Jme

Damn. As soon as you said "where I left a little trap", I stopped and then suddenly I realized I'd done the textures wrong. Touche.

O H H.

Yep, got it, that's clicking now too. Thanks for explaining and for drawing in the extra visual, I've achieved nirvana and look forward to crashing back to reality trying to draw a car or whatever in the next lesson.

Thanks.

Additional pages: https://imgur.com/a/BiDva5o

The point plotting with the subdivisions clicked when you described it has carving wood, but I'm still hitting a block when translating more complex forms from orthogonal to 3D -- anything square or rectangular is OK where I can kind of "hug" the planes with the lines, but even after re-watching your video on the barrel, I get lost on what happens to the points I plotted out in the orthogonal views when translating them to 3D space.

Hmm...okay, thanks. I read this a couple times, watched the video (it did help), and then cut a toilet roll in half and stared at it for a while...after that I drew a few more boxed ellipses and I think I get it a little more now.

Much appreciated.

Thanks, I think I feel better then?

Regarding the ellipses with the longer boxes -- I was finding that when I tried to get all the points to converge, the center line of my actual ellipse was consistently way off from the rest of the lines, so I started getting really conservative with the degree/angle of the box edges because I couldn't figure out why that was happening (and still haven't). I thought it had something to do with how the instructions highlighted ensuring that the box was properly square and not rectangular and we thus expected the cylinders to be circles for the exercise; I touched base with the Discord folks and people advised that I make my angles less extreme, thus I ended up more with the issue you pointed out where convergences are paired up instead of wholly convergent for a side (which seemed to be the lesser of two evils). I feel like I am missing something in how to achieve the actual desired result there.

I think I am also not 100% wrapping my head around the foreshortening concepts you outlined for the cylinders; I can understand the "what" (circle on far end get small and wide when foreshortening big), but a little shaky on the application of the "why"...but I think for this piece I just need to draw more cylinders in warmups and stuff and eventually it'll stick.

Thanks again for the feedback.

This is interesting, thanks. The "just scribble until something happens" is typically what I end up doing and nets me a whole lot of frustration and not a lot of progress.

I have found (weirdly) that if I listen to music while drawing (certain music evokes very strong visual imagery for me when I am not drawing), I can "hold on" to the image just a little bit longer before it slips away (sort of like holding on to cupped water running between your fingers) and can very quickly get down the major shapes etc before it falls apart entirely. As long as I can get enough down on the paper in time, then I can just use the image on the paper to "revive" the image I had before to an extent since I am looking at it.

I'll have to try some of what you suggested. Looking at other images of the thing I want to draw actually makes it worse sometimes, because the thing I am looking at completely erases my own version that I had in my head before. I am generally speaking about things that are already in my visual library -- I can still certainly draw a generic version of that thing without a visual aid since it's in my library, but any kind of unique variation that I had previously envisioned just sorta dies.

Best of luck to you as well.

All good points. I take it this is not the norm then.

I don't think aphantasia is what I'm talking about exactly -- I have a vivid visual imagination.

...Until I try to draw. The image I dream up in my head only disappears when I put pencil to paper, whereas I believe aphantasia is never being able to imagine the images to begin with.

His video is interesting, though.

For me it was helpful to ghost the angle of the inner lines allll the way out (past the box boundaries like the rest of the vanishing lines) before putting down the actual marks.

Hey, thanks for the critique. Sorry about the rotated images. I meant to go in and correct them but then I forgot...I would've fixed it if you sent them back so you wouldn't have to view them all sideways.

Anyway, here are the revisions with an attempt to keep all the feedback in mind: https://imgur.com/a/9z8wVxy

Thanks again.