Lesson 1: Lines, Ellipses and Boxes

If you haven't yet read through Lesson 0, you absolutely should before moving forward. It covers important information on how these lessons are meant to be used, and highlights common pitfalls many students encounter that can hinder their progress as they move forwards.

The major skill sets

In my experience, there are two major sets of skills involved in drawing, and they both play important roles throughout, but it's important to understand the role they play in drawing as a whole, and how we go about developing in each area.

• Mechanical Skills
• Analytical Skills

The mechanical skills

These are composed of everything we require to command our muscles to make specific movements, resulting in particular marks on a page or canvas.

When we start out, we tend to try and control everything our hand does with our conscious brain, because we want to be absolutely precise and accurate. This approach has a few problems, however:

• This desire to be hyper-accurate results in numerous course-corrections, each occurring whenever our brain notices that we've gone off track. This may result in a line that keeps roughly to the path we've intended, but it also makes for a pretty wobbly, stiff and erratic line.
• If we're focusing so much on a task as simple as drawing a line, then our brains are not free to deal with all the other problems involved. Focus is a limited resource, and we can only think about so much before we start spreading ourselves too thin.

These mechanical skills are pretty similar to the major motor skills we employ in our daily lives. Walking, talking, manipulating objects, even breathing. We don't have to consciously think about these things - at the very most, we might consciously decide to walk somewhere, or to grab an object, but we don't have to worry about all the specifics involved beyond that. This is because a different part of the brain, the cerebellum, handles these tasks. It's often referred to as 'muscle memory'.

Ultimately, the processes involved in mark-making can be offloaded onto the cerebellum, though it takes practice. That's what the exercises in this lesson will explore.

The analytical skills

These consist of the skills required to truly see and understand the world around you. Humans have evolved a natural instinct to simplify what we see, and really strip it down to the basics needed to survive. When running from predators, or hunting prey, we learned as a species to throw away all but the most critical of information. While this has helped us thrive, it's also made us pretty ineffective when it comes to drawing what we actually see, especially when it comes to doing so from memory.

The result is what is generally referred to as 'symbol drawing' - like the tendency to draw a house as a square with a triangle for a roof, and it's one of the many things we must unlearn. We do this by getting used to drawing exactly what we see, while we see it - continually looking back to our source material, only looking away long enough to make one or two very specific marks. Over time this will rewire our brains and make our memory more effective for this task, but for the time being, don't trust in your memory. It will simplify things without you noticing, and cannot be relied upon.

More than simply drawing what we see, 'analytical' skills speak to truly understanding what is in front of us. This is a topic we'll delve into a little later, but one of the core aspects of Drawabox is to learn how everything around us can be broken down into very simple, primitive components. Understanding which forms serve as the foundation for a given object, and how those forms are connected to each other in space gives us all the information we need to go on and reconstruct it on a page.