled, and really put a dint in my enthusiasm for this program. Why did it take me longer?

Well, I planned on doing two sheets a day, of 10 boxes because when I started out it would take me hours to get through the pages. I would get distracted and bored or furstrated with it not clicking or not getting any better. Especially lining up the back corner, the one they tell you not to worry about and to instead focus on planes and lines. It was things like that that held me up. That and I'd lose sight of the point of doing it.

What ultimately happened was that I reaslised I wasn't keeping up with 50/50, and that I was sure that stepping back for a bit would help. So I took some time off the boxes and worked on other things from other courses that I liked and more importantly, I got doodling again, and just generally let go of the idea of where I was supposed ot be or what I was supposed to be doing.

I guess what I'm saying is a couple things:

1. Don't lose sight of why you're doing this program. This very challenging program. It is hard but you know what, when I look at my work now, and I'm only just into Lesson 2 (I hurt my drawing arm and had to take a break for that reason), it is definitely better. My mark making is much improved, as is my spatial reasoning. I still struggle to slow down and observe (I have ADHD and this is THE hardest thing for me.). If you need to take a break from the boxes so that you don't end up hating everything, take a break. It's tempting to force it, but I've done it again and again and again and I promise you that you will just end up doing it again and again and again too, because forcing it sucks the joy and the lessons from it.

2. Do the 50/50 if you're not. And review the section on the site about this rule and why it's there. You might recognize some things. We draw because we want to or feel compelled to. We love it. So be sure to draw what you love, even if it isn't what you're vision hopes. Current you made that and that's something old you didn't do. You'll get there. But have faith, go easy on yourself, but work hard in the right direction, cuz you can force yourself to do those boxes, but when all 250 are done, what lesson did you learn? You effing HATE boxes because they still are wonky. You can't learn properly if you are forcing yourself. So we're back at 1.

I'll finish by saying, don't give up. Rest as you need. If you get frustrated, put it down, walk away, come back when can ask, "what is it that I could do to make this easier?" Sometimes slowing down now helps you speed up later.

Good luck!

Josh The Mathochist

@the.y.method (Instagram)