Getting Started

Many come to believe that drawing in this manner is a "gift" or a "talent" - but that is not the case. It's simply a set of skills that can be developed. Not easily, and not quickly - this is difficult, challenging stuff - but it is not something out of reach of the average person.

At its core, this is a course about developing students' spatial reasoning skills, and we do that through constructional drawing exercises from lessons 3-7, which force students' brains through the process of solving 3D spatial puzzles by breaking down complex objects into combinations of simple forms, then building them back up on the page. Prior to that however, we ensure that students are armed with the ability to execute intentional, confident marks, a basic understanding of the principles of perspective, and the ability to roughly estimate the convergences of the lines they draw, so they can make the most out of those constructional drawing exercises.

In addition to this, we operate our "official critique" program which allows students to access more reliable, timely feedback from our teaching assistants very cheaply (the cost of feedback for a lesson's homework ranges from around $5 to $10 USD - although this is subsidized by other students and sponsors who support Drawabox, and does not cover the full cost of the TAs who provide the feedback).

Drawabox sets out to teach students one thing - spatial reasoning - and everything else we end up learning along the way (for example, the rules of perspective, and how to execute accurate marks with confidence) are a biproduct of working towards that goal.

That said, what we do teach - spatial reasoning - is an extremely valuable skill, and is one that plays an outsized role in many of the other topics there are to learn. There are a lot of free and cheap resources out there across the internet, but you will find that as your spatial reasoning skills develop, what you're able to get out of such other resources will increase, and that the things they discuss will start to make more sense, giving you a greater capacity to apply what they teach and share.

It is subconscious similarly to how when we walk, we rely on the subconscious parts of our brains to manage all of the specific movements of our leg muscles, while our conscious brain only focuses on where we wish to go. Similarly, an artist with strong spatial reasoning skills is able to focus their conscious cognitive resources on what it is they wish to draw (in the sense of design, composition, narrative - the creative things that actually make what we draw interesting) and rely on their subconscious spatial reasoning skills to influence how they draw their marks to capture how they sit in 3D space accurately (or at least close enough).

Many students operate under the assumption that drawing is either a very conscious activity (like solving a math problem), or that it is a magical activity (like watching someone juggle, if you've never juggled before), but neither is true. Rather, drawing is like a sport - we can do focused, targeted exercises to rewire our subconscious auto-pilot and train it to take care of certain tasks reliably, so that when we're out on the field, we can focus on the larger strategies being put into motion instead.

It's just not a good pairing of tools, and while we can't force students not to do the work digitally (all the material is freely available, so we can't stop you from using it in that way, nor do we care to), it is worth taking into consideration why we don't allow students to submit digital work for official critique - it increases our workload because those students more frequently run into problems from rushing, losing focus, or running into other issues that simply don't occur with the same frequency when working with the recommended tools.

Ultimately we recommend fineliners (as discussed here) because they align very well with the specific principles and concepts we seek to teach. When the things a given course focuses on and the medium it uses for its exercises align very well, it has an extremely beneficial effect on what students get for the time they put in, and the permanency of ink does a great job of aligning with how our course relies on hyper-intentional decision making behind every stroke, while also turning every mistake into a valuable learning opportunity.

That's not to say that ink is great for learning everything. For example, rather than using ink if a student was to learn figure drawing, I'd probably lean more into a graphite pencil whose lead has been further exposed with a utility knife to allow for a wider variety of mark-making surfaces (we talk about this a bit in this section from Lesson 1 where we discuss the different grips we use for different tools).

Free community feedback is,

• As the name suggests, free of cost

• Can be received both by submitting directly on the website (complete work only) and on our discord chat server (partial work is permitted, as our lesson-specific channels are better suited to it)

• Does not have any hard requirements in terms of what tools to use (so you are allowed to submit digital work) but it relies on students volunteering their time, so some individuals may prefer to spend their time focusing on those who do adhere to the course recommendations (especially since those recommendations tend to result in providing that feedback being easier)

• Does not guarantee that you will receive a response, or that it will be timely - again, it's based on volunteers. There is however an unofficial critique-exchange program that students operate on our discord chat server (specifically in the #critique-exchange channel) where by adhering to the specific structure and rules of that program (all of which is explained in that channel's pinned message) you can vastly increase your chances of getting feedback, especially for the earlier lessons

Paid official critique is,

• Paid, although we offer it as cheaply as possible, charging students close to half of what our TAs are paid to provide that feedback, with the rest being covered by those community members who allow credits to expire

• Received by paying for credits (currently via Patreon), connecting your Drawabox account to Patreon via the account settings page and redeeming them when submitting your work for critique. Credits expire 2 months after being received, at which point that money spent goes towards covering feedback that is given to students, and running Drawabox as a whole

• Is only received by submitting directly on the website, with the "Submit for Official Critique" option

• Only complete work for an entire lesson or challenge is accepted

• Is handled by our trained teaching assistants, under my (Uncomfortable's) supervision, although I handle some critiques myself

• Subject to stricter requirements, both in terms of what tools are used, and that students act in good faith, ensuring that they are giving themselves as much time as they require to do it to the best of their current ability (both in going through the instructions and in doing the work without rushing, aiming for arbitrary deadlines, etc)

• Feedback generally comes back within 5 days or so (Lesson 1 is closer to 2 days, it varies from lesson to lesson)

You will find more specific information about the requirements for official critique here in Lesson 0.

• You need to maintain reasonable expectations, and avoid comparing what you get from a given course with others who are taking it alongside you. It is natural that you will not gain as much in the short term in terms of what can readily be applied to your drawings, and your exercise work within that course may not meet the same standards as your peers due to prerequisite skills not being developed as far. Taken out of context, this can be very demotivating and frustrating, but going in with an awareness of it can help neutralize those negative emotions. Instead, focus on what it is you do get out of it, and how it fleshes out your overall understanding of how you're working towards your goals. Additionally, keep in mind that what you learn in any given course isn't merely about the short term benefits - as your other skills grow, you will find yourself being able to bring the concepts you've learned to bear, as long as you keep up with the exercises you've learned.

• Similarly to the previous point, remember that you only have so much time to commit towards your efforts to learn to draw, and the more individual courses you follow at the same time, the less time each will receive (resulting in each course taking longer to complete). That is not a bad thing, but you should keep an eye on whether or not you're hitting a point where one of those courses ends up progressing at such a slow crawl that it's losing its purpose. Make sure that you can give each course enough time for it to individually be impactful, even stretched over a longer period of time, and do not forget to adhere to the 50% rule, which requires that for all of the time you spend studying, you should be spending at least as much time on drawing for the sake of drawing (drawing as play).

• Every course uses its own strategies and methodologies for teaching its concepts, and different courses may seem to contradict one another. For example, Drawabox is very stringent about every mark needing to be the result of specific intent and planning, but another course may prefer you to build up your marks with multiple strokes, and to be more exploratory in "finding" the mark you wish to make. This does not mean that one is correct, and the other is wrong - rather, each one is presented in the larger context of the courses themselves, and it all comes down to how they play towards each course's individual goals. If a given course tells you to do something one way, make sure that you are applying that consistently for all of its work. Don't bring in approaches from other courses if they directly contradict the given instructions.

When it comes to the benefits of taking multiple courses, I think this is best explained with a metaphor. If your pursuit of these goals were to be framed as solving a jigsaw puzzle, working only from one course at a time is like starting from a single arbitrary piece, and only ever accepting pieces that connect to it. This kind of approach can generally be quite slow, especially early on, although it starts to speed up as you expand out from that singular point. It will also be a very long time before you really start to see the picture of the whole jigsaw puzzle emerge.

Conversely, if you were to start solving the puzzle from many different locations - in other words, by studying multiple subjects through different courses in parallel - this allows you to not simply expand out from one point but rather to bridge across from multiple starting points, closing off whole regions of the puzzle more quickly, even if there are still large gaps in between them. This kind of approach will help you to see the whole picture much sooner, as your brain will be able to fill in some of the gaps and infer information based on the larger framework being created. You'll develop a better grasp of how the different areas interconnect and feed off one another, and at least when it comes to learning, these are all greatly beneficial for both helping students to pick up skills more quickly, and to better understand what it is they're working towards.

So, if you have the time and resources to allow for it, I would strongly encourage you to explore different courses, rather than limiting yourself to completing them one by one in sequence.

Students ask this question for a number of reasons, but the main ones are that:

• Either the student at some level still thinks that they need to be at some arbitrary level of skill, or have some arbitrary quality of a result, in order for them to draw without feeling shame, embarrassment, or just the sense that they've wasted their time, or

• They associate "play" with an implication that it must be a fun, positive experience, and that if it is not, they must be doing it wrong

What we ask students to do with the 50% rule is not fun. It's not pleasant. At least, not initially, because most students have come to Drawabox specifically to escape from what they perceive as their inadequacies. But the first thing, the most important thing, for a student to do is to come to terms with the fact that what they perceive as an inadequacy is simply a fact of life, of being, of who they are. That they are not shameful because they don't have a skill they've never practiced - something that applies also to those who've spent years trying to learn to draw (I did this myself for a decade), because drawing is not a singular skill, but a vast collection of different skills, many of which can be important to our goals, but in a way that is never properly conveyed to us and thus never meaningfully developed.

A lot of students develop the impression that the 50% rule is a nice-to-have, a moment of rare compassion from the box demon for those weaker ones who can't simply sit and grind away at their exercises day in, day out. But that is about as far from the truth as you can get, and moreover, it's a lie they tell themselves because the idea of drawing as play genuinely frightens them. They want to stay in the warm, comforting embrace of exercises that promise them that their time won't be wasted, that even if it turns out badly, it's working towards something concrete and tangible.

But it's not. It is a fundamental component in the tug-of-war that is learning. The exercises we perform throughout this course involve being hyper-intentional at every turn, ensuring that nothing you do is the result of a reflexive action or a thoughtless choice. Everything, insofar as we can make it so, should be the result of a conscious choice. It's slow, it's time consuming, but it's necessary to ensure that the auto-pilot we are trying to train (the thing that decides how we draw when we aren't making those hyper-intentional choices) is trained reliably, so that it can perform correctly when we need it to.

The trouble with that is that the very process involved causes us to erode the trust we have in the auto-pilot. After all, if you spend weeks and months telling yourself that the auto-pilot is not to be trusted, so how exactly would you expect yourself to suddenly start trusting it when it comes time to finally draw your own stuff? It's not a switch you can flip - you have to maintain that balance the whole way through.

And so, while there are many reasons we push the 50% rule, one of the biggest is that it pushes back against this erosion of trust, and ensures that as your skills do develop, that they can have a direct impact on your own drawings. That when you come out the other side, you won't find yourself needlessly bogging your brain down trying to plan out every little mark, and will actually be able to focus on the creative decisions of design, composition, and narrative - the things that make our drawings interesting - and will be able to rely on your autopilot to take care of the rest.

While a simpler exchange of a clear, consistent price per critique without the credit system would be much less complicated, it would require us to charge more than twice as much as we do currently, making the service inaccessible for many of our students, and undermining one of our core operating principles of prioritizing the financial accessibility of what we offer. Instead, while our current system is riskier for us (since we regularly have to monitor just how many credits are spent versus how many are permitted to expire, and normally positive things like a sudden influx of new users can actually greatly increase our operating costs by causing more credits to be spent in the short term), this approach allows us to strike that precarious balance to ensure our students are getting as much as they can, while not being pushed to spend more than they're able.

In this manner, Drawabox is very much a communal effort, where the community as a whole helps to ensure that our TAs are paid well for their time and experience, and that those students who are more restricted in their finances are still able to access reliable feedback.

As a business, we operate on a few core tenets - primarily that we prioritize the financial accessibility (keep things free where we can, and cheap where free is not an option), and that we pay our teaching assistants fairly for their time and expertise, two things that exist very much at odds with one another. We have miraculously been able to achieve these goals due to the generosity of our community (though the base price of feedback does not cover the cost of having a TA provide it, enough students allow their credits to expire to balance those scales), and the very specific requirements we attach to receiving official critique (around which the entire course is intentionally designed).

Having students take responsibility for whatever they can, primarily in terms of being responsible for their own motivation, and in being willing to invest the time necessary to ensure that the work they submit is the best of which they are currently capable (so it can accurately represent their current understanding, allowing our TAs to provide feedback and next steps that best serve the student in question - something that cannot happen if a student rushes their work) allows us to use our TAs' time as efficiently as possible, keeping those costs down.

If we were to take on more responsibilities - for example, providing students with more opportunities for feedback within a given lesson, instead of just at the end, to reduce their fears of carrying mistakes forward (something that would double and triple our TAs' workload, since providing feedback on partial work takes about as much time as it does for completed work) - then our costs would balloon resulting in official critique no longer being something we could provide as cheaply as we do.

While we would love to see a future in which we have enough resources to bring to bear to serve our students better, right now this is simply the compromise we are forced to make to ensure that those who are more financially limited are not left behind.

Our approach is a rigorous one, and one with a specific set of goals. There are many things - for example, observational skills - that we simply don't cover super deeply, that other courses will put more focus on - and conversely, the spatial reasoning we do focus on are things that other courses won't put as much focus on, allowing it to develop more as a side effect of what they do teach. That doesn't mean one course is better than another, it simply means that there are many ways to get started, and that these are all different paths pointing in the same general direction.

It is also worth keeping in mind that not all students use Drawabox in the same way. It is entirely normal for our students to feel they've gotten what they wanted out of it and move onto other resources. Some of them come back after a while once they feel that they're at a point where they'd like to continue along our path, and others are perfectly happy to continue exploring the world of resources out there. Drawabox is not a course where the only way to benefit from it is to complete the course from start to finish, or that this needs to be done in one go.

So relax. Take whatever good we were able to share with you, and start looking for the next resource to continue on your journey - or just spend some time drawing as play. That said, if you do find yourself trying a lot of resources and dropping out of them quickly, this comic on the subject may grant you some perspective. It talks about how instead of trying to gauge how good of a fit a given resource is with every step, to focus instead on whether or not you trust in the resource or the instructor behind it. If you can continue to trust their guidance, continue to make the best effort to follow their directions as closely as you can, with as little alteration as possible. If however you cross that threshold where you're no longer able to trust them, that's okay - put the resource down, take what good you got from it, and move onto something else.

• Firstly, review all of the material up to the point where you took your break, starting from Lesson 0. This is to ensure you're up to date on everything and haven't forgotten anything critical, either in terms of the course material or the specific instructions associated with each exercise.

• Secondly, for a stretch of time - I'd do 1 week for every year you've been away, so if you've been away for half a year, then make it half a week - spend the time you would generally allocate for your studies exclusively on exercises from your warmup pool. If for whatever reason 1 week per year away isn't sufficient to revisit each exercise to some degree, then give yourself however much time that would require, with the goal being that you're at least exposing yourself to each exercise to some degree.

• Finally, resume where you left off.