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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.

PureRef
This is another one of those things that aren't sold through Amazon, so I don't get a commission on it - but it's just too good to leave out. PureRef is a fantastic piece of software that is both Windows and Mac compatible. It's used for collecting reference and compiling them into a moodboard. You can move them around freely, have them automatically arranged, zoom in/out and even scale/flip/rotate images as you please. If needed, you can also add little text notes.
When starting on a project, I'll often open it up and start dragging reference images off the internet onto the board. When I'm done, I'll save out a '.pur' file, which embeds all the images. They can get pretty big, but are way more convenient than hauling around folders full of separate images.
Did I mention you can get it for free? The developer allows you to pay whatever amount you want for it. They recommend $5, but they'll allow you to take it for nothing. Really though, with software this versatile and polished, you really should throw them a few bucks if you pick it up. It's more than worth it.