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5:30 PM, Monday April 26th 2021
edited at 5:38 PM, Apr 26th 2021

Hey dgscott922, great question!

Are you balancing your drawabox studies with the 50% rule in lesson 0? If so, what medium are you using for your own 50%, as it's totally up to you what you use! Now assuming that you're using whatever medium you want in the 50%, would you be willing to use a fineliner pen for the drawabox lessons?

Also, looking through your previous posts it seems, to me at least, that you might be putting too much pressure on yourself to get every line as straight as possible. The lines you drew were in all honesty "good enough", and even if they weren't, that's good too! It's perfectly fine to draw bad lines. Drawabox is supposed to show you mistakes as blatantly as possible, making it easy to identify mistakes and recommend the next steps forward. This is partially done through using fineliner, as it reveals all of your marks and decisions to us, remove that grey area that pencil and other mediums may bring. I also agree with some of the points FLOTSCHOS made, this will get better with mileage!

Hope this helps, let me know if you have any questions!

edited at 5:38 PM, Apr 26th 2021
6:16 PM, Monday April 26th 2021
edited at 6:20 PM, Apr 26th 2021

I'm doing the 50% rule with digital.

Here's an example of why the complete inability to erase is very stressful to me: if you're drawing a cube and you make one wrong line, the entire cube is going to be wrong, and any time you spend on the rest of the cube is wasted because you're not learning to understand it in perspective because the perspective is already wrong.

Another example is how I was doing the form intersection exercise, and I was trying to draw a circle, and it ended up being horribly deformed because sometimes that's how elipses turn out even if you're generally good at them. That giant deformed circle isn't going to make a 3d shape that's conducive to the exercise, let alone the sphere, and now, the entire page is obscured by this useless shape, which makes the rest of the exercise more difficult, not because you're learning more, but because you can't see properly.

Making these mistakes that inhibit my learning doesn't make me feel more confident. In fact, it's the exact opposite. It makes me feel like I'm a failure incapable of creating anything decent and I'm wasting my time even trying because all doing is just adding to a drawing that's already wrong and therefore isn't helping me learn perspective.

Doing the 250 box challenge, after 150 boxes, I felt like I wasn't learning objects in space any better. It became just an exercise in making straight lines because the moment you didn't, you're just reinforcing work on an incorrect perspective.

I don't feel like the value of always respecting every mark right away is worth sacrificing the increased learning or perspective, let alone my mental health or stressing out my partner. Especially when you consider that you can practice deliberate mark-making in other ways that won't ruin an exercise when you fail.

edited at 6:20 PM, Apr 26th 2021
7:40 PM, Monday April 26th 2021

I get where you are coming from and I feel like if you really believe being able to erase your marks is better for you then go for it. And I don't mean that condescending in any way at all (sorry if my comment before made you feel like that)

As far as I understand it is part of what this website tries to teach - being okay with making mistakes because they will be there, they will mess up an entire page and there is nothing you can do about it. Mistakes are inevitable and that's fine.

but for now I believe that thing that did improve most since I started this course was my ability to embrace the suck. I suck, some of my lines are wobbly, not accurate, I miss about 90% of my superimposed lines and don't even get me started on some of my cubes where I put a dot where the line would have converged but I messed it up and the whole cube now is ruined...

...but I learned to accept that and for that I'm kind of glad

So the way I see it the 250 box challenge is not just there to get better at perspective. It's to improve at perspective, line making and being okay with ruining pages and boxes by stupid mistakes

(I'm not as far as you in the course so I could be wrong and maybe after 50 more boxes I'll give up as well though ;) )

However, if your mental health (or your partner's) is suffering just stop doing it! It's clearly not worth that and I don't think any person here judges you for that at all! Also I'm absolutely sure that if you want feedback on your work you can ask people on the discord server even if you draw with a pencil

PS: if you haven't already I would recommend reading the article on this page about using ink: https://drawabox.com/article/ink

7:49 PM, Monday April 26th 2021
edited at 7:50 PM, Apr 26th 2021

Yeah, I've looked at that and I definitely see the value in fineliners. I'm just not sure seeing myself fail and making horrible lines is worth sacrificing learning perspective more efficiently. Like, if the perspective is already wrong, it's not going to teach you how to do it properly by finishing it, so isn't it just a waste of time?

edited at 7:50 PM, Apr 26th 2021
8:55 AM, Friday April 30th 2021

If you haven't already, read this short article on the topic written by drawabox: https://drawabox.com/article/ink/notpencil. If this doesn't help I'd suggest continuing in pencil or getting in contact with the drawabox team. The rest of this reply will be my own opinion.

With incorrectly placed lines or ellipses, if it's slightly off I'll estimate where the proper line/ellipse would have been and place the rest of the lines accordingly. If way off then I just draw the correct plcement of the line/ellipse in its place.

If you did this course perfectly without fail, you didn't need to take this course. We can't learn if we're right, as we've already learnt it. we learn by correction of mistake. If your making mistakes AND correcting them properly your doing it right. Now this can be done in pencil, though if you rub it out you've 1. wasted time rubbing it out (if the objective is only to learn, not to make it look good) as the time spent literally using the eraser isn't spent learning, 2. removed the ability to see where you've most commonly went wrong in previous studies. Again, this is only my opinion on the topic, so I'd suggest do what suits you best!

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The Science of Deciding What You Should Draw

Right from when students hit the 50% rule early on in Lesson 0, they ask the same question - "What am I supposed to draw?"

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