10:23 PM, Friday July 8th 2022
Apologies for the wall of text, but I just have to communicate everything that I'm about to.
I've been rereading your feedback and the lesson's informal tutorials practically once a day, on top of frequently rewatching older videos for my (roughly) 20 minutes of warm-up pages before I start each exercise. I've also been drawing more personal stuff lately, meaning I've been following the 50% rule more than ever since starting Drawabox. All this is to say that I have no excuse for how I still haven't improved, nor why I still can't figure any of this out.
Upon posting the Owl, a well-meaning person on the discord said something to the effect of "this is a good start, now all you have to do is learn how to make your additional masses make sense, and how to draw fur!", and I had to tell them "Those things are what I've been focusing on." Almost every time I've gotten advice on the discord (and occasionally in your own feedback) I'm told to try something I'm already doing (but hasn't been helping me improve), and that it'll help me improve, which is demoralizing beyond words. I've tried thumbnails, planning the deconstruction by tracing over the image digitally, drawing (smaller) doodles of different reference images of the animal to warm up... I've been constantly trying every suggestion and possible angle of attack, and none of it helps me.
The only piece of feedback I've managed to integrate is carving pentagonal eye sockets, but even those are extremely sloppy.
The main issue (I think?) is that I simply have no idea of how to add additonal forms. I understand how to wrap them around a simple joint on a leg, but I have no idea how you're supposed to decide where they should go and how to layer them on a frame in a way that makes sense. I can't find an answer to it anywhere, which usually means that it's something that's supposed to come intuitively to me, but can't.
My infuriation with my own incompetence in this lesson is threefold;
One, I'm certain that I'm overcomplicating a very simple lesson, and that being able to follow it properly would take way less time and effort, while yielding much better results.
Two, I can't stand the fact that I'm two years into a professional-level drawing course and have made less progress than most beginner artists do in just as much time, without any courses - and infinitely less progress than everyone else doing the same course, as evidenced by the discord.
Three, this is easily the most important lesson for me, as 'living creatures that look belivable in 3D space' is the one thing I always want to draw more than anything else, as I expect everyone else sees it as the most important thing to learn. Not being able to do this simply means that I don't have a creative outlet. (Still no progress on getting any professional help, had a recent phonecall with my Doctor who admitted that we've already explored every mental health service he has access to, and all of them have turned me away due to not having anyone who could help me/was willing to help me.)
I'm not going to give up on Drawabox (giving up on this course would be giving up on being able to draw, and giving up on being able to draw would be giving up on my life altogether), but I just want to apologize for spending this much of my energy and time on this course and (presently, we could turn it around) proving the ethos of the thing (that anyone can learn to draw using it) null and void. I know it reflects just as badly on the course itself, and by extension you and everyone else following it or who has completed it.
Redoing the entire lesson from scratch is the only logical next step, but I... genuinely have no idea how I'm supposed to fix the things that I haven't improved on, simply grinding away at doing another 20 images won't help: I need some kind of breakthrough in how I understand this lesson, and I have absolutely no idea what it could be. As upset as I've gotten in this message, the fact that this is the most important lesson for me means I'll gladly spend another two years on it, if that's what it'll take for me to learn how to do it. While I'm already bummed out that I've spent way longer on it than anyone else doing this course and with the least to show for it, if I have to, I'll have to.