What does Drawabox teach?
Having critiqued thousands of homework assignments since I started this endeavour, I've adjusted the material to focus primarily on the following skills and concepts:
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Confidence. The willingness to push forwards without hesitation once your preparations are complete. This is critical to achieving smooth, consistent linework, and the lack of confidence in one's execution is the primary cause of the wobbly lines and chicken-scratch we see from beginners.
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Control. The ability to decide ahead of time what kind of mark you wish to put down on the page, and to execute it as intended. We are not born with perfect accuracy, but it can be trained. Understanding how the brain works, and how it controls our muscles and movement helps a great deal.
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Patience. Living in this day and age, we are pretty used to getting the things we ask for instantaneously. Unfortunately, this leads to us being rather impatient, and when an exercise does not yield immediate results, or when we're not immediately able to do an exercise correctly, it can be quite frustrating. Here we face that frustration head-on.
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Spatial Reasoning. This is the primary focus of the course overall - being able to understand the things we draw as being three dimensional forms that exist in and relate to one another within a three dimensional world. It is all about the ability to look at something we know is just a series of lines on a flat page, and understand it in terms of being 3D.
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Construction. The ability to look at a complex object and break it down into simple components that can be drawn individually and combined to reconstruct our complex object on a page. Simple forms can be made to feel three dimensional and solid more easily than complex ones - building things up from simple components allows us to maintain that illusion of solidity, and as an exercise, helps us to develop our spatial awareness.
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Visual Communication. The skills required to take a concept, idea, or amount of information, and to convey it clearly and directly to an audience using visual means. In later lessons we talk about drawing real objects from reference photos, but we do not focus on simply replicating a photograph. We focus on taking the information represented in the photograph and conveying it visually.
In my view, these are the fundamentals of drawing. A lot of people have different lists of what constitute the fundamentals, but I believe that everything else builds on top of these basic blocks.
