pelham123

Thank you so much King Prawn for taking the time.

Looking at the examples you mentioned I can see now that I've drawn them incorrectly, the objects don't make sense from the viewer's perspective.

Appreciate the diagrams too, those were really helpful.

Thanks again King Prawn and good luck with your future projects!

Hi GrumpyOwl,

My pleasure and thanks for getting back to me, I appreciate it. No worries at all, I know how it is to juggle the drawing practice with study along with life's problems.

Just about your line-work looking wobbly, mine was very wobbly too and is still far from perfect. It seems unnatural to draw from the shoulder and for a long time it feels that way I think.

You mention about paying more attention awhile drawing and I think you are on to something there. I find that during practice, consciously choosing which pivot you use each time you practice drawing a line you are training yourself so that you will eventually do it unconsciously, automatically. It's really a matter of repetition.

One of the exercises that I find helps is combining the ghosting between 2 points exercise with the super-imposed lines exercise. For example, if you ghost a few lines on a page first and then go back and super-impose them at the end 7 times, if you do this for a few minutes each day, that muscle memory will develop for sure.

Anyway, I wish you luck GrumpyOwl, take care and keep drawing, we'll get there!

Hi it_sjustvedant, I hope things are going well with you.

Just for your info, I've been working through Draw-A-Box for about 14 months now, I'm currently on the 250 Cylinder Challenge. I can only speak from my own experience, but I have definitely seen my drawing improve, though it is a very gradual process. Anyway, I'll go through your exercises and see if I can give constructive feedback.

Organic Arrows

Good flow to your arrows here, it's obvious you're drawing from your shoulder. Some of your arrows are falling off the page though, I have this problem as well and it was pointed out in the feedback I received. Try to control the space a bit more, a way that works for me is to place in a rough top and bottom point and try keep within those points. Remember if you're drawing in the top line of your arrow first, the bottom line will extend further below your bottom point. It's just a matter of thinking it through while you're ghosting your lines. Some of the lines in your arrow heads are not connected, this tends to breaks the illusion of form. Using points/dots to plot out the geometry of the arrowhead first can help and then connect them after with your lines. Your hatching is a little rough here, try to slow down a bit with your hatched lines, it's time consuming to do it I know, but you'll be making the most of every moment of your practice time.

Leaves

These look really good, nice flowing lines and convincing forms. Well done on the texture too, nice work. I can see you tried both adding and subtracting the jagged edges, where possible try to add rather than subtract, there's a lot more adding rather than subtracting in the next couple of lessons.

Branches

Good work here. You've broken your curves into more manageable parts and hit most of the edges of your ellipses. What helps for me is varying the degree of the ellipses a bit more just to practice the back and forth flow through 3D space.

Plants

Nice work on the daisy, the texture looks great and the petals feel convincing with those cast shadows. Mushroom looks well, you got those ellipses bang on and texture also looks great.

Good job also on the Hibiscus, just make sure you're always drawing through your forms.The form of the cactus looks good, but it is a little hard to make out whats going on with the cast shadow, Well done on the pitcher plant, that one I remember being pretty challenging. The potato plant looks good, as do your 2 final plants.

Great work overall it_sjustvedant, no hesitation in recommending you move to Lesson 4: Applying Construction to Insects and Arachnids. Good luck on your journey!

No worries, good luck :)

Cheers Cuvid :)

Play around them Jansiva. If you observe the examples, the ellipses are all different degrees. Try varying the degree of your ellipses and see what effect this has on your form.

Hello again GrumpyOwl, I hope things are going well with you, your art and in life.

I will go through your exercises now and see if I can give constructive feedback.

Organic Arrows

Your arrows are nicely presented with good control of space on the page. Good job on reinforcing the overlaps with superimposed lines. Keep drawing all lines from the shoulder and maximize your mileage using that shoulder pivot.

Watch the shape of your arrow heads, they should be symmetrical, equal width both sides. Also, while I can see you have done this for the most part, just watch out where you increase the amount of space between each successive curve as it comes forward in space, it really does help sell the illusion of depth.

Organic Forms

Again, your control of space is excellent with most ellipses touching the sides of the forms, well done. Do watch the shape of your forms though, try to think of these as 2 equally size spheres connected by a tube of equal thickness. what helps for me, is drawing two spheres and connecting them with curves as a warm up, just to get a sense of the form. Your second page forms are a lot more consistent, well done.

Texture Analysis

Great work on these I think the best I've seen so far. You have a great sense of gradation from dark to light, I learned a tonne from these, thank you!

Texture Dissections

These are nicely rendered and you've wrapped them around the forms really well. Hopefully someone a bit more experienced with texture can give you more constructive feedback on these, as for me I will be studying these for sure ????

Form Intersections

You mentioned this one was a bit of a struggle, I think most of us are struggling with this one too. I had a bit of a breakthrough recently when I concentrated purely on 1 form intersecting with a single plane, it's starting to make a bit more sense to me. So my advice would be start simple like that, for instance, what would it look like if a cylinder intersected with a flat plane? Overall though I think you managed to get quite a few of these and your forms look great, with foreshortening fairly consistent for the most part.

Organic Intersections

You're starting to get the hang of those organic forms.. Contours are nicely wrapped around and there's a good sense of weight to the pile, maybe the foreshortening is a bit extreme on the top forms, but that's really a nitpick. Do try to watch your shadow shapes though, I find these can get tricky too. I guess it would be helpful to buy a bunch of water balloons to study the shadow shapes, I think I might try that myself in future.

Great work overall GrumpyOwl, no hesitation in recommending you move to Lesson 03: Applying Construction to Plants.

Good luck on your forward journey!

Hello GrumpyOwl, fellow art traveler, I hope you are well.

First off I want to say straight up, your work is really good, congratulations. Now, having said that I do feel you're putting yourself at a bit of a disadvantage by uploading to GoogleDrive.

Just from my own experience. it's good practice to put yourself in the shoes of the person looking at your work and to try to make their life as easy as possible. Uploading to Imgur links a preview thumbnail on Draw-A-Box which makes it far more likely that you'll receive feedback and not get skipped over in the crowd of submissions.

Just for your info, I've been working through Draw-A-Box for about 14 months now, I'm currently on the 250 Cylinder Challenge. I can only speak from my own experience, but I have definitely seen my drawing improve, though it is a very gradual process. Anyway, I'll go through your challenge and see if I can give constructive feedback.

I wouldn't worry about your pen size too much, but if you can stick to 0.5 for the sake of consistency, it definitely makes it easier to give feedback.

Your presentation and your line-work is fantastic overall, but I will say, it is hard to tell if you are drawing these lines exclusively from your shoulder as requested. I've noticed that line-work from the shoulder in general tends to be straighter, less wobbly and initially at least, less accurate. If you are drawing from the shoulder then that's great, ignore me but just remember that all lines, including superimposed lines, should be drawn from your shoulder pivot for these exercises.

Overall I think your convergences look good, you have a nice mixture of extreme and less extreme foreshortening and you played around with different proportions. Try to observe box-like forms around your home to get a sense of how extreme the perspective is in real life, it really does depend on the scale of objects and how close they are to your eye.

Well done overall GrumpyOwl, your convergences certainly improved by the end of the challenge and your presentation throughout was one of the best I've seen. Good luck on your art journey!

Hello fellow art traveler, I hope you are well.

Congratulations for completing the challenge! I spent June and July of last year working through it, it's a serious mountain to climb, so well done to you.

Just for your info, I've been working through Draw-A-Box for about 14 months now, I'm currently on the 250 Cylinder Challenge. I can only speak from my own experience, but I have definitely seen my drawing improve, though it is a very gradual process. Anyway, I'll go through your exercises and see if I can give constructive feedback.

Overall I think your convergences are pretty good. It's usually the back faces that are the most difficult, something that helped me was to compare the angles with the straight edge of my pen, not sure if that's cheating or not, but it worked for me.

You seem to have played around with foreshortening quite a bit, the more extreme foreshortening you're likely to see in larger objects or those that are very close to your eye, I suppose it depends on what you plan to draw, but I feel less foreshortened boxes are probably more useful, so if you'e practicing, I would lean towards less foreshortened boxes. Try looking at box-like objects around your home and observe where their lines converge in relation to your view point.

You drew different sizes and proportions of your boxes, I think that's good practice. There are few incidents where you returned lines towards the viewer rather than away to their VP, this happened to me a few times as well, Just check your convergences when you're plotting in your dots/points, that should help to avoid mistakes before you commit to a solid line.

Good work on your freehand hatching, it can be tedious, but it means you're getting the most out of your practice time.

Do try to watch your line weight though, try to get into the habit of superimposing those outer silhouetted lines a 2nd time, it can be a bit messy for a while, but eventually you'll build that confidence and be able to thicken any line you want.

Well done Cuvid, I can see your boxes already improving in your Lesson 2 submission. Keep practicing and good luck on your journey!

Thanks Milo_999,

No problem at all, you can learn a lot yourself from doing crits every once in a while and it really helps to reinforce the knowledge you've learned so far. Patience is the key I feel, especially when it comes to practice.

Thank you for the reply and good luck with your Art journey too!