Yoyobuae

Thanks for the critique.

And I think you've touched on the two points I feel were my weakest in my drawings. I'll keep in mind what you mentioned about sticking more closely to simple sausage forms and remembering to draw the joints between them (honestly I just forgot in some drawings, oopps xD).

Also sometimes I felt like I drew the sausage forms too big or somehow didn't match the reference as closely as I wanted so I kinda gave in and tried cutting into it (which I shouldn't have >_

To add to what others have said: The world today is setup to transform you into a huge ball of insecurity and doubt.

The moment you get on the Internet, what do you see? Some artist (which is probably profesional level) posts a "doodle" which easily blows any of your best drawings out of the water. So you feel like your not doing a good job and then want to stop drawing.

Those are lies. You and "random pro artist" are very much not a fair comparison. It's like just starting to do a sport and then constantly comparing yourself with world champion athletes. Yeah, that ain't gonna last.

So, avoid comparing yourself. With anyone. It will almost always destroy any confidence you have.

Except when you compare with yourself from a few years back. That's the one good comparison you can make, because if you work consistently for years then you can see your progress when you compare. Just don't expect progress to happen in just a few weeks/months. Be patient, it takes time.

Remember that "random pro artist"? They had to go thru the same process. No matter how good any artist is, at one point they were beginner level. It is thru consistent work and time that they got where they are.

You just have to do the same.

Official critique uses a credit system.

The moment you subscribe to a membership level in the Patreon page you will get charged for the respective amount. At the same time you will get the respective amount of credits for that membership level added in drawabox.com website. Credits expire after 2 months (I think) if not used.

You can check how much credits each lesson takes by going to that lesson, clicking on "Submit homework for review" and then clikcing the "Submit for Official Critique" button. That will show a new panel which shows your current number of credits and the amount of credits the official critique for the lesson costs.

Your progress thru the lessons is tracked thru your drawabox.com account and is independent of the Patreon membership. So you can subscribe to Patreon membership, immediately submit your homework for official critique and then cancel Patreon membership (note that by then you already have been charged for the month, and already got the credits in drawabox.com).

Take the time to read thru the 250 box challenge instructions. Not a single time does it say "check how the box looks", or "avoid the box looking distorted". That's not how DrawABox approaches things.

There's a series of steps/rules you need to follow. Read and understand each carefully. Then execute those steps as faithfully as you can. You will succeed if you do that.

What is success in this case? It is explained in the challenge instructions (and also in organic perspective exercise):

• Draw a Y-shape. Keep angles between the lines greater than 90 degrees

• Draw an additional line, one towards each vanishing point.

• Draw the lines to finish the three side of the box facing the viewer

• Draw thru your box

• Extend lines away from the viewer to check convergences

• Apply lineweight (and maybe hatching) to show which side faces the viewer

And do that 250 times. That's it.

"They look all distorted" is not very helpful criteria. But "these two lines converge instead of diverge" is the kind of criteria that will guide you towards more consistent boxes.

And "a bit better" by the end of the challenge is what you are expected to do. I mean if you can consistenly extend lines away from the viewer that already is a huge success. Pay close attention when the instructions say "facing the viewer" and "away from the viewer". Consistency in the convergences and those convergences being consistent with whats away/towards the viewer is key for boxes to look like boxes.

Thanks so much for your comments.

I felt like I was making progress with each new insect so I'm glad to hear it was noticeable from the outside too.

I'll make sure to keep in mind what you said about partially wrapping forms around the base instead of fully engulfing it it. It felt a bit weird when I just draw a whole new form on top of the existing one, like the new form didn't really had much interaction with the base I was working from. But now I know better, thanks!

That image in particular already has a good gradient to it:

https://imgur.com/a/c9Rxhjo

All that's needed is to bring it out using fineliner pen is to make the parts darker than a certain shade black, and parts which are lighter than certain shade pure white. Most image editing programs have a Threshold or Levels filter that can do this. Of course, you want to do this manually rather than relying on a filter.

Note that when you do this some information from the image will be lost. This is expected and actually good. You do not want to draw every little detail of the original image, doing so would be too time consuming and make the drawing too noisy.

Now not all texture images have such a nice, well behaved, gradient to them. So you'll need to learn to design those shapes yourself using information about form you get from the picture and mentally calculating where the cast shadows will be. Which is the point of the exercise after all.

You can see the starting point clearly. There's absolutely no reason you cannot move your pen EXACTLY to the start point with each ghosting motion.

You see the point and you move your hand to align the pen tip to it. No need to think (or over think it). If you have trouble doing this then maybe you are speeding thru the ghosting so fast that accuracy suffers. It's better to keep a constant rhythm thru the whole ghosting, slow down a bit if you have to.

When an intersection line crosses the edge of a box the intersection line forms an angle less than 90 degrees in 3D space:

https://imgur.com/a/0bxWwU5

What is an intersection? The lesson instructions explain:

• The intersection between two lines is where a point sits on both lines at the same time

• The intersection between two planes is where a line runs along both planes at the same time

In the case of boxes they are formed from six planes. So If we can figure out the intersection between planes we could extend that method to boxes.

So a plane. What is it? It's a flat surface. In DrawABox we call planes what could be described geometrically as rectangular plane. A general plane in geometric/mathematic terms is actually infinite. The prime example of this is the ground plane. It extends infinitely all the way to the horizon line.

Note the connection there: For every infinite plane you can find it's respective horizon line.

How you you find an horizon line for an arbitrary plane? There's an easy method: say you have a flat object (a piece or carboard, a flat ruler, your hand with all your fingers straightened out) placed on the flat table surface. Now lets say you raise that object, without rotating it, all the way to your eye level. At that point you will be seeing the object edge on. That edge is aligned with the horizon line:

https://imgur.com/a/0xHTUdk

That little trick works for any plane in any orientation. You don't even have to do it physically. You can imagine a box, and then imagine moving eacho of the planes of the box outward until you see it edge on. Then you can trace the horizon line for that plane.

There a few things you can do with this. Let's say you do the above procedure for the three planes of a box that are facing the viewer. You will end up with three horizon lines. Those three horizon lines form a triangle. The corners of those triangles are exactly the vanishing points for the box!!

https://imgur.com/a/WtcXNJR

But why are the vanishing points there? What are vanishing points anyway? When we draw boxes what we actually are drawing are the edges of the box. What is an edge? The edge is the the line in between two adjacent planes. To be more specific: It is the common line between two adjacent planes.

So now we can go back where we started: An intersection between planes is the common line between two planes. In other words, by drawing boxes we have been drawing intersections all along!!

So the next logical step is to take our knowledge of drawing boxes and apply it to draw intersections. We know that order to draw the edges of a box (which are actually intersections) we consider the vanishing points for those edges. When drawing intersection between two planes then it is expected that intersection will converge at some vanishing point.

But how we find the location of that vanishing point for the intersection between planes. The answer for that is above: we consider the horizon line for each of the two participating planes, where those horizon line cross is where the vanishing point for the intersection line is:

https://imgur.com/a/AYq8Pb1

The above statement gives us the direction of the intersection line (towards the respective vanishing point). It doesn't give us the start location of the intersection line. That's because the first intersection line can start at an arbitrary location (which is still inside the overlap between the boxes).

And with that we finally have all the tools to draw the intersection between two boxes:

1. Draw two boxes with some overlap

2. Pick a point inside that overlap

3. That point lies on a pair of planes, one from each box

4. Find the horizon lines for those two planes

5. Find where those horizon lines cross to find the vanishing point for the intersection

6. Use that vanishing point to draw the intersection line until an edge of either box is reached

7. Examine which pair of planes lie beyond that edge

8. Repeat from step #4

But of course, since this is DrawABox you cannot plot anything of the above. Not that it would be possible to plot everything within a piece of paper. Still, it is possible to estimate it well enough to get mostly convincing intersections.

I really like that explanation about separating one form into two 3D forms using contour lines. Reminds me a lot of form intersections but applied to organic forms instead.

It's like there's a common surface between the two new forms which also happens to be where they touch. Along the surface of the original form that contact surface shows up as a contour line. It all makes so much sense.