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Anyone here complete the course in pencil?

8:24 PM, Sunday July 16th 2023

I have read the articles on the reasoning for choosing ink, and none of it applies to me. I have no fear of making incorrect lines, they just motivate me to do better. I basically have no drawing history, so there's no urge to sketch light lines, no bad habits have been trained in. I just used a B pencil with a dull tip on the ghosted planes exercise and the lines are bold and dark and even. It is not hard to maintain the same pressure, especially with a slightly dull tip. The bit on pressure control makes sense, but pencils provide the same training if you are focused on making a bold line. I have already decided to do the whole course in pencil, just curious if others have done the same. Not concerned with the evaluations, I can tell when it sucks, he does a very good job of explaining what is right or wrong in the exercise.

I'm approaching this as a hobbyist and this course is built to take us far higher than I ever expected to be, even a lesser version of it will delight me with the results. I'm already very pleased with the progress in my line making, getting more level 3 strokes every time I practice and almost no wobbly lines now, that is crazy fast improvement already, so happy. I LOVE the homework so far, can hardly wait for the 250 box challenge, gonna be so fun.

Also going to wait until the end of lesson 2 or 3 for the 50% rule. I disagree with his reasoning for it completely, it only applies if fear is the reason you don't want to free draw. That's not me, I just don't enjoy doing things I don't know how to do. I want some fundamentals to play with. It is also bonkers to me to not use the technical skills learned in the course on the free drawing, that is the entire point for me, to gain technical skills to be able to accurately draw the stuff I see around me and in my head. I do not know how to do that yet, so unstructured drawing is not fun. When I learned to juggle devil sticks, every fundamental I learned expanded my capacity for play. Same here. But yeah, if fear is a major barrier, totally makes sense to force yourself past that with dedicated free drawing right from the beginning. I wish he wasn't quite so in love with rules, some small elements of the course should be more about guidance than a hardset rule. Makes sense for most of the course structure, but some of the stuff is specific to the mindset he had in his journey and makes no sense for other people. Mostly the pen-only and 50% rule, those really don't make sense for everyone if a few additional guidelines are given. The better way would be to make the quality of line part of the evaluation process. If someone drew shitty light lines with a pencil, don't pass their effort, or pass it but let them know that line sucked and why, depends on how rampant the low quality lines are. If they clearly didn't listen to the directions for how things should look, don't pass them. But if someone uses pencil or crayon and doesn't make any of the potential errors, then there is no sense in not passing them. Let people know you think that path is worse, but if they do a good enough job on the work, then that is all that matters. He did such a great job explaining the potential pitfalls, seems weird to me to not allow some wiggle room there, except the no-digital rule, that makes perfect sense to me. Thanks for any thoughts on all this. Be well, Ben

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1 users agree
2:18 AM, Monday July 17th 2023
edited at 2:30 AM, Jul 17th 2023

Pencils are very hard to use in this course if you want to gain full value that fineliners offer. You can press the pen very lightly and it still makes the darkest line ever whereas if you use a pencil, you must press it very hard to achieve the same darkness. There is also thickness of your strokes that you have to consider. Do your lines have the same thickness as lines that come out of a 0.5mm fineliner? Are you sure you are going to get a consistent thickness when drawing with a pencil? The more you use your pencil, the more dull it becomes, which results in thicker lines. That means you have to sharpen your pencil again to revert to its previous thickness. Later lessons will be extremely difficult if you focus on "making bold lines" because there's a lot of overlapping lines, bolder/thicker lines are going to make it harder to read your page.

edited at 2:30 AM, Jul 17th 2023
2:24 AM, Monday July 17th 2023
edited at 2:26 AM, Jul 17th 2023

Reading what you said about 50% rule, I think you only consider "fear", which is only one out of many reasons why this rule is necessary. I suggest you give the rule a reread and consider all reasons carefully.

edited at 2:26 AM, Jul 17th 2023
0 users agree
5:43 AM, Wednesday July 19th 2023

Not trying to change your opinion as you said you are decided to take this course with pencil, but, In my opinion, Fineliners for this course are very imporant to gain as much confidence and ability to draw the marks that you want to draw. First of all because it doesn't let you erase or create soft/light lines, and most importantly, because every mistake is going to show, this is going to make you think more carefully about the lines that you put and why are you putting them, essencially making you think before you draw.

Now of course, like you said, there's going to be people that understand the reasoning behind fineliners and say "well it doesn't matter, i'll just simply accept my mistakes and thats it", and thats ok, but not everyone is the same, there could be people that indeed are afraid of their lines, and so restricting the materials is the best option so that everyone is on the same page and gets the most out of this course, i can safely say that i improved a lot in my line confidence by using fineliners, and that got reflected also on my pencil drawings, i also think that going outside of your conformt zone is going to make you improve.

Also for the 50% rule fear is not the only factor, is also what you mentioned, not wanting to draw because you know it'll suck, you need to try and experiment with things, it doesn't matter if the result sucks or not.

Drawabox as a point in saying that the 50/50 rule is the hardest concept to follow in this course because it goes agaisnt our ego, we know what "good" is, so we don't to try things until we get good, but this is a bad mentality imo and you are going to get burn out if you keep waiting for the moment that you'll have the "skill" to produce the things that you want, also just like drawabox said, part of the lessons concepts will slowly develop into your "free drawing time" once you understand how to use them and why, so with time you will eventually start using some of the course concepts into your drawings, but you have to be patient, for example, i personally go back to see my old drawings and wonder how i could draw such abominations and think it was ok, but thats the thing, i didn't care if it was good or bad, i just had fun drawing, and the same thing is going to happen once i improve even further, i'll look back at my old drawings and say that they were crap, thats part of the process of just letting go and having fun drawing not worrying about whether it will be a good drawing or not.

11:08 AM, Thursday August 31st 2023

I'm absolutely loving the pencil so far, no regrets there. Wanted to know more about the general basics of drawing so I did a month of the Drawing Foundations course. That helped, but they focused way too much on rendering way too early, skipped most of those parts. It did help me understand perspective better and taught me enough to start enjoying the act of drawing. Took about 2 months, but now I actually want to draw. That's really what I was looking for, enough information to make it fun. Now it is so I don't have to force myself to do the free drawing, I'm drawn to it now. Thanks to both of you for your thoughtful replies. I still think the whole pen thing isn't important unless you have the specific mental issues he mentions surrounding drawing. But I understand that many people do, so he made the course to apply to as many people as possible. I'm super happy the resource exists so I can take what I want from it. I know I will not get as much out of it as someone who follows it religiously and I'm fine with that.

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