Drawabox.com | Frequently Asked Questions

There's a lot of questions that come up on our community subreddit (/r/ArtFundamentals) pretty frequently, so with the encouragement of a few community members, I've decided to compile the responses I find myself typing out most often here. If the question you wish to ask isn't answered here, or if you have additional questions related to those here, you may still feel free to ask the community. Just make sure you've gone through this page diligently first.

  1. Conceptual Questions
    1. Why is this so hard?
    2. I'm not interested in realism. Why would studying the real world help me?
    3. I want to learn to draw, but I just can't find the motivation to start.
    4. How do I draw from my shoulder, and why would I even want to?
    5. Can I draw from my elbow instead of my shoulder?
    6. How should I hold my pen?
    7. Do I need to draw with my hand hovering over the page?
    8. Can I draw lines and ellipses from my wrist if they're really small?
    9. Is it okay if I do my lessons on the bus, laying on my bed, on the couch, or in other similarly less-than-stable positions?
    10. Do I need an angled drawing desk or is a flat table okay?
    11. Why do you want us to use ink/fineliners? Is pencil okay? Is ballpoint pen okay?
    12. My fineliners keep dying!
    13. Can I use another drawing resource/course/lesson alongside Drawabox?
  2. Common Misconceptions
    1. If the results of an exercise are not beautiful, I am doing something wrong.
    2. I want to become a digital artist, so doing the exercises in pen seems useless to me.
    3. Are you trying to tell me that observational drawing is wrong?
  3. Lesson Questions
    1. How do I know when to move onto the next lesson?
    2. Do I need to be able to do each exercise perfectly before moving onto the next one?
  4. Patreon Supporters and Official Critique
    1. I love what you're doing here, and would like to give something back. How can I do that?
    2. Why does anyone support Drawabox on Patreon?
    3. How do I get my homework critiqued? Are there any rules I need to follow?
    4. I've given you money - why do I need to start at lesson 1 if I'm confident I already know that stuff? Can't I just jump straight to the good stuff?
    5. How do the credits work?
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.
Framed Ink

Framed Ink

I'd been drawing as a hobby for a solid 10 years at least before I finally had the concept of composition explained to me by a friend.

Unlike the spatial reasoning we delve into here, where it's all about understanding the relationships between things in three dimensions, composition is all about understanding what you're drawing as it exists in two dimensions. It's about the silhouettes that are used to represent objects, without concern for what those objects are. It's all just shapes, how those shapes balance against one another, and how their arrangement encourages the viewer's eye to follow a specific path. When it comes to illustration, composition is extremely important, and coming to understand it fundamentally changed how I approached my own work.

Marcos Mateu-Mestre's Framed Ink is among the best books out there on explaining composition, and how to think through the way in which you lay out your work.

Illustration is, at its core, storytelling, and understanding composition will arm you with the tools you'll need to tell stories that occur across a span of time, within the confines of a single frame.

This website uses cookies. You can read more about what we do with them, read our privacy policy.