What is spatial awareness?

3:30 PM, Saturday May 11th 2024

drawabox has a focus on this spatial awareness, but im not sure exactly what it is. or how to achieve this, tips would be greatly appriciated.

https://youtu.be/LWgXSxxEjgs?t=3m25s

in terms of relationships of 3D form and how theyre related to each other, would it be something similar to positioning?

ex: this cube is sitting in front of the cone but is closer to the sphere.

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4:31 PM, Saturday May 11th 2024

Yeah, you've got the right of it, but it's not a conscious understanding, one that you're actively thinking about, but a subconscious one that influences the way in which you represent 3d forms on a flat page. There's a lot of internalized "math" they the brain does to understand the relationships between elements in three dimensions, and by default we're not used to applying it when drawing on a flat page. That's why when, as beginners, our drawings tend to come out flat.

10:12 PM, Saturday May 11th 2024

thanks for the reply. is there anything I can do to help myself with this? I am drawing all these 3D forms, but it feels im just going though the motions and not internalizing any of the information when I draw.

6:04 PM, Sunday May 12th 2024

This course as a whole is, as you noted, designed to develop students' spatial reasoning skills - not by just going through the motions, but by having them complete specific exercises, and being hyper-intentional in terms of the choices they make as they do them. It is easy to lose focus and fall into auto-pilot, but when you catch yourself doing so, it's important to stop and take a break, or in some other way get yourself back into focus so you're continuing to think about what you're doing. Ultimately that falls to the student, but it is important to keep in mind that the information is very dense, and so it is natural that you will find yourself going into autopilot on occasion. It's simply a matter of catching yourself and correcting that behaviour until your capacity for longer periods of focus expands.

To be clear though, what I mean by being hyper intentional is actually thinking about what you intend for each mark before you actually draw it, rather than just jumping in and relying on your instincts. To consider which edges you need the one you're drawing to converge with, and other such factors - again, instead of just relying on your instincts.

Additionally, keep in mind that the main tool this course uses to develop students' spatial reasoning skills are the constructional drawing exercises we perform from lessons 3-7, each of which forces the student to lay down forms in space, and think about how those forms relate to the other forms they're building upon them. They're 3D spatial puzzles, and each time we do one, it rewires our understanding of 3D space a little bit.

Prior to lesson 3, we're just getting to that stage and collecting/developing the tools we need to be able to engage with that kind of material - which includes strategies for executing controlled linework while doing so without hesitation, considering how different lines are meant to converge on the page (due to being parallel in 3D space) and improving one's ability to maintain the consistency of those convergences, and so on.

As a whole, it's unfortunately not something we can attack with any one simple exercise - at least not in a meaningful and generalized fashion, so if you look at any one exercise and try to tie it back to the core goal of the course, you may find that there are a few steps that sit in between, and make the connection less obvious.

2:01 PM, Monday May 13th 2024

thank you for the detailed reply.

i am a little bit confused on this part

"actually thinking about what you intend for each mark before you actually draw it, rather than just jumping in and relying on your instincts."

what are the kinds of things I might/should be thinking about before i put down marks? could you give an example of a scenario?

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