Drawabox Resources. FAQ, Communities, Live Streams, Youtubers, etc.
https://www.reddit.com/r/ArtFundamentals/comments/78ps0w/drawabox_resources_faq_communities_live_streams/
2017-10-25 18:45
Uncomfortable
So, given that we have only enough room for two stickies (technically one sticky and one announcement), I've decided to replace the one about the FAQ with a general place for me to link resources - both official and unofficial that seem to be useful.
It's a little weird to link from one sticky to another, but if you have no idea what drawabox is, go there first.
If you read the intro sticky, you know exactly what this is!
We get a lot of people asking the same questions - if you don't want to risk being one of them, check the FAQ before posting a question. If you don't find it there, then that's fine, go ahead and ask.
The Official Drawabox Discord Server.
The subreddit is a great place to get thought out, detailed feedback on large bodies of work (like fully completed lessons). Members of the community are able to take a full picture of your current approach and parse it, in order to give the most appropriate advice. Sometimes, however, you really want to get feedback on something small and specific, and don't want to necessarily wait. Discord is great for this, and the community generally quite happy to help out. Or, maybe you just want to get to know other folks who are going through the same challenges and lessons as you. It can be very motivating to have a great group of people with whom you can discuss shared interests. Just keep in mind that as topics will range considerably, the general channels are not always restricted to the purest of topics. As most creatives, we end up talking about some weird stuff.
Curated Pinterest Boards
Pinterest can be a great place to get reference. Here are some boards curated by our users.
- https://www.pinterest.com/rybar/ by /u/Rybar
Live Streams
I've recently come to discover just how valuable it can be to watch another student toil through the lessons and exercises live. It's one thing to be told that failure is normal, everyone makes mistakes, and that being bad at something at first is expected. It's something else entirely to actually see someone blunder around in realtime. That said, I am definitely big on certain qualities being demonstrated - patience, attentiveness to the instructions, being aware but accepting and comfortable with one's failures, and so on. I think it's a good idea to list streams that embody these principles.
NotoriousWhiteRabbit seems to have taken a break from streaming, so her twitch channel is inactive at the moment. You can however check out the recordings of her previous streams on her YouTube channel. There's a lot there to go through. I'm leaving the original blurb up in hopes that she resumes streaming in the future. -- NotoriousWhiteRabbit on Twitch. /u/CuddleyCake streams most nights (Eastern Standard Time), often for a downright daunting amount of time (6+ hours). She's steadily working through the drawabox lessons, but also tackles other stuff like Michael Hampton's Figure Drawing: Design and Invention. She's extremely welcoming, and likes to encourage the use of the pomodoro timer technique (25 minutes of work, 5 minutes off). Though sometimes it can be distracting (as any stream would be), it can be nice to draw alongside her while following the periods of work/break. Mind you, while it's not NSFW, things can get a little weird in chat. ..and it's not always my fault.
If you or someone you know streams drawabox content, send me a message and I'll take a look. If I feel it reflects the kind of qualities I'm looking to encourage amongst my students, I'll list it here.
Video Channels
Watching a live stream can be a bit demanding, given that it's live, so some of you may prefer to watch prerecorded and even sped up content. While it can sometimes glaze over the mistakes and failures, it still does a good job of capturing the major struggles and difficulties one might face when tackling challenging exercises.
Mithrilda on YouTube. /u/mithrilda produces a variety of content, more recently including videos detailing her journey learning to draw. Each video on the topic covers a mixture of drawabox and other resources, as well as some observational studies and so on. The videos aren't too long (under 15 minutes each, so they're not a huge commitment of time to watch), but she does offer a fair bit of commentary on the feedback she's received.
Rebecca Rand on YouTube. /u/BeccaRand started going through Drawabox near the end of January 2018 and is documenting her progress. Her videos focus more on observations of her experience going through the lesson with a lot of useful reiteration of some of the important points in the instructions. The videos are bite-sized but full of helpful reminders to keep you on the right track. She's also got a lot of other older videos documenting her experiences with other sources, like Watts Atelier and Proko. Definitely worth a watch.
Liz V. Art on YouTube. /u/Lizzipoos has posted one video so far, covering two exercises from Lesson 2 (dissections and form intersections). It's about 15 minutes and has some great, insightful commentary. She's aiming to post a video every week. Her channel will also cover all kinds of other videos detailing her journey as she formalizes her drawing skills.
Rick Bonilla on YouTube. Not the best production values, but what he lacks there he makes up in the sheer thoroughness of how he documents his experience with the Drawabox exercises. Lesson by lesson, exercise by exercise and page by page he shows all his work and provides useful voice over commentary explaining where he ran into trouble and how he went about solving it. He's also not at all shy about showing his failures and mistakes, but rather uses them as an opportunity to learn.
If you know of any channels on YouTube (or any other video hosting website) that you think would fit in this list, send them over to me. Like with the live streams, I'll check to see if they generally promote good habits. Remember that I'm not looking for experts - in fact, I'm more interested in sharing content that shows people struggling and ultimately working through those difficulties.
Uncomfortable's Recommendations
Not directly tied to the lessons (although my pen of choice is listed there). Some people have told me that they've force-refreshed the drawabox website repeatedly to see all the recommended items, not having noticed the little link to the full list of recommendations. I will tell you though, these are all amazon affiliate links. Still, I always ensure that everything I recommend is either something I've used personally, or something that I've heard good things about from people I trust.
Figure Drawing Resources
Many of you know that I removed my figure drawing lessons a while back, on account of me not being satisfied with my ability to teach that material. While I have taken courses that vastly improved my ability to draw figures, professionally my focus lies with environments, vehicles and props rather than characters, so my grasp of the material just isn't solid enough. That said, here are some resources you may wish to use instead that do approach figure drawing in a more analytical manner. I haven't gone through them myself in any great depth, but from what I've seen, they're a good starting point.
Figure Drawing: Design and Invention by Michael Hampton.
I will continue to expand this list of resources, so let me know if you think of anything that should be listed here.
tilkau
2018-01-16 03:42
Over time I've noticed a number of people here mistakenly try to beat things to death with repetition.After watching This video about research into effective learning, I was convinced that people here could benefit from it, but unsure about whether to post it top-level.
So just posting it here for now, let me know what you think.
Subjects covered:
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Forgetting (and thus spacing things out in time) being an integral part of learning. You could hypothesize that the reason why is that the act of reconstructing things from memory inherently forces a level of abstraction.
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Repetition creates a feeling of fluency. But learning is closely related to struggling, so fluency is a measure more of stagnation than of success.
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Interleaving types of task / subjects (ABCABCABC or random selection) results in better retention than blocking (AAAAABBBBBCCCCC).
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Blocking gives better short term performance at the cost of long term performance. This short term performance boost results in a majority of people concluding that blocking helps them learn better. The correct conclusion seems to be it helps them cram, pass the test, and then forget most of it forever.
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The value of testing BEFORE you know the material. My guess is that this gets you more serious about the topic of study, so that you are primed to pay close attention to the study material and think more critically.
The above video is 30 minutes. This video hits a lot of the same points in 4 minutes, but doesn't include any of the data backing it up.
MisterNuggets
2018-02-02 18:15
Hey there, quick question, I just came across drawabox, and was wondering if a translation project has ever been considered, as I'd be glad to help if that was the case.
Uncomfortable
2018-02-02 18:29
I did play around with that as a possibility some time ago, resulting in lessons 1 and 2 being translated into Spanish. I ended up deciding that it wasn't worth pursuing any further, as the contribution to the growth of website traffic did not outweigh the work that went into merely formatting the translated content (other costs aside). It also highlighted other complications, such as keeping translated material updated (as lessons are modified every now and then).
All in all, while I appreciate the offer, it's definitely too much trouble.
yungcashmoneydollah
2018-02-04 01:39
I had a question, is it ok if I use grid paper? Like the paper for maths books since I have quite a lot of it lying around. I was wondering if it would interfere with imagining straight lines or something
Uncomfortable
2018-02-04 03:02
I really, really wouldn't recommend it. I mention that you shouldn't in the FAQ, here.
Uncomfortable
2018-01-16 03:57
The principles you've mentioned here are actually all present in the way I present the material. A lot of people tend to miss the areas where I explain these points however, so over time I've tried to emphasize and underline them (most recently through the newest round of videos, specifically the introduction to drawabox in lesson 1).
I actually quite like how you've listed and described the points, as it's quite succinct. I'm going to piggyback off of that here and explain how they are manifested in the approach we use here (and perhaps where people tend to ignore them to their detriment).
Spreading things out over time. It may seem like the lessons rely heavily on direct repetition, but a the few pages per exercise I assign as the recommended amount of homework are there to ensure that the student understands the purpose and goal of a given exercise. It's not an excessive amount (though contrary to my own recommendations, far too many students think that they need to grind things out until they've mastered it, which I regularly speak out against). Afterwards, those exercises become a part of a regular warmup routine, where two or three are chosen to do for 10-15 minutes at the beginning of a sitting. This keeps them on constant rotation, spreading them out over a long period of time.
This focus on technical repetition as part of a warmup allows the student to get accustomed to the techniques they are then expected to apply to more meaningful content. For example, the use of the ghosting method - I don't expect a student to really grasp the purpose of it by performing the ghosting exercise, but rather to develop a second nature of thinking and planning before each confident execution when actually drawing.
Furthermore, the warmup routine ensures that the tasks are interleaved rather than stacked into blocks, and keeps students from forgetting these key principles, by mixing a bit of purposeful cramming, followed by practical application.
I strongly agree with the idea of testing before properly learning the material, and I emphasize it not only with my views on the value of failure, but also in certain key exercises. The rotated boxes and organic perspective box exercises are the first major manifestation of that, and while students regularly get frustrated over them, they are there to force students to think differently, rather than explaining everything up-front. Afterwards we explore the challenges they faced, but tackling them without knowing how exactly to go about it is integral to the process. Even the dissection exercise in lesson 2 throws students into the deep end of handling texture before knowing anything about it.
It's good to know that there is some validation for the principles behind how I've chosen to present this material. I'm not a trained teacher of any fashion, I've just decided to lay things out this way out of a mixture of stubborn instinct, and observation over the last several years of critiquing homework. It is a pity that so many people who tackle these lessons try and go about it their own fashion (falling into a grinding mentality, focusing on achieving mastery on one piece at a time and ignoring other explicit instructions against such approaches), but I'm hoping that the newer video content will help reduce those misunderstandings.
tilkau
2018-01-16 07:45
Yep, I didn't intend that as a criticism of the material; I'd considered how they applied to some elements of DrawABox, but also fully aware that people often skim your instructions to their detriment.
Mainly, I was hoping it could help people to disabuse themselves of the 'blocking-is-most-effective' myth, so they could explicitly strategize to learn more effectively both inside and outside of the scope of DrawABox.