Regarding your question towards the end, when doing lessons for submission you have to do it with pen and paper. For anything else outside drawabox lessons, including warmups, it's up to you how you do it.
Good luck on your endeavour!
Thanks everyone! I would feel free to join the Discord but i would risk to remain distracted waiting for a response. At this time i would prefer submitting exercise results on this site whenever i can. It's not going to be easy for me to maintain a everyday approach to the course so depending if i have one or two hours free in the day i should continue moving on the course, and would pause either during or after reading/working on the lesson's progress.
I felt wise when i wrote the discussion because i used to take this site quite badly and want to think further on my past. I'm nearly at my 20's but i can't guarantee i'll avoid impatience that easily even to this day because i feel worried to end up doing worthless sketches of body structures / unbalanced gesture drawings after last week.
Yeah, not guaranteed i'll slay the Dragon that easily just like in the comic strips!
Best regards.
EDIT (5th April 2020 3:35 PM UTC+1 circa) : A half hour after writing this reply, i got through the first half of Lesson 0 by listening carefully, sometimes had to rewind few seconds for some sentences that took me time to know. I faithfully had to use my browser's full screen to avoid distractions, which i believe is what some people do to attempt to be generous and calm.
There were some concepts i had already known (discretely...) while some were added further to my psychological knowledge thanking Uncomfortable's precise explainations about people's attitudes (that's one of the things i want to congratulate him for), and while following the videos i kept in my mind about the arm positioning that would come after this part as it is part of the Control concept from said lesson.
As for the "50% rule", by the moment i started to approach this course, i have decided to take away the "fun" segment away (aka Stop drawing manga and cartoon shitz with complex poses) because i'm paranoid that i'd risk to unleash my frustration. I would rather do "comfort zone" drawing in a digital environment rather than traditional because it allows me to easily correct mistakes without pushing harder with an eraser, and even because working on layers is better than having a single layer of a sheet in front of you.
tl;dr I have tried my best to listen half of Lesson 0 carefully AND knew few psychological concepts before but discretely (Confidence, Patience, Construction and Visual Communication?) BUT i decide further that i should try to stay away from the fun stuff (aka Drawing useless manga-like hijinks).
I don't think you should try to stay away from fun stuffs. You would most likely quit when you are in the 250 boxes challenge if you keep that up. That's the time where most people stop doing DAB because it's tedious and boring but helpful at the same time.
About the discord, since this part is shorter: What I do to prevent distraction is to do a few versions of the exercise (example: 2 superimposed lines, or 1 ghosted plane), take a photo, and post that to the discord. I ask if I'm on the right track, and request a ping so that I can continue working without checking back on the server. Then I finish the page, post that, and continue to the next page or exercise.
That aside.....
Drawing fun stuff is incredibly important!!
I always use the example of nature documentaries. If you are only drawing to learn (only draw a box/loomis/brent eviston/etc) then it is like only ever watching a nature documentary for a test. Drawing for the sake of drawing (referred to as "drawing for fun", or the 50% rule) is like watching a nature documentary for the sake of the documentary.
In both cases you learn and take in information, but if you only ever watch documentaries for tests then you're probably going to get sick of watching documentaries. In the case of DAB/learning to draw, that means burning out-like a candle reaching the end of its wick.
That doesn't mean you have to draw things exactly the same as DAB, just that you're still drawing. To go back to the nature documentary example, drawing on paper is like watching documentaries about birds, where drawing digitally is like watching documentaries about fish. Both are still nature documentaries, though they don't go over the same things. It gets to be an issue when you start to think about sculpting or 3D modeling, which are more like documentaries about WWII or engineering. Still creative (documentary), but war and machines have very little to do with nature.
The problem with personal drawing is that i have a certain art block and at the moment i have other hobbies i take care of as for the time being i'm also focusing on writing material for tabletop roleplaying, for example. Considering i feel a little uncomfortable with drawing on traditional (but i sometimes draw when i feel the absolute need of doing it but few days ago i took about 3 hours to sketch a portrait of Atsuko Kagari while cleaning up a little so it didn't look like too messy) i'm trying to get an iPad.
Probably you'll say that i should continue drawing on Traditional EVEN if it ain't Drawabox-related because i've heard this suggestion several times, but i'm kind of better suited with the digital tools (i even was able to catch a Procreate course at Udemy when it had a limited time 100% coupon so i don't have to waste time finding free tutorials on how to comprehend it) due to them having the ability to undo, transform selections and also the use of pretty creative brushes.
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While I have a massive library of non-instructional art books I've collected over the years, there's only a handful that are actually important to me. This is one of them - so much so that I jammed my copy into my overstuffed backpack when flying back from my parents' house just so I could have it at my apartment. My back's been sore for a week.
The reason I hold this book in such high esteem is because of how it puts the relatively new field of game art into perspective, showing how concept art really just started off as crude sketches intended to communicate ideas to storytellers, designers and 3D modelers. How all of this focus on beautiful illustrations is really secondary to the core of a concept artist's job. A real eye-opener.
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