View Full Submission View Parent Comment
11:46 AM, Thursday December 2nd 2021
edited at 8:32 PM, Dec 2nd 2021

Hello Uncomfortable! As always thank you for taking your time to answering questions I know you are very busy so I'll make sure to tip you after this.

As I promised I'm now back after taking Dynamic Sketching 1 at CGMA. I've got a several questions, I hope you don't mind.

I'll start off by saying that the CGMA class and the instructor was amazing! Can't lie, I learnt alot and got alot of amazing feedback, just like I did here.

Despite that there was some things that I couldnt grasp unlike all the other students. (I think it's because I overthink too much)

So here at Drawabox we use forms and attach organics on them as shown in Lesson 5.

The way we use organics here seems to be very different from how they teach at CGMA so it got me really confused.

Also the construction part at CGMA also got abit confused, I thought we'd use dissection until we started doing plants where alot of 2d things came into play.

All in all it was one of the most fun I've done. It's just that I'm too much of a birdbrain to understand how to combine what we learnt and put into practice.

edited at 8:32 PM, Dec 2nd 2021
6:34 PM, Thursday December 2nd 2021

I'm not entirely sure what your specific questions are, but the main concern you have obviously relates to the distinction between how Drawabox handles building up organic structures, and how Dynamic Sketching does.

Basically the thing to keep in mind is that Drawabox exists in its own bubble where it pushes specific rules and approaches, but only expects them to be used as part of the exercises we're doing here. These aren't techniques I expect you to use in every single drawing you produce from here on in, and it's certainly not the "right" or "only" way to draw. It is all part of an exercise. Through the act of drawing in this fashion, you're being forced to focus on the relationships between different forms in 3 dimensional space. Being forced to do that over and over, across many drawings, is what gradually rewires the way in which your brain perceives the world in which the things you draw exist. It pushes you from understanding the things you draw as lines and shapes on a flat page, to actually having the exist within a mental model that comprises of all three dimensions.

Drawabox focuses on this specifically because it's what I felt made the difference between myself and some of my peers when I took Dynamic Sketching many years ago. Where I had enough prior experience (having drawn for a decade before then) to make the leaps of logic to understand how even the 2D shapes we were drawing represented 3D forms, some of my classmates did not - and so what they gained from the course was diminished (although still valuable).

What Dynamic Sketching teaches you is how to separate the spatial reasoning skills Drawabox teaches and break them away from all of these hyper-strict rules - the rules we put into place in order to develop those spatial reasoning skills in the first place. With the freedom to jump back and forth from shapes, forms, and even individual lines, it can help us loosen up and ultimately focus more on creating drawings that, frankly, look good.

Circling back to the initial point - Drawabox's rules and techniques are intended only to apply as you work through Drawabox. That, frankly, goes for any course. They do not teach you the right and wrong way to draw things, but rather they give you a set of tools that you can use as you see fit, once you understand how to employ them. There's a whole world out there, and as you embark on your own, you can choose what it is you wish to draw - and the tools at your disposal will help you achieve those goals.

What sets a beginner and an experienced artist apart is not what they draw, but how close what they draw is to what their intent was in the first place.

8:37 PM, Thursday December 2nd 2021

Thanks for the response, and yeah I guess my mindset was too focused on doing everything the drawabox way.

But hey I did still do good, imo atleast haha.

10:04 PM, Thursday December 2nd 2021

Honestly I am really glad to hear that you went through the course, and that you had a great time with it. Everything adds up!

View more comments in this thread
The recommendation below is an advertisement. Most of the links here are part of Amazon's affiliate program (unless otherwise stated), which helps support this website. It's also more than that - it's a hand-picked recommendation of something we've used ourselves, or know to be of impeccable quality. If you're interested, here is a full list.
Wescott Grid Ruler

Wescott Grid Ruler

Every now and then I'll get someone asking me about which ruler I use in my videos. It's this Wescott grid ruler that I picked up ages ago. While having a transparent grid is useful for figuring out spacing and perpendicularity, it ultimately not something that you can't achieve with any old ruler (or a piece of paper you've folded into a hard edge). Might require a little more attention, a little more focus, but you don't need a fancy tool for this.

But hey, if you want one, who am I to stop you?

We use cookies in conjunction with Google Analytics to anonymously track how our website is used.

This data is not shared with any other parties or sold to anyone. They are also disabled until consent is provided by clicking the button below, and this consent can be revoked at any time by clicking the "Revoke Analytics Cookie Consent" link in our website footer.

Note that we also use cookies internally to help reduce abuse by bots - these cannot be disabled, but are not used in any way that violate users' privacy and are not shared with any others - they are simply used to confirm that you are indeed a human user.

You can read more about what we do with them, read our privacy policy.