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4:09 PM, Sunday July 25th 2021
edited at 8:36 PM, Jul 25th 2021

I completely understand. I remember quite vividly how much I struggled on the arrows and organic forms exercise myself when I was going through lesson 2.

I think the problem that I had, and the problem that you may be having, is relying on intuition to capture the idea of things like "flowing through 3D space" or "organic shape". The reality is that we cannot rely on our intuitive understanding of these things, the whole reason we need to learn how to draw instead of just knowing how is because our intuition of these concepts is wrong. Drawabox, among other things, gradually changes our intuition about these things in a more correct direction. But to use intuition when doing these exercises will be using your intuition to fix your intuition, in other words, an exercise in futility.

Having completed lessons 3 and 4, I can draw an arrow just thinking about it flowing through space. But that's because my intuition was built up from thinking about what makes something flow through space. I've detailed the approach I used below:

What worked for me, and what may work for you, is to break down those big ideas into actual, measurable, and more importantly doable, things. A checklist of sorts, that every line in these exercises should fulfill. For example, the top line of an arrow should be:

  • Flowing through space with gentle S curves

  • Compressing on one side of the line (the "back" side)

Then, when ghosting the line, go through this checklist one by one. For example, first time I ghost, I noticed I was making sharp turns. Ok, next time, make those turns more gentle. Now I'm noticing that it's not compressing. Compress it more. But that compression is causing sharp turns again. And so on.

I will leave it up to you to figure out similar checklists for the other lines in both exercises (if this approach works for you).

Keep doing this until you feel like all the elements of the checklist is fulfilled. This will result in ghosting a lot, which is completely normal. Some of my arrows on this exercise, I must have ghosted like 20 times before I was satisfied. Then, make your mark, don't think about any of the above stuff anymore, just going through the motions you've already ghosted through.

This sometimes won't turn out correct, especially at the beginning. The first organic forms I drew were still pointed at the ends despite me focusing on making them round. In which case, make a mental note about correcting this. I would keep making my ends rounder and rounder until they got to what I wanted them to be. Eventually, you will reach a point where the forms and arrows you draw are correctly done.

Also, draw bigger. This will help with spatial understanding, and bigger means small mistakes have a smaller impact. I think my pages of organic forms had like 6 - 8 forms on there.

Hope this helps!

edited at 8:36 PM, Jul 25th 2021
8:45 AM, Wednesday July 28th 2021

Thanks for the advice. After a few days of work, here are the new version for the organic arrows and organic forms exercice.

https://imgur.com/gallery/oPzIQMz

May I ask for your opinion again so that I keep on working the mistakes which are still here?

Have a nice day!

3:54 PM, Wednesday July 28th 2021

Overall, this is looking a lot better. Where before, I saw you approaching the exercises in the wrong direction, here I believe that you are definitely on the right track. That isn't to say that there aren't any issues with the new version, but I will list the issues that I see later.

First though, I want to remind you not to repeat exercises until they are "good enough". This goes against the grinding rules as stated in lesson 0. Before I saw a generally incorrect approach to things, so I suggested a redo, partially because the exercises weren't achieving their goals and partially because I was concerned you would do all of the exercises in a similar fashion (which would require redoing the entire lesson). However, here I believe the issues will be fixed mostly with practice, and it's against grinding rules to redo exercises to improve things that are improved with practice. So I recommend you keep these exercises to submit for (I assume) official critique, and move on to the other exercises in this lesson.

All of that said, let me briefly talk about the issues I see in these exercises.

Arrows

Your second page of arrows is definitely stronger than your first. I will talk about the issues in the second page only.

  • Your line work is stiff in a few places in the arrows. Drawing curves is definitely hard, just try to not focus on where the curve is going while drawing it, and leave accuracy to the previous stages of the ghosting method.

  • I see a few places where the arrow is pinching or bulging. This will improve with practice, but again, invest more in the preparation stage of the ghosting method, make sure you can "see" a correct second line before trying to draw it.

  • Try to also compress the negative space in the arrows when the arrow is going back into the distance.

Organic Forms

  • I definitely get a sense that you are trying to capture the correct shape of simple sausage forms, and a few do have that characteristic. Of the ones that don't, the major issues that stand out to me are pointed ends (both in that a regular ball wouldn't fit in the ends, and some that actually have corners in the ends), a few that are pinching in the middle where they bend, and a few that have two ends that are not the same size.

  • Your contour curves are not overshooting, curving slightly around the other side of the form. I've linked the part of the common mistakes talking about this here.

  • You are not varying the degrees of your contour ellipses or contour curves. This is also listed as a common mistake, here.

  • Remember that the contour ellipse at the end is still a contour ellipse, this means that it should be close to the degree of the ellipse/curve next to it.

So, a major improvement. I want to restate that you should move on to the next exercises in the lesson, and submit these exercises for critique after you are done the whole lesson. If revisions are necessary, do them at that point. But do not redo these exercises based on my critique above, that gets too much into grinding.

9:11 AM, Tuesday August 3rd 2021

Thanks for the remarks. I noted them done for when I'll draw the ones I'll submit officially. I've tried to do the last 2 organic intersection and organics forms.

https://imgur.com/gallery/0NK3kEL

Could you please make some comment? I still have trouble to marks where forms intersects...

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