themathochist

Thanks!

I see what you mean about the intersections. Ironically, I have a good idea of what the intersections will be like as I have done engineering drafting, which is part of the problem: overthinking. I'm not worried about it but will keep practicing and simplifying.

Best,

Josh

Yay! And congrats and happy very belated birthday!

Hey I hear all of this. So, I never really doodled either. I wanted to do comics when I was in high school but 'real life' saw me put that all aside, all my art, and I didn't pick it up again for a looooong time. And that was probably around 2018. I've been scrambling from free course to paid tutorial, and even expensive mentorship. But I was missing these fundamentals, sure, but I was also missing patience with myself.

The 50/50 isn't meant to be a chore, it's meant to remind us of what we started drawabox for. So go do some really rough sketches and some value studies and paint some watercolours studies! That's what I did, but with gouache. The point is to make art, no matter weather it looks like what we hoped or not. Something I encounter a lot is the idea that we've got all these "bad" drawings or lines or whatever in us and we gotta get as many of them out before we can get to the good ones underneath. In truth this is just practice making lines and drawings, iterating, thinking, solving problems all the while, and eventually they start looking like how we envisioned them. But it's discouraging at times, I'll grant you. At some point in the boxes, I needed to make it more interesting, so I made it into a math puzzle and tried to find an algorithm or two that I could use to turn the process into something less taxing and time consuming.

Two tips I could give you on the practical side of things is for your warm ups and you need to do 10-15 minute before hand, trust me.

First, warm up by doing the rough perspective exercise and knock out 4 or 5 quickly. The box challenge is in large part judging where the vanishing point is over and over and over and over, and so is judging angles in the rough perspective exercise. The tough ones for me were always the shallow angles close the the horizon when the box is on the opposite side of the page from the VP.

The other is write something on the page that might be encouraging or a useful reminder. I tend to tense up once I get to drawing the real thing, so I often write "loose, relaxed, fun!" and "From the shoulder!" because I formed the bad habit of drawing from the elbow.

But definitely paint, regardless.

You got this!

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)

Thank you so much for your helpful review and critique. I have a VERY bad habit of redrawing and it is something I am working on. I feel like I got better as the page count increased, but I know that near the end, I redrew a few times and shook my fist at myself every time.

By the end, I understood staying loose and relaxed is the only way to draw. So now I do silly things to loosen up, like theatre/acting exercises from way back to get overmyself and have fun.

In regards to the convergence/divergence issue for pairs of lines, I tried to think in terms of the planes being parallel in perspective, and this helped as I got nearer the end of the challenge. Thinking of the lines in terms of "families" from the get go also helped.

Best,

TheMathochist

(PS I accidentally sent same to Community for review bc I didn't check the "official review" slider the first time. Should I leave it there, or is there a way I could get it removed from the Community Review Queue?)

Thanks for the feedback! I have made note of the places to keep an eye on in my warmups log. On to the Challenge! Peace!

j

Hi Rob,

Sorry about that.

Here is the link DRAWABOX Lesson 1

Best,

Josh