*This post will be kind of long so take some patience to read because it tells (not in much detail) a summary on a hobby i don't find easily fun and how i'm considering to give drawabox.com a real try.

In some parts of this text my english grammar might be confusing, just like it as if still takes an eternity for me to perfect the English language.*

Hello everyone, I'm from Italy and I've been struggling art alone since the mid-2010s. I started this hobby back when i got a Wacom Intous Pen&Touch tablet for my pc in 2015 and i felt quite excited back then. I decided to immediately run through drawing characters as the first thing i ever done really.

Months later, i started hearing of words such as "anatomy" and "perspective" going around my head when i began hearing some feedback from the internet, so this is where my struggle begins. By then I had hard time finding thousands of ways to achieve what i wanted to always draw, you guessed it, figures of popular cartoon animations and ignoring the good stuff did not help get me anywhere.

I kept trying to get on the same levels as most adult-age artists i see around on Instagram, but i realized that it hurts to compare with my art... even tought i still do it. After many numerous delays and attempts to get back to drawing, i departed from drawing on computer (where infact i stopped using my Wacom tablet before i did that) and finally moving on traditional on November 2019, where i continued drawing various cutesy-looking characters from animated series / video games / manga (you heard that right...).

And i'll tell you what i've did in the recent days during my quarantine in Italy... i recently decided to go back drawing from references commonly, in my A5 sketchbook, once again using sites like Quickposes for some of the sketches i done + started using Pinterest to base off what i want to do. The results so far (for my quickposes practise) were not bad but they looked like one of those many no-effort school doodles, even with many of the techniques i had applied (for example, for the head i always used crossed lines but entirely forgot of the legendary Andrew Loomis method while for the rest it's mixed use of circles, lines and confusing on the spine line A LOT, etc.)

Still felt frustrated and it made me take away too much time from doing other hobbies such as role playing tabletop games and i keep having these damned toughts in my head. I felt like suffering and wanted to figure out how to get out from this mess. Even thought i stopped drawing on PC and never had the motivation to use it ever again because the tablet i have isn't display.

And lastly, i keep realizing that i am a person who unfortunately owns some physical difficulties, especially on the precision part while writing and drawing, but despite my repeating of "i suck at drawing", my friends and companions always replied back "nah, you're good", but NOT on the level i wanted to achieve, where i wanted to be as much precise as i could.

Then the storm came... a site called drawabox.com.

All during these years, i kept hearing of drawabox.com, trying to blindly watch videos of it without starting to the beginning with stress, and years later, to this period right now, i'm seeing it as a real gateway to start art LIKE AT SCHOOL, but really better than any one else could. Hours ago before i published this discussion, I imagined if i was at a real school, where ALL of the tutorials i've seen, all of the tutorials i've read and watched in my life (Proko, Andrew Loomis, deviantART, YouTube artists, etc.) came after completing the art fundamentals, and i took it further by making a comparison to writing on computer with Microsoft Office Word after i learned the alphabet and writing on hand traditionally (thought i didn't develop real handwriting as i can write uppercase letters, sometimes i do messed up lowercase letters by memory).

Anyways, after giving a watch to a review, the silly comic strips and several questions of the FAQ, i think it's probably the time for me to take on this site with a serious feeling, looking back at the stuff i left behind and remembering i have 3 blank A4 sketch blocks (one however was used for very few pages) i never used (except my A5 sketchbook where i did most of the comfort zone stuff) and a Staedtler pigment liner 0.5 i had kept for years and still are good as clean, but not sure how much ink my fineliner remains. It looked like a striking opportunity for me to try the course.

Before i did that, i analyzed few of the site's contents with patience and acknowledged the difficulty, the requirement of me to stay and work in a noise-free environment (i am on my parents room with a portable desk) but i have other stuff to do (such as focusing on doing online RPG sessions and take spare time) so there's a lot for me to think how i should approach this course.

Looking at the lessons, for when it has the exercises, i think i'll be planning to have a piece of a lesson for 1-2 hours a day (for example, if i read through a part of the exercise until i stop during or after a drawing session of a specific exercise, is it okay?), but considering i'm not the best in organizing timeslots, it doesn't seem easy for me to maintain faith on it.

Really, i decided to take on drawabox.com for real because i'm tired of being a wimp at drawing cartoon-styled characters of any kind starting always from barebones construction as i've been like this for a large amount of times since 2016 (i did not say 2015 because i wasn't too sensible at art topics back then). Warmups for me are inexistent until i noticed the necessity of doing warmups while reading one of the comic strips on this site AND also the arm... i had to test out my arm without getting on drawing while i was still writing this discussion... if i remember well, i don't think i used a lot of my wrist but the elbow, but i'm not sure either if i used my shoulder for my drawings. Maybe with drawabox.com it might mean a lot for me, as long i'll start to try to notice my arm's movement a lot.

...and i think i've said enough regarding my words for coming here. This course is kind of scary for me to look further.

Before I close, I have one more question: While i'll do this course trying to follow everything it says, the lessons have to be followed using the required tools on traditional UNLESS i want to use the methods used in the exercises as a warmup for both traditional/digital drawing outside drawabox.com? (I'm saying as response to the 2nd comic strip "A box a day keeps the demon away") Cause while i'm still off with my fortunate sketch blocks and a Staedtler pigment liner 0.5, i'm trying to get an iPad + Apple Pencil with the money we have in order for me to take on drawing on display.

Ok. Time for me to stop (even if not sure) and to go back doing my activities. i'll look into drawabox.com properly by the next days so i don't know if you'll expect me to start properly.