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Lesson 1: Lines, Ellipses and Boxes
Some Quick Reminders
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.
Video vs. Text
As you may have noticed, Drawabox is presented in both videos and text. This is because the content we teach here is dense, and it helps students to absorb the material when it is delivered in multiple formats.
While we are working to make the videos more concise and to touch on all the same major points in both text and video format, as of February 2021 we are only just beginning revising the video content. Most of the videos are older - some by a year, some by a few - and many of them are not as up-to-date as the text content. They are still useful, but should not be treated as a replacement for the text.
Even when the videos are fully updated however, there is immense value in absorbing the material in different formats. Our brains easily become complacent, so going through it in multiple formats is more effective, even than just rewatching the same video several times.
Expect to both watch the videos and read the text, in order to get the most out of this resource.

But Comfy! I have trouble with reading!
Between June and December 2021, we worked with Audiblogs, an awesome startup that allows you to turn websites and articles into audiobooks, using neural network driven text-to-speech. They provided audio versions of our first lesson as a free preview, then charged a small monthly fee to access the others, to help with their bandwidth costs.
Since then, we've amicably ended that partnership (you should still check them out) - but worry not! We've implemented the feature ourselves and are providing it completely free. We're going to keep an eye on how much it costs to provide, but we would like to keep it free into the future, if it continues to be feasible to do so.
So! Feel free to click the "Listen with Drawabox" button at the top of each article to have the content read to you. You can also hit the little play button on the right of each bookmarkable section, or use the bookmarks right on the player to jump to a specific section.
So- if you've read through all of Lesson 0, are ready to follow the instructions of the tasks laid before you, and to both watch the videos and read through the text, let's get started. You can click the link at the bottom right of the page to move onto the next section.

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.