This question (more like a painful cluster of questions) is pretty much directed to our Lord and Saviour, Uncomfortable, but if anyone else wishes to add up to the discussion, that would be great too.

The thing that's been bugging me for a long time (and I can't be the only one) is the matter of usage of certain, let's say, 'helper sketching' techniques (semi) presented in various tutorials and courses.

Drawabox, as being said, uses those exclusively as a teaching tool. I am well aware of the fact that the whole point of the course if, among other things, raising one's spatial reasoning. There is a whole bunch of lessons that address this directly through the construction of various living and non-living objects.

We approach building of those using the so-called basic shapes and eventually we get a kind of mannequin that we, at last, 'dress' into details and texture. Again, I understand that these are primary the teaching tools for gaining the basic understanding of 3D space and all its wonders (funny thing you said - that these are 'not training wheels that you'll need to take off at some point', but makes me wonder, are they not?).

Basically, my enigma:

as a real professional artist, how often do you use (actually draw) basic shapes, not as a learning tools but as an art-building tools, when you are creating your art?

Call it a sketch, template, blueprint, bracket or whatever - do you, as a long-lived experienced artist actually sketch a circle, create contour lines and draw a head over it, as a starting point for your character? When drawing a portrait, do you use, let's say, Loomis method and actually put those framework lines on paper so you can use it as a starting point? When drawing a vehicle, do you still make all those scaffold lines (with a ruler, perhaps) to build its basics (Lesson 7, respectively)?

For instance, in the Lesson 0 video you are freely drawing a landscape without creating some template shapes for the cliff or cylinders and ellipses for trees, giving the impression that those templates are somewhere hidden below, in the underlying layer.

Is that how the ''resulting'' drawing skill looks like? Your spatial reasoning, gained from experience and exercises in construction (where you've actually been drawing those basic shapes, thus creating what you called a 'too many lines' result) is so advanced that you are able to freely and confidently draw lines and create something meaningful

• without the preliminary sketching? Do you do this construction mentally (with the help of ghosting) so that actual markmaking to help you out is unnecessary?

Do you ever use preparation in any form, like sketches, rough drawings - something you can draw over, using a tracing paper or layers, as a digital artist would. You know the drill - sketch first in colored pencils or my all time favorite 10B, then do lineart sort-of thing... The approach also varies by the type of the drawing, I know, but the question is the same - are the helping wheels present, at least in the beginning of one's single drawing?

Furthermore, do you still study your references extensively (not just by watching, but also with drawing some kind of prototypes) or you don't need those kind of things anymore as you leveled up to the point you don't need preparations and have understanding of 3D deeply rooted in your pencil so you can simply sit down and draw stuff (be it something from your surroundings or imagination)?

Make no mistake, I saw a lot of videos of artists drawing live, but there is so much variety in their approaches when they create their actual personal art and approaches usually differ greatly from the techniques presented in videos in which they do explicitly teach 'the ways of drawing'. This variety, this uncertainty, is what's really annoying me.

Some of them use the contours juuust a little, simply dipping into the gesture (making it barely visible, a loose sketch) and then, later, they draw over it (erasing the lines if needed). Some of them sketch like mad and use this as a template for the 'real' thing. Some of them don't do shit - no thumbnails, no sketching, measuring, obvious ghosting - they just... do the drawing! Or so it seems to the untrained eye.

Take, for example, Proko's famous figure drawing course. He presents the whole bunch of 'constructional' (?) techniques - gesture, landmarking, mannequization and so on. And then, in his timelapse drawing video (you know, the one with the naked buffed dude), he uses none of them. So, my guess is, those techniques are too nothing but a bunch of reasoning' lifters (alas, this time for the matter of figure), so when the time comes, once I study them individually (once it 'clicks') I'll draw just like that, confidently and free-handedly, carrying all of them in the back of my mind. And then, I'll know what am I doing, for sure.

So anyway, I know all of this is kind of vague (and shows a great deal of ignorance to something that is probably obvious to you) but my understanding of this whole drawing process is full of holes because of this variety in approaches and the lack of the 'right' way makes me all... uncomfortable.

Indeed, art itself is not about following the rules and there is no true 'right' way to do it, but some insight in one artist's process and couple of finite answers would do just fine. For now.