Uncomfortable

Equilateral refers to keeping the scale of the form you're constructing relatively similar in each dimension. That is not the same as simply keeping the length of your Y's edges equal on the page, because this doesn't account for distances extending into the depth of the scene.

That said, it is not something you need to worry about being entirely precise - it's just asking you not to intentionally play with forms that are extremely long in any one dimension.

Generally if your line is wobbling, it suggests that you're likely hesitating when executing the mark. This is entirely possible even when you're putting plenty of time into the planning and preparation phases of the ghosting method, if you still ultimately choose to hesitate when executing the mark. It's not easy, but we have to make a conscious decision to push through from the moment the pen touches the page, rather than hesitating out of a fear of making mistakes.

While accuracy improves with practice and mileage, the execution of smooth, confident marks is a matter of approach. And certainly none of this is innate.

If you take a look at your lesson 1 work, you are clearly capable of achieving this, but as the exercises become more challenging, we can become prone to shifting priorities away from these seemingly basic things, and we have to pull ourselves back into ensuring we are following the instructions closely.

Lastly, you're going to be drawing 250 boxes. That's a lot of mileage, and it will help your accuracy a great deal. Having completed lesson 1 and done 15 boxes, you've barely begun with the sheer volume of practice you're going to get in freehanding your linework.

The reminders from this section of the course material goes into this in more detail, but this challenge has us rotating our forms freely and randomly, and for that reason we don't want students aligning them to the viewer's angle of sight (which as explained back in lesson 1 is how we end up with vanishing points that get pushed to infinity, resulting in sets of edges that are parallel in 3d space also being drawn as parallel on the page). So the kinds of orientations you showed here, where we've gotten very specific alignments resulting in 2 and 1 point perspective should be avoided for this challenge.

So it should be explained here, but in essence you head over to our patreon page, click "Join" on one of the tiers that include credits (Casual Student and above), and follow the prompts.

Once you've completed that process, you'll see some information on how to connect your Drawabox and Patreon accounts together, and I generally send a welcome message with that same information, usually within a day, but in essence you go to your account settings page, scroll down to the "Connected Accounts" section, and click "Connect" next to the listing for Patreon. You'll be sent back to Patreon to give permission to our system, and then sent back to Drawabox where it'll show as connected.

Usually Patreon takes a bit of time to process on its end (outside of the beginning of a month it's usually under an hour), after which it'll automatically send information about you to our system, and your credit will be dispensed. You'll be able to see that credit both in your account settings page, as well as in the homework submission form, once you've enabled the "Submit for Official Critique" option.

I would recommend reviewing this video from Lesson 0 though and rewatch the section of it relating to submitting your work for official critique, to make sure you don't miss anything.

I get that the approach is different here, but it is for a reason. At the end of the day, from lesson 3 onwards, we're always focusing on the same core problem (developing our subconscious grasp of 3D space and how to convey that space on a flat page), but we attack it from different angles, with each subject matter and the way in which it frames that problem serving as a different lens through which to look at the same core issue.

Lessons 3-5 involved working from inside-out, an approach that reduced the importance of working with correct proportions, or being particularly precise with each action we took. That is to say, you might start out with some of your initial structure being too big, having misjudged or simply not executing it as intended, but that's okay, and worrying about it as a problem at that point would have been detrimental, by asking the student to focus on more things simultaneously, and spreading their cognitive resources thin.

This lesson is the first one where we really dig into precision in a meaningful fashion. Precision is often conflated with accuracy, but they're actually two different things (at least insofar as I use the terms here). Where accuracy speaks to how close you were to executing the mark you intended to, precision actually has nothing to do with putting the mark down on the page. It's about the steps you take beforehand to declare those intentions.

So for example, if we look at the ghosting method, when going through the planning phase of a straight line, we can place a start/end point down. This increases the precision of our drawing, by declaring what we intend to do. From there the mark may miss those points, or it may nail them, it may overshoot, or whatever else - but prior to any of that, we have declared our intent, explaining our thought process, and in so doing, ensuring that we ourselves are acting on that clearly defined intent, rather than just putting marks down and then figuring things out as we go.

In our constructions here, we build up precision primarily through the use of the subdivisions. These allow us to meaningfully study the proportions of our intended object in two dimensions with an orthographic study, then apply those same proportions to the object in three dimensions.

So yeah - it's a hell of a lot more involved and taxing, but that's because students are ready for looking at space and construction in this fashion. By being forced to think about every choice they make individually, we shift the student's instincts away from just doing things without thinking, to developing the instinctual need to spend even just a split second considering what it is your mark is meant to achieve, before executing it. It makes students less sloppy, and it helps make their drawings considerably more concise, especially when sketching in a looser manner outside of the course.

As to your other concerns, in Lesson 0's tools video where I present the different tools we leverage throughout the course, I talk about different kinds of ellipse guides you can get. I generally encourage students to go for the cheaper option (a master ellipse template), arguing that ultimately there isn't really enough benefit for the course itself to shell out the additional expense for a full set of ellipse guides. The big distinction being that what the full set covers is not too difficult to achieve freehand. Where we really need an ellipse guide, which is both in the wheel challenge, and in Lesson 7 specifically for the "Constructing to Scale" technique you'll come across in one of that lesson's videos. For the rest, if you don't have a full set, freehanding is still probably preferable. Just make sure that when you do freehand those ellipses, you're setting up structure to define the ellipse you want to make (in other words, establish a minor axis and a bounding plane, then drop an ellipse into it, instead of jumping straight to the ellipse.

Lastly, yeah - Lesson 7 is a doozy. It's going to take a lot of time. While it's definitely on the more extreme end, I've had students who spent upwards of 10 hours on a single vehicle construction. But Drawabox isn't a course where you either complete the whole thing, or you get nothing out of it. You've gotten plenty thus far, so you get to decide for yourself whether you stick with it, or whether you move on with what you've learned to a different resource, and that's different for each person. But at the end of the day, let's say Lesson 7 takes 40 hours to complete, and that perhaps that would occupy 3 months of your life. Those 3 months seem like a lot right now, but in the fullness of your life, they are a drop in the bucket. Just a question of whether there's a different way you'd like to spend that drop.

While I understand you're looking for someone to draw with, replying to a bunch of unrelated questions and homework submissions is absolutely not an appropriate solution. What it is, is spam.

As a result, I've removed those posts. You can go ahead and post a single question/discussion submission requesting people to draw with, but please do not zero in on specific unrelated posts again.

Starting with your cylinders around arbitrary minor axes, for the most part you've handled this well, but there are a couple things I want to call out to your attention, so you can be mindful of them going forward.

• Always remember that every mark we freehand should be applying the three stages of the ghosting method, to ensure that we invest all of our time into the planning and preparation phases, and execute with confidence to avoid wobbling or hesitation. For the most part I noticed hesitation in the execution of your ellipses (with ellipses it's also extra important to engage your whole arm from the shoulder), although upon closer inspection I did notice a touch of wavering in your straight edges as well. It's not abnormal for students to get a little lax at applying the ghosting method as strictly as they should, especially at this stage, so this challenge serves as a good reminder to be mindful and hyper-intentional of every choice we make, and every step we apply throughout the process of making our marks. Students get used to thinking that they're applying the ghosting method, but gradually they shift away from investing their time into the first two steps, and compensate by taking more time to execute... and before you know it, we think we're applying the ghosting method but aren't actually adhering to any of its principles. So, give yourself a quick refresher and take a bit more time with each mark to ensure you're going through the correct steps.

• I noticed later into the set, in cases like 78, 80, 84, 86, 92, 95, and so forth that you started falling into the trap of pushing your vanishing points to infinity. Be sure to review these reminders which explain why this is incorrect.

Aside from that, I'm pleased to see that you're checking the alignment of your minor axes quite fastidiously, and that you're catching both the more obvious and more easily noticed discrepancies, as well as those that are small enough to be easily overlooked.

Continuing onto your cylinders in boxes, by and large this appears to be coming along quite well. This exercise is really all about helping develop students' understanding of how to construct boxes which feature two opposite faces which are proportionally square, regardless of how the form is oriented in space. We do this not by memorizing every possible configuration, but rather by continuing to develop your subconscious understanding of space through repetition, and through analysis (by way of the line extensions).

Where the box challenge's line extensions helped to develop a stronger sense of how to achieve more consistent convergences in our lines, here we add three more lines for each ellipse: the minor axis, and the two contact point lines. In checking how far off these are from converging towards the box's own vanishing points, we can see how far off we were from having the ellipse represent a circle in 3D space, and in turn how far off we were from having the plane that encloses it from representing a square.

There is one area where your approach is running into an issue, and it comes down to identifying the correct minor axes of your ellipses. Here on a couple examples I've marked out the actual minor axes for your ellipses - as you'll note, your analysis had them as having been pretty much correct. When we have all of these line extensions all over the place, it's easy to slip up and just assume that they are correct, without paying closer attention to the ellipse itself, and in turn. Fortunately, this tends to be more of an issue when the box's proportions are so far off that the actual minor axis veers off in a completely different direction. Our brain thinks, well we can't have made a mistake that bad, and instead resolves that we were just a little off, or that the alignment is correct. In other words, it's easier to identify the true minor axis when it's not too far off, because that's what your brain is looking for.

In order to avoid these assumptions, we have to always be extra attentive to what we're doing - similarly to being attentive to applying the ghosting method in its entirety, as discussed earlier. On top of that, using different colours for the different directions of line extension (or at the very least ensuring that those expected to run down the length of the cylinder, including the minor axis line be drawn with a separate colour) can help us avoid situations where we correctly identify that the minor axis went off and coincided with a totally different set of lines, but don't notice that this is a problem because it aligned very closely with that other set of lines (so for example, if on 201 we'd identified the minor axis of the farther ellipse correctly, we might still not immediately notice that it was that far off, if we assumed it was supposed to be part of the lines going downwards - colour coding can help make the mistake more obvious).

Anyway, all in all, you're headed in the right direction. I'll go ahead and mark this challenge as complete, just be sure to continue working on the points I raised in your warmups.

Alrighty, we're off to the races. Jumping right in with your form intersections, overall, you're handling these very well. At this stage, students have had the opportunity to develop their understanding of how different forms relate to one another in 3D space through the constructional drawing exercises we've focused on from lessons 3-5, and while those focus primarily on organic forms, it still feeds back into a more general grasp of 3D space. So, we find it pretty standard to expect students to be pretty comfortable with intersections involving flat surfaces, but to still have some issues when curving surfaces are included in the mix.

I'd say with a fair bit of confidence that you are further along than this - for the most part you're demonstrating a good bit of comfort with intersections involving curving surfaces. I did notice a few little hiccups, as I've called out here, but for the most part the nature of the intersections were correct, it was just the degree of curvature that didn't always match with the curvature of the surfaces in question. So for example to the left the upper part of the intersection had a pretty dramatic turn, and at that point the surface of the sphere would be more shallow. Same thing for the intersection to the right, between the sphere and cylinder - the curve was simply too dramatic.

For the intersection towards the middle, you focused primarily on following the cylinder's surface, but on the left side there we would be able to see where that intersection would follow the sphere a little more dominantly. This demonstration, which explores how an intersection line changes as we go from a sharp and sudden transition between two surfaces into a more gradual, rounded transition, the way in which it impacts the intersection line - although based on your work I think you probably grasp this on some level already.

Oh, one last minor point - remember that when freehand ellipses in this course, we draw through them two full times before lifting our pen. You appear to be stopping after the first turn.

Continuing onto your object constructions, your work here is admittedly a little mixed. At first glance, it's pretty solidly done - your linework is clean and concise, and you're demonstrating an understanding of the subdivision and mirroring techniques demonstrated in the lesson, but where things get a little weaker in exactly how you leverage the tools the lesson arms you with.

The main shortcoming relates to what is explained in this section on the use of orthographic plans. The assignment doesn't require students to include their orthographic plans, but you definitely should be using them (in case you hadn't). Orthographic plans give us somewhere to make our decisions - that is, as explained in the section I linked, the decisions on where different forms are placed, how they relate to one another, how big they should be, and so forth - so that we can avoid having to make them alongside having to worry about actually applying them and constructing our three dimensional object.

In other words, having to observe our reference and decide how to break it down into simple forms, and figuring out where to actually place those simple forms - it's a lot to do all at once, and we only have so much in the way of cognitive resources to bring to bear at the same time. By making these decisions two dimensions at a time, we can process our reference image and decide how we're going to interpret it (after all, the goal here is not to replicate the reference perfectly, but rather to use it as a source of information to inform the object we do construct) without also having to balance a ton of other tasks.

Of course it's very possible that you are using orthographic plans, and just didn't include them (which again, is fine). The structured manner in which you approach your subdivisions in constructions like this AC adapter and this measuring tape certainly suggest a clear, concise decision making process that an orthographic plan would help you to achieve. This brings us to the next way in which your approach can be improved.

Make sure that when you're making those decisions, that you identify all the major landmarks necessary to build your object. I noticed a number of things that would have had to have been approached using some amount of guesswork or estimation, based on observation of the reference, which should have been first identified in specific terms. For example, here on the AC adapter where the specific footprint of each prong was not identified. The bottom two seem to have had their center points pinned down, which is at least something although not enough to ensure the prongs are equal in size, although the top one looks to have been positioned more arbitrarily than that.

Now, by all means, you do a fantastic job of estimating those elements, and for the purposes of this lesson in particular, that's fine. But I called these out because with the complexity of the structures we encounter in Lesson 7, this simply will not suffice (which is why orthographic plans are required there). More importantly than that though, keep in mind that we want to do everything throughout this course as mindfully and intentionally as possible, and avoid relying on our instincts or our ability to estimate by eye. Reason being, everything we do in this course is meant to hone those very skills - those very instincts - so that outside of the course, the shortcuts you take are better informed and more reliable. Using your instincts to train your instincts tends not to provide much benefit.

Similarly, I noticed that your approach to this construction suggested that you may not have gone through the material explained here about breaking curves down into chains of straight edges or flat surfaces, so that their specific nature can be better controlled, before rounding them out towards the end.

Lastly, aside from being upside down it appears that the box you started with for this construction was drawn without any noticeable convergence, resulting in the top plane being severely misaligned to the rest of the structure. I assume this was just a simple mistake, that you misjudged what you were doing, and it appears to be so, since you didn't run into this kind of issue elsewhere. One thing I do want to mention though is that we can use our rulers in novel ways to help us better judge or estimate our convergences. After all - a ruler provides us with a visible extension of whichever line we wish to draw. We can line up the ruler as intended, then look at how that ruler extends out in relation to the other lines of the same set, and adjust its alignment accordingly. As long as we're mindful of those convergences in the first place, this can help us construct initial bounding boxes that are more reliable than just focusing on each line one at a time, and only using the ruler as a tool to provide straight lines.

Anyway, I'll leave you to apply what I've explained here going forward, so you can consider this lesson complete.

I'd tried tagging you on discord but it doesn't look like you saw it, so I'm grabbing this submission earlier than planned just to let you know that your submission link points only to a single page of form intersections.

I wanted to give you the chance to cancel it and resubmit, but since I've claimed the submission that's no longer an option. Instead go ahead and reply to this message with a new link and ensure that it includes all of the assigned work. Hopefully you'll be able to get it in before my next usual round of critiques.

I understand the anxiety associated with moving on and feeling like things may not be entirely clear, but I assure you that is an entirely normal aspect of how the course is designed. The TA provided you with feedback on any issues that you needed to worry about right now.

The box challenge is daunting, but you are appropriately equipped to tackle it. Try not to give too much weight to your anxieties, and focus on the advice Rob already provided - it's easy to, out of a desire to be a conscientious, come up with a lot of other things to worry about, but that only serves as a distraction.