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10:45 PM, Monday May 12th 2025
Jumping right in with the arrows,
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You're doing a pretty good job of having the side edges line up without a ton of excessive bulges or pinching that might undermine the 3D nature of the structure.
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I'm seeing some experimentation with how foreshortening applies to the positive space of the arrows (that is, the structure of the arrow itself), although this can definitely be exaggerated further. You have some arrows that are drawn to be smaller in their width span, and others that are larger in their width span, but they tend to be that throughout their entire length, with minimal growth/shrinkage as we move along the length of the form, so that's something that can be pushed farther when practicing this exercise in the future.
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When it comes to the application of that foreshortening to the negative space of your arrows however (that is, the empty gaps between the zigzagging sections), this is an area that isn't getting a ton of attention, although that is pretty normal. As shown here, those gaps remain pretty consistent, so they're not really conveying much depth, causing the arrow to feel more like it's moving down across our field of vision, rather than coming towards us. It's very common for students to actually be hesitant to allow those overlaps to occur (which is what can result in the arrows being laid out across our field of view, as they tend to be here), and that is also something I often see paired with a greater and greater tendency to make the arrows themselves more complex (as we do see here in your work) instead of just sticking to that simple, languid zig-zag. Don't be afraid of the overlaps - as shown here drawn on another student's work, it is the overlapping that really sells the sense of depth, so be sure to incorporate them more when you practice this exercise in the future.
As a side point, which I'm addressing separately simply because it appears to be present to some degree throughout your work as a whole, I wanted to note that you should strive to be more intentional and decisive with the marks you make. Don't get in the habit of redrawing marks that haven't come out as you intended, as we see here - once a mark as been put down on the page, there's no redoing it. We have to accept the mistakes we make, and doing so allows us to learn from them. When we correct a mistake, it can lessen the sense that the mistake ever occurred (since we did something to "deal with it" to some degree), and therefore we get less out of it. If however we're forced to let them stand for themselves, and be present in the work when you get feedback on it, that's going to make much more of an impression to encourage you to take your time when thinking through how you're planning out the mark, which is a big part of why we use ink in this course.
Continuing onto your organic forms with contour lines,
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You've got some mixed results when it comes to adhering to the characteristics of simple sausages. I think it's clear that you're trying to adhere to them, but you do have a tendency in the first page to have them come out more "pointy" (which can often occur when we're not quite engaging our whole arm from the shoulder, but perhaps instead using our elbow - the more limited range of motion can make it hard not to have that end be elongated). You're not far off, and it's clear that there's intent here, so just keep an eye on whether your upper arm is moving as you draw (which is usually the sign that the shoulder is being engaged).
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Your ellipses are drawn very confidently, which helps to maintain a smooth, even shape to them. Your contour curves are also fairly confidently drawn.
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Where your ellipses and curves are running into trouble is that there's a tendency for them not to be aligned correctly to that minor axis line, with the curves being more obviously skewed. Make sure that you're applying the ghosting method when executing these marks, especially rotating the page to find a comfortable angle of approach during the planning phase. If you are rotating the page, then shifting the angle might help you to counteract that tendency to be off by a fairly consistent amount.
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Don't forget that the degree of your contour ellipses and contour lines needs to be shifting as we slide along the length of the forms. There's more on this and how it works in the ellipses section of Lesson 1, but the basic rule of thumb is that as you slide away from the viewer along the length of the sausage, the degree of your contour lines should gradually increase, getting wider. If your sausages are bending a lot, that'll also have an impact (since the degree corresponds to the orientation of the cross-sectional slice in space, which the bending will change), but when there isn't a lot of bending going on, this basic rule of thumb works out well.
Continuing onto the texture section, one thing to keep in mind is that the concepts we introduce relating to texture rely on skills our students generally don't have right now - because they're the skills this entire course is designed to develop. That is, spatial reasoning. Understanding how the textural forms sit on a given surface, and how they relate to the surfaces around them (which is necessary to design the shadow they would cast) is a matter of understanding 3D spatial relationships. The reason we introduce it here is to provide context and direction for what we'll explore later - similarly to the rotated boxes/organic perspective boxes in Lesson 1 introducing a problem we engage with more thoroughly in the box challenge. Ultimately my concern right now is just how closely you're adhering to the underlying steps and procedure we prescribe (especially those in these reminders).
I'm very pleased with the degree to which you're focusing on working with filled areas of solid black, especially in your texture analyses. While there are some places where you aren't quite always using the methodology of designing/outlining a cast shadow shape, then filling it in, and that you sometimes dive right into drawing marks directly, line by line, you're moving in the right direction. Just remember that though this methodology is tedious, it has a lot of value because of how it forces us to think about the relationships between the form casting the shadow. This helps us avoid simply drawing what we see without thinking about it, and also keeps the focus on spatial reasoning, instead of drawing what we see which can result in us using our filled areas of solid black for any number of things - including local surface colour, as we see with a number of your dissection textures, which resulted from you focusing more on copying information from your reference over, without thinking as much about what it was showing you.
Moving onto the form intersections, this exercise serves two main purposes:
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Similarly to the textures, it introduces the problem of the intersection lines themselves, which students are not expected to understand how to apply successfully, but rather just make an attempt at - this will continue to be developed from lessons 3-7, and this exercise will return in the homework in lessons 6 and 7 for additional analysis, and advice where it is deemed to be necessary). To this point, I'm admittedly not actually seeing you drawing any of the intersection lines at all. At most, I'm seeing a very rough addition of line weight to help clarify the overlaps between those forms, but there aren't actually any marks defining the intersections themselves. These reminders may help - we're not looking for intersection lines that are drawn correctly, but we do want to make sure that you are at the very least placing some kind of intersection line in the correct region (the overlap between the silhouettes of the intersecting forms), and that you're not simply tracing over the edges of that overlap).
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The other, far more important use of this exercise (at least in the context of this stage in the course) is that it is essentially a combination of everything we've introduced thus far. The principles of linework, the use of the ghosting method, the concepts surrounding ellipses along with their axes/degrees, perspective, foreshortening, convergence, the Y method, and so forth - all of it is present in this exercise. Where we've already confirmed your general grasp of these concepts in isolation in previous exercises, it is in presenting it all together that can really challenge a student's patience and discipline, and so it allows us to catch any issues that might interfere with their ability to continue forward as meaningfully as we intend.
In regards to the main focus of the exercise, what I mentioned previously about your tendency to go back over lines, rather than executing singular, intentional marks via the ghosting method is a notable issue here. There's also inconsistency in whether or not you're drawing through your ellipses two full times before lifting your pen, which is required for every ellipse we freehand throughout this course, similarly to how it is necessary for us to apply the ghosting method to every mark we freehand in general, taking the appropriate time to step through the planning and preparation phase, and finally execute a single mark before lifting our pen. When students tend to go back over their lines, it's because they're not giving the planning/preparation phases adequate attention.
I know that it gets tedious and time consuming, but ultimately that's largely the point. By being hyper-intentional with every choice we make here, we're training our instincts so that when we draw our own stuff outside of this course, we can focus on what it is we wish to draw, and rely on well-honed instincts to handle the how, leaving us free to slip into the treasured flow state where we lose ourselves in the act of drawing and do our best work.
Lastly, your organic intersections are somewhat mixed, with the bigger issue being that the choices you made in terms of going back over your work and outlining everything obfuscating the important parts of the exercise necessary to gauge your understanding. Note that in this course we leverage line weight in a very specific fashion as explained here in Lesson 1, with a focus of being very subtle and not going back over all of the linework. In general throughout this course, aside from using one to fill in shadow shapes, you're never going to want to go back over your linework with a different pen. This is something we regard as a "clean-up pass", and we avoid it for the reasons explained here. Always stick to the instructions as they're laid out, and avoid adding anything additional.
I am going to need some revisions, which you'll find assigned below.
Next Steps:
Please submit the following:
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2 pages of form intersections
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1 page of organic intersections
12:10 PM, Saturday May 17th 2025
Here are my revisions, I focused on having more planned out lines that were ghosted.
I had the form intersections be in between the silhouettes this time, but am still not entirely sure how you are supposed to decide the shape of the form intersections.
7:43 PM, Monday May 19th 2025
Jumping right in with the organic forms with contour curves, I did have a number of things I wanted to note, along with a few iterations of notes directly on the page.
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Make sure that when you're drawing each sausage, you are thinking about how they need to bend in space in order to wrap around the structures that are beneath them.
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Don't place sausages anywhere - meaning, you can't put them underneath structures you've already drawn, because you won't be able to modify the one that ends up on top to respond to the structure underneath, so it would be signing yourself up to make mistakes.
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Draw each sausage in its entirety - you're not going to be in a position to think about how the sausage exists in 3D space as easily right now if you don't draw the whole thing.
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Avoid arbitrary complexity in those silhouettes - keep sticking to the characteristics of simple sausages, as noted here.
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You were fairly light on the cast shadows, and when you did apply them, you had a tendency to have them "stick" to the silhouette of the sausages casting them (as discussed here in the lesson material. I've blocked in a number of missing cast shadows here - note how the shadows are projected from one form, onto another surface - and if that surface is turning away from that form, and the space between them increases, then the shadow being cast will similarly separate from the silhouette of the form casting it (as shown in this more extreme example).
As for your form intersections, your work here is coming along well. You're much more intentional with each mark you put down, and while as you noted you're still uncertain as to where to put the intersection lines and how they should be shaped, I promise you that is entirely normal. It may be a little frustrating that we don't get into correcting that stuff right now, but it's simply more efficient (for the purposes of operating the course and providing feedback as cheaply as we do) to address that more directly when we assign it again in Lesson 6, after students have had an opportunity to develop their spatial reasoning skills between lessons 3-5.
I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete, just be sure to keep the points I mentioned above in regards to your organic intersections in mind.
Next Steps:
Move onto Lesson 3.

Proko's Drawing Basics
Drawabox isn't the be-all, end-all of drawing fundamental education. Our approach prioritizes certain concepts over others, and while we believe it do so for good reasons, ultimately it doesn't appeal to everyone. If Drawabox simply doesn't work for you, give Proko's Drawing Basics course a try - at the very least, you'll probably find it to be a hell of a lot more fun.