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This exercise is all about exploring the bounds of all three dimensions of space, and reinforcing the idea that you're not creating things on a flat piece of paper - your page is a window into a vast 3D world with breadth, height and depth to it.
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Start off by drawing a curve on the page. You may want to practice these a bit on their own as well. Try to draw a curve that bends and turns a little. S-curves are generally pretty good. Put yourself in the mindset of drawing in 3D space - your curve isn't simply sitting on a flat page, it's travelling through the depth of it as well.
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Next, draw the same curve a little below it. This can get tricky, since it's quite difficult to replicate an identical curve. You may want to build this in segments, but make sure that these flow smoothly and flow directly into one another.
Also, try and consider perspective - the space farther towards the back end of the arrow is going to be more compressed than the space up front, so all of the distances get a bit smushed. The arrow's width is going to be smaller back there, and even the space between different lengths of the arrow are going to have less space between them.
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Now, we connect them and add an arrow head at one of the ends. Fairly straight forward.
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Finally, add a little bit of shading at the bends, and reinforce your overlaps with a bit of extra line weight. A good rule of thumb for applying line weight at overlapping points is that the line that crosses on top gets the thicker treatment, to establish its dominance. Don't go overboard with this though, just make it a little bit thicker. Be subtle.
This exercise is all about familiarizing yourself with all three dimensions of space, and getting used to plunging into the depth of the scene, rather than sticking to just the space defined by the page itself.
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Sometimes students are a little afraid at first about letting their edges overlap. This is going to make your arrows look very flat, and is part of getting stuck thinking as though you're working in the space defined by the page, rather than a three dimensional world where your arrows are free to twist and turn.
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While this arrow certainly does look three dimensional, it's still pretty limited to the space defined by the page. You need to let it push into perspective and explore the depth of the scene and apply foreshortening (making the farther end smaller and the closer end larger).
And when you're done, your page should look something like this. As you get used to the steps, don't be afraid to rearrange their order to suit you. Sometimes I'll start with a curving line, and then add the shorter lines across the width of the arrow, wherever the arrow would turn. This gave me something to aim for when constructing the opposite edge, making things a little easier at times.
Also, as you can see here, I don't worry too much about letting my arrows overlap each other altogether. I don't want to feel restricted in my exploration of space, so I'll draw the edges however I please. If one ends up on top of another, it's no big deal.
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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.
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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