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.
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
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.
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.
This page has student-made readings/recordings
They can be helpful for those of you who cannot follow along with the text, or who need live examples for the exercises to follow along with.
Just keep in mind that as the lessons themselves are continually being updated and adjusted, the audio recordings may not be completely up to date.
While I have a massive library of non-instructional art books I've collected over the years, there's only a handful that are actually important to me. This is one of them - so much so that I jammed my copy into my overstuffed backpack when flying back from my parents' house just so I could have it at my apartment. My back's been sore for a week.
The reason I hold this book in such high esteem is because of how it puts the relatively new field of game art into perspective, showing how concept art really just started off as crude sketches intended to communicate ideas to storytellers, designers and 3D modelers. How all of this focus on beautiful illustrations is really secondary to the core of a concept artist's job. A real eye-opener.
Having your work reviewed by others is critical, as those who are just starting out aren't in a position to properly judge their own work, and won't be for quite some time. Don't be afraid to show your struggles - it's by analyzing your mistakes that we can help you grow. Perfect homework is not what we're looking for; we just need it to be complete.
There are currently two places you can get your work critiqued by the community - Reddit and our Discord Chat Server.
Both of these are completely free.
If you are interested in receiving extra help, I critique the work of those who support Drawabox on Patreon.
All of these private critiques are done through reddit, in specific threads where students post their work as a comment, including a link to their work (often hosted on Imgur, though most image hosts are okay).
My requirements are more strict than the free community critiques:
The minimum pledge for this lesson is $5.00/month. The orange button above will take you to the reddit thread for this lesson, you can post a link to your work there and I'll be notified. Once I catch the submission, I'll add it to this backlog spreadsheet.
Pledges are collected at the beginning of the following month, but you may start submitting your work immediately. If you're a new patron, I'll be reaching out to your shortly to collect your reddit username.
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