Hello. I recently completed Lesson 7 and as I move onto new drawing adventures, I'm wondering what to do about these old warmups. I've done them every day for a long time now, and while I would enjoy a break from them, I'm a little worried I'll slowly lose what I learned from Drawabox without this daily maintenance. I'm curious if any Drawabox alumni can chime in.
Thanks!
It might not be a bad idea to ask about this on the discord chat server - generally speaking there's no real reason for students who've already completed the course to be visiting the website frequently.
I feel like this ties into the bigger question: "Where do I go from here?"
Full disclosure, I did not finish Drawabox yet. Congratulations on your accomplishment.
First, I would say I have heard professional artists say that they still do some line exercises just to get the arm warmed up. So maybe that one doesn't go away. Focus on l, C, S lines and all of the variations. Second, think of the rotating box exercise. Why just draw a box? Draw a box with a pyramid on one end and maybe take out a chunk out of one corner of the box. Now rotate that a couple of different ways. Think of all the ways you can take the basic shapes and alter and combine them. Look for some videos online that start talking about using line weight to show light direction. Third, take the object or vehicle construction exercises and rotate those. Look around your house. Draw the lamp from the table using construction. Now rotate that a few different ways. I would try to do this using construction but no rulers and quickly without worrying too much about accuracy. The mental gymnastics required to mentally rotate something in your head is plenty of exercise. The texture exercise? Wrap that texture around a sphere of cylinder or more complicated shape. This may require looking at some videos outside of Drawabox however.
Just suggestions from someone who did the same exercises for a long and got a little bored. I'm sure other people have expanded on the basic exercises.
I appreciate your response. I did something similar in the last few months where I concocted more challenging variations of some of the warmups, like drawing a single box tumbling along the path in the organic perspective exercise rather than arbitary boxes of different dimensions, or practicing stacking boxes atop each other in the rough perspective exercise -- that kind of thing. I'm probably not going to stress it too much to maintain these warmups but I'll try to incorporate the various principles in some fashion as I move forward so I don't get too rusty.
i'm not an alumni. in fact, i'm a new kid here :D
so, if i was you, i'm going to either;
1 to 2 hour excercise before professional drawing, or
1 excercise drawing every 2 personal arts and 1 professional art
why?. 2 things
Drawing inspiration from my hobby, which is making music. I always make sure to set aside at least one hour before starting my "big" projects (i.e., my whole ordeal with "album2" and "album3") to practice creating melodies or doing sound design.
The so-called knowledge (the brain's muscle) doesn’t just disappear. It’s like the muscles of bodybuilders—with the difference that even if they rarely lift heavy barbells, they still keep training with lighter ones.
hope this helps, bro :D
Where the rest of my recommendations tend to be for specific products, this one is a little more general. It's about printer paper.
As discussed in Lesson 0, printer paper (A4 or 8.5"x11") is what we recommend. It's well suited to the kind of tools we're using, and the nature of the work we're doing (in terms of size). But a lot of students still feel driven to sketchbooks, either by a desire to feel more like an artist, or to be able to compile their work as they go through the course.
Neither is a good enough reason to use something that is going to more expensive, more complex in terms of finding the right kind for the tools we're using, more stress-inducing (in terms of not wanting to "ruin" a sketchbook - we make a lot of mistakes throughout the work in this course), and more likely to keep you from developing the habits we try to instill in our students (like rotating the page to find a comfortable angle of approach).
Whether you grab the ream of printer paper linked here, a different brand, or pick one up from a store near you - do yourself a favour and don't make things even more difficult for you. And if you want to compile your work, you can always keep it in a folder, and even have it bound into a book when you're done.
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