Old thread got locked, those eligible for private critiques can submit their work here (and all others are welcome to submit their work to the main subreddit for a community critique).
You start out alright. Your construction on the first two pages are careful, conscientious and measured. You're patient and willing to take the time to subdivide wherever needed, and you generally avoid relying on guesswork where it can be helped. This shows that you have the capacity for patience, and that you are absolutely able to draw these things properly.
By the end of the set (with the exception of this boat), you're guessing the vast majority of things, focusing on drawing oversimplified details, and in a lot of cases throwing construction to the wind.
What I see here is that whenever you approach a drawing knowing that you're going to add detail, your brain decides to switch to wanting to draw something impressive. Something with a lot of flare to it, something to make you feel like an artist. Of course, that has nothing to do with this lesson. This lesson's about construction, it's about understanding the forms that make up complex objects and how they relate to each other in 3D space.
We're not here to draw pretty, impressive things. Each drawing is an exercise, and we're meant to learn from it. We may as well be burning them at the end regardless of how nice they look, because the point isn't to create something beautiful. It's to learn.
Now, for most students when I see this issue, I'll have them draw however many pages with no detail whatsoever, so they focus on construction and really grind it down. In fact, I've probably had you do that very same thing more than a few times. And when you focus on construction, you do what's necessary, for the most part. You probably could stand to go further. For example, on this page you built your wheels as basic cylinders - there's a lot more to be done form-wise there without delving into what we regard as superficial detail. You could have placed inset ellipses on the end of each cylinder to create the inner portions of the tires, and hubcaps, etc. That's all form, after all. But anyway, you're definitely going in the right direction when you know you're not going to delve into trying to make a drawing pretty.
When you DO decide to take a drawing "all the way", you lose track of all those good habits.
So, we're going to do it a little differently. I want you to draw five vehicles. I want you to first draw each of them focusing purely on form and construction with no superficial detail, taking that as far as you possibly can. Subdivide wherever needed, draw through all your forms, and so on. Do this for all five vehicles, then take pictures of your work.
Then come back and add detail. Observe carefully, make sure every mark you put down here is with the intention of capturing some feature you see in your reference, and take it as far as you want.
One other thing - do all your work in ballpoint pen this time. Set the fineliners and brush pens aside for now. Also, use a ruler as much as possible, and if you can get your hands on one, use an ellipse template as well (though those can be expensive, so I totally understand if you can't). Use ballpoint for everything, including adding line weight. Try to avoid hatching, but if you must, make sure it's neat and tidy, not scribbly and chaotic like this.
Here are my five drawings before and after details: https://imgur.com/a/eGZy99Q ! I used a black ballpoint ben, rulers and some ellipse templates i got from ebay preatty cheap! I did some hatching on one of the drawings because i simply forgot that i was supposed not to. To be honest this homework took me some time to go through, and i'm not at all satisfied with it, but with a 7 week old newborn and an undergraduate project on the way, i haven't had as much energy to focus on this as much as possible. I hope it's alright though
It's great that you were able to get an ellipse guide pretty cheap! I've heard a lot of students who've only been able to find them being sold for exorbitant prices. I even had one guy make his own out of acrylic, as he had access to a laser cutter.
So one issue I noticed (much moreso in your later few pages) was that lines that ought to be parallel in 3D space tended to go off towards wildly different vanishing points, with entirely different horizon lines. Take a look at this.
There's a few differently coloured lines. The magenta one is the horizon line based on the body of the bus (we'll treat that as the correct one since it's the biggest form in the construction). The other colours all belong to a different component - the wheels, the body, etc. Each of the wheels appear to have a different vanishing point, and more than that, those vanishing points sit WAAAY above the horizon line. This tells us that the wheels by that construction are actually not sitting properly on the ground plane.
Ensuring that all the lines that are parallel in 3D space sit go off towards roughly the same vanishing point is extremely important. Without that, your construction will start to fall apart.
Now there are areas where you've shown definitely improvement - you're much more aware of the basic construction, and you're less eager to jump off into drawing based on guesswork. That's a big step forward, and I think that's part of what's bringing these inconsistencies to light.
There are still issues with observation however, which will improve as you continue to train your eye (basically by doing more and more studies). For example, this construction was pretty good, but the slope of that windshield is probably too gradual, and the front section of the truck is too short.
You are making progress - but there's a lot of room for improvement. At this point, all I can really say is keep at it. Follow the same structure as before, focusing only on construction, then coming back later to add your details. Try another five pages, keeping in mind what I've said here about consistent vanishing points, and then we'll see where you've gotten.
And congratulations on the (sort of) new born! I hope things aren't too hectic!
Thanks! There has been a lot of stuff to do, but fortunately it hasn't been too hectic :P
Here are my five new drawings! https://imgur.com/a/cDsXAhL I have tried my best to follow your advice when drawing these and i hope it shows! And if doesn't i'll just try harder and draw some more :D
These are definitely headed in the right direction. Your sense of perspective is continuing to improve, but more importantly I get a general sense that your overall understanding of 3D space, and your own belief that what you're drawing is actually 3D (rather than just a flat drawing on a flat page) is jumping forward significantly.
There is of course things to work on:
Try to avoid the kind of guesswork you did for the top half of the car here. Admittedly you did a pretty okay job of it (it was a little off, but not bad), but it's best to avoid those kinds of situations altogether.
I'm not a big fan of how you rounded off your corners - it's kind of like you covered the car in a big blanket. You don't want to stray away from the edges of your forms as much as you did at the far end of the hood/windshield.
I quite like the form you constructed here, but it does feel like the farther side of the car is a little higher up. So things feel like they're tilting/twisting upwards. You may have guessed more than you ought to have there.
This one's a bit of a mess. The box you started out with seemed off, and the ellipses for the wheels aren't correct (rather than laying flat against the box, they seem to be set at an angle).
Avoid hatching, you tend to be pretty scribbly with it, and usually it's better just to focus on line weight to clarify your forms instead.
As I said, you're headed down the right path. All I can prescribe at this point is more practice. What I'd recommend is to spread your practice out over all the subjects from lesson 3-7, and to submit them in chunks once a month. I'll give you what advice I can, and point out anything particularly egregious.
Im definitely gonna submit some monthly drawings! Under what post should I do it? Or should I just create a separate post for it?
Also, I've exclusively done drawabox style drawing for the last 2-3 years I think it's been now, and I want to try and learn from other sources as well. I have wondered about trying to follow proko's lessons but I don't really now If that is the best approach. Could you recommend me anything?
I generally recommend Proko, as I've given his videos a cursory glance and they seem solid. Unfortunately I haven't had the time to dive into any online figure drawing courses or books at any sort of depth due to my time being taken up by drawabox (and I learned what I know on the topic from a course I took in person).
Hi Uncomfortable. Here are some drawings i have done since last time. I don't really know where to post them tough, as they aren't focused on a single lesson. https://imgur.com/a/4pavYl4
There are a few major overarching issues that need to be addressed:
You're viewing construction and your "final drawing" as two separate things. It's extremely important to understand that there should be no such distinction when doing these exercises. That's what they are - you're not drawing horses, you're studying how horses are composed of simple forms combined in a specific fashion. So when you draw the construction lightly and sparsely, obviously skipping a number of steps, you're taking away a good chunk of the value from the exercise itself.
Every single mark you put down should be drawn confidently. You don't give any thought to which ones are better off hidden, or which ones constitute your "final drawing". You only weigh whether or not a mark you're putting down is going to contribute to the overall process, and what it is meant to bring to the table. If it contributes in a meaningful way - be it through construction or communicating a specific aspect of its surface textures or other details, then you draw it. If it doesn't contribute, or if it attempts to accomplish something that another mark already does, then you don't draw it. Simple as that. Afterwards, once the full drawing is fleshed out, you can go back to add line weight to specific key places. That doesn't mean covering the entirety of your drawing with fresh lines, it means adding a little extra thickness to local segments of existing lines to clarify how forms overlap. I talk about the idea of "local line weight" in the video for lesson 2's form intersections, so I suggest you take a look at it.
You are very distracted by detail, and it is distracting you from working through the spatial and constructional problems. It comes back to the whole exercise vs. final drawing deal. There are plenty of opportunities to draw clean things outside of drawabox, but that is not what these exercises of critiques are targeted towards.
If there is one overarching goal for all of drawabox, it is as follows: to teach a student to truly believe that what they are drawing is three dimensional - that they are crafting solid, unyielding, 3D forms within a 3D space to which the page is just a window, rather than simply drawing 2D lines on a flat piece of paper to make people think it's 3D. To put it simply, when someone starts learning to draw, they still understand the difference between an actual 3D object they can see, and the marks they're making on the page, and that comes through.
Conversely, as a student really starts to internalize the material, the border between "i'm really just drawing 2D lines and fooling my audience" and "i'm constructing solid forms in a three dimensional space and I firmly believe it" gets thinner and thinner, and these exercises - pushing you to draw through your forms, reinforce them with contour lines where necessary, and so on are designed to whittle it down. It all comes down to the idea that the best way to convince someone else of something is to already believe in the lie yourself.
That is why we don't strive to limit our reliance on construction in these exercises, because our intent is not related to the results we produce. It's all about how it impacts and influences the way we think. We're rewiring our brains.
Now, I noticed you had some issues in adhering as closely to construction with your horses as you should, in a number of places. There's a few newer demos I've done for students that may help in this area, as long as you take them to heart:
Notice how explicit I am with every single constructional line I draw. I'm not cutting corners, or trying to hide things. I'm constructing all of my forms to completion, and then working out how they relate to one another as I go, then compare that to your own process. It's not so much about me having more experience - the process is something anyone can apply, and that's the first step. And with experience, the results and the general spatial understanding improves.
You are certainly continually improving, but that's what holds you back the most. The fact that you have a tough time internalizing the lessons however comes down to whether or not you are regularly applying the techniques and instructions as they're explained. So you'll learn the stuff, and then slack off a little in terms of applying them, doing so half-heartedly instead. You're still benefitting from them, but you need to push yourself to be a lot more direct in your application of the concepts.
This is not a submission of a drawing, but rather a question about how i should structure my drawings, now when i'm not doing lessons by them selves.
I want to try drawing stuff outside of drawabox, namely humans and landscapes, but i still want to do my drawabox drawings. But i don't really now how to proceed. I want to try drawing with other techniques etc. but i kind of feel "guilty" when i try other stuff, and with other techniques.
I'm not totally sure what i'm asking. But can you give my any advice in regards to incorporating stuff outside of drawabox?
Drawabox as a whole is less about teaching a specific way of drawing, and more of a course that is meant to use certain approaches and techniques to increase your understanding and awareness of core concepts that exist underneath the surface. Specifically, we use concepts like construction, drawing through forms, using contour lines, etc. all to build up your understanding of 3D space, and to develop your own belief and view that what you draw is not simply lines on a flat page masquerading as 3D objects, but rather that what you're doing is creating solid objects that exist in a three dimensional world. If you truly believe that lie, then it becomes a lot more natural for your resulting drawings to actually convince others of that illusion more effectively, due to how your subconscious behaves while drawing, adjusting lines one way or another in a manner that your audience's subconscious picks up on.
I've probably mentioned this a number of times - all drawabox is, is a series of exercises. Lesson 1 and 2 is obvious in this regard, but lessons 3-7, where you're drawing actual things and building them up - those are also exercises that just happen to use specific kinds of objects as an example. So when you talk about drawing things "the drawabox way", while there's obviously a particular manner that implies, in truth there's no such thing. It's not a technique for drawing, it's a technique for learning how to think about space and form.
And sure, you can and will incorporate some of those techniques into actual drawing, in parts at least, it's only because it's something that helps you to think through those spatial problems. So you can certainly still do your drawabox exercises whenever, but if you're following along with another instructor's lessons, you should be following along with their instructions to the letter and not replacing their instructions with someone else's wherever you see fit. I tell people the same thing when they're following my lessons - follow my instructions to the letter, and if you think you know better because of something you've heard or read elsewhere, it doesn't matter because you won't truly know what you're meant to learn from this until you're all the way at the end - and perhaps not even then.
There's a lot of good that comes from trying many different things and different approaches, as long as you're throwing yourself into them completely - the only thing you should ever feel guilty about is if you're following someone else's material, but replacing their instructions wherever you see fit. It's something a lot of beginners do because they prefer one way over another, but without any understanding of what it's all for.
The other thing that's worth mentioning is that one should not be grinding any lessons 24/7 - I strongly encourage my students to spend only half of the time they're drawing specifically on trying to learn and improve. The other half of their time should be spent drawing for the sake of drawing - we all learn drawing because we want to do something, otherwise there would be no point, but many of us feel like we shouldn't start attempting it until we're ready. But in truth there's no such thing as being ready - you just do it, it turns out like shit, and you keep doing it anyway. If you don't, and spend all your time focusing only on "I need to get better", you'll either burn out (although I doubt you would, given how long you've kept at this, you've got an iron will to be sure) or you'll end up with polished technical skills and no sense of how to apply it.
I took vehicles I observed in my neighbourhood and at a show as references. Going out was more fun than grinding google for references.
Partly why it took so long was because of the ellips template. The ones they had at my local art and supply store were quite expensive and the shipping costs online were quite high. Luckily I have access to a laser cutter so I made my own one in clear acrylic. Still took quite a bit of work and time but it was fun to do and now I have all the angles and sizes.
Because of the waiting with the ellips template I started out with some planes. I figured ellipses weren't very needed here. I was quite mistaken when it came to wheels and propellers. In general I'm not too happy with my planes (have more lying around), but I learned a lot from it. The more boxier vehicles seemed to go much smoother. Finally having the ellips template also did wonders. The hardest part was usually transitioning from the scaffolding to the definitive design. Followed up by adding some shadow and weight to it. I know I added too much black ink in some pieces, but it made realise how much is needed and that there is difference between black and shadow.
I also added an unfinished construction of a Vespa motorcycle. It was making too many mistakes which made it disappear in its own scaffolding. Maybe if you want you can give me some tips on how to approach this better.
It was very fun to do and I still feel inspired to draw many more vehicles. But for the sake of meeting personal deadlines I show you what I have now. I hope you enjoy them and I'm looking forward for your critique
I think it's pretty amazing that you were able to laser cut your own ellipse guides - most definitely find that they're way too expensive (I've heard people talking about cheaper ellipse master templates, but they definitely cover fewer cases).
Overall, you definitely did a phenomenal job. Earlier on in the set (I'm not sure if these are in chronological order) with some of your planes, things were definitely a lot more simplistic, but as you progressed you seemed to gain a much greater awareness of how forms could be broken down further. It's clear that you did struggle a fair bit with some of the fuselages, especially those with more specific, nuanced curves to them. These are notoriously difficult, it's really the specificity of those curves that makes them tricky, and it'll take a good deal of practice to really get over that last 10%. To be completely honest, due to the fact that I've rarely ever drawn airplanes, it's not something I've gotten past either (though with some targeted practice, I have no doubt that you'll get over that barrier if you so choose to).
The rest of your constructions are really fantastic, and convey a really strong sense of solid form. Your proportions are spot on, and even those that stray from the symmetrical nature of most vehicles (like the industrial lift at the end).
I do agree that you went overboard in many cases with the black sections - the key here is to remember that at least in these construction drawings, our main use of solid black "shadow" areas is to separate things out from one another. A little cast shadow here and there can help focus the eye on one form over another. In this regard, having solid black areas on the parts of a construction that sit closest to the viewer (so not serving to clarify any form overlapping that section) becomes largely pointless.
I can definitely see the draw aesthetically (this one came out beautifully), but the cases where it really helped were those where they did function at least partially to help separate things out. Here and here on the other hand, it actually worked to your detriment as it hid a lot of the valuable contour lines you had in there, which would have helped define the form (especially in the latter).
As for your Vespa, I actually think it was going pretty well, and it's too bad that it went unfinished. That said, when I draw things with an overbearing amount of construction and subdivision, I have a tendency to factor considerations towards line weight in throughout the process, rather than only at the end. It's usually very subtle, and I'll still find places to push things further at the end, but I'll usually try and pull some forms out as I build them up, so as to keep things from getting too visually confusing.
At the same time, as you practice dealing with complex constructions like this, it does become easier to see the hidden vehicle. In this regard, I can make out your vespa without too much trouble - so as much as being a matter of technique, it's also a question of continuing to train your eyes.
Anyway, you've done some more excellent work here. I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete - and with that, you've completed the dynamic sketching curriculum! So congratulations on that. Right now there isn't really much else as far as drawabox goes to tackle next, but in the coming months (after I've had a chance to rebuild the website, which I should be starting in the next week or so) I'm planning on developing another lesson set focused on design and form language - basically taking what we've learned about drawing real objects and leveraging it to create fresh and interesting designs. It is worth mentioning though that the critique tier for these will likely be the $20 one, due to the more general and flexible nature of that subject matter. The lesson material, as always, will be completely free.
Thank you for the wealthy feedback. I agree with all your points and I'll give the Vespa another shot. I think the principle of less is more is quite applicable in how I need to apply shadow.
I'm very much looking forward to the new lessons you are making. For now there are still the treasure chest and texture challenges that I can do. I also started following the proko figure drawing courses. It has an assignment quite similar as lesson 6 which gives me a head start.
Here are my vehicles for critique. There's definitely improvement and increased complexity, but all in all these still look pretty goofy. I do feel like I was able to use a lot of the techniques laid out in the videos, though, so I obviously understand the basics, but wish I could get these to look more refined/less awkward. Thanks for your time!
So it's clear you're heading down the right track. There are some issues that I'll point out, but fundamentally you're focusing a great deal on your major forms and establishing everything as components that sit firmly grounded in 3D space. The reason they're looking "goofy" comes down to your observational skills.
Up to this point, your observational skills have always been ahead of what's been required. I think that's because the previous courses you've taken really leaned into developing those, so you had a pretty significant head start. While you've certainly been flexing those muscles throughout these past lessons, most of your focus and development has been concentrated on handling those 3D forms.
Vehicles are complex and nuanced in ways that we haven't quite seen just yet. The everyday objects from lesson 6 start treading into this sort of territory, but their scale tends to make them a lot more relatable. On top of this, in that lesson we were mostly looking at objects we had in front of us, whereas this one forces us to rely more on photo reference. All of this comes together to really push the limits of our observational skills.
This has an impact in several areas:
Proportions. This is a huge one, and it really bites people in the ass with this lesson. I can definitely see you improving quite a bit with this over the course of the set, but while I can't be certain without seeing the references you were drawing from, I feel like you have a tendency to make the wheels smaller than they ought to be.
Nuance. This is definitely the most frustrating part, as it plays such a huge role, but it's the sort of thing that can only be developed through a lot of targeted practice. With all that is going on in these various vehicle designs, it's quite challenging to distill out the key features and details that really carry the entire thing. Sometimes it's the precise flow of the curvature of the hood, or the angle of one piece relative to another, but with vehicles when the mark is missed, it tends to be terribly obvious (without being entirely clear as to what was missed - just that something has been). On the flipside, when you really nail a particular point of the vehicle's character, it's equally obvious. For example, we know this piece has proportions that are all kinds of goofy - but if you look at the way you've handled the hood and the headlights, despite the relatively simple level of detail, you can see that the character of that piece has been nailed down quite well. Conversely, look at this one, the angle of the windshield feels off, despite having no idea what the reference actually looks like. It's the nature of the subject matter - vehicles, especially consumer ones, are so meticulously designed, that the margin for acceptable error is pretty slim.
Aside from those issues, I did notice areas where your ellipses were off by a fair bit. It usually comes down to the ellipses-in-planes, and applying the criteria for whether or not an ellipse represents a circle in 3D space. Here's an example where things were off. The red one closely matches yours, while the blue one is what would have been more correct. As you can see, the minor axis was pretty close, but what really had a significant impact was the matter of the contact points to top and bottom of the enclosing plane. This suggests that the degree of your ellipse should have been quite a bit smaller in order to represent a circle at that orientation (based on the vanishing point towards the right side).
Another area of contention are the wheels as a whole - and to an extent, this excites me. The reason is that your wheels tend to capture the essence of most of the problems I've raised above. Obviously, ellipses and maintaining the illusion that they represent circles are extremely important when it comes to drawing wheels. Beyond that however, wheels and tires have a lot of nuance to their own designs, and can be quite complex if taken so far as to worry about tread, rims, etc.
So, I want you to set aside the vehicles for the time being and instead focus on drawing 30 wheels, from reference. Focus first on making them feel solid (so constructing sturdy, consistent cylinders), then pay attention to the tires (you'll notice that their edges are a little beveled, so they bulge more than basic cylinders), give some consideration to tread, and finally play with their rims. Look at a variety of kinds of wheels - basic sedans, SUVs, sports cars, jeeps, motorcycles... hell, even the landing gears from air planes.
You're going to be a bit of a guinea pig on this - I may turn this into an exercise tied to lesson 7, kind of like how lesson 3 has the leaves and branches exercises.
I dwelled a lot on the criticism side of the critique, but I figure it's worth mentioning - I think you did an excellent job with the helicopter, and you did some pretty good work nailing the particular design nuance of this car (and its wheels look pretty good too!). The very last thing I want to mention is that once we get back to vehicles after the 30 wheel bit, I want you to try leveraging the constructing to scale methodology more to construct your enclosing boxes to specific measurements. There does appear to be a fair bit of winging it here, where you accidentally end up having to build outside of your initial boxes, due to a misinterpretation of scale.
Sounds good! Nothing wrong with taking a little break. This stuff, especially the hard surface constructions with the vehicles being the most challenging among them, can definitely wear a person down. Some time away can definitely be beneficial, but I'm glad to hear that you're back at it now.
I bought some ellipse templatesyou can see that the drawings where I used the guides vs the freehand ones are night and day.
Minimal success with the tire tread (couldn't figure out how to estimate that without pulling the circle out of perspective and plotting back), but I think they are looking better in general.
This is fantastic. I got your submission while I was travelling between cities (I'm on vacation with family at the moment), and I was so pleased by your results that I showed them to my grandmother. She was quite pleased too (though she doesn't know a whole lot about drawing).
Here you've demonstrated an exceptional grasp of how these wheels both exist as cylinders in 3D space, as well as how to approach the finer, smaller points of their details as form rather than sticker-like throwaway features. Personally, I'm also very pleased with your tire treads (despite your own assessment), and found that while you're right that the ellipse guide ones were considerably cleaner and better, those you constructed freehand were still reasonably solid all things considered.
I think this will serve as an excellent exercise to add to this lesson - and I particularly liked how you played with connecting some with an axel. I think I'll be stealing that, if you don't mind!
So, to round this off, I'd like you to do 3 more vehicle drawings, taking what you've learned here and applying them. Obviously stick to vehicles with wheels, as you've already proved yourself with helicopters and such. I'm keen on seeing these new pages, and I expect you'll see a considerable bump up.
The exercise aside, your brief break from drawabox may also have helped in a number of ways.
I think the second van and the Model T show a lot of improvement, the Porsche attempts not so much. I couldn't figure that one out after a few tries so I decided to give it a break. I kept getting confused by the cab because it's so far inset from the body.
Though the wheels look better on all of them so that was good!
/u/uncomfortable Can you take a look when you have a chance? Thank you!
The vans are alright, and definitely show an overall developing grasp of the content, but that model T is something entirely different. You've got a number of complex forms that are meant to play against each other with very specific relationships, and you've really nailed them. More than the drawing being pretty, you've captured the impression of the model T down to, well.. a tee. This speaks to an understanding of its form language - the kind of thing you can pull out from a study like this and apply to a completely fresh design (the kind of thing I want to tackle in future lessons). Stunning work.
You certainly did struggle with that porsche, though I think you started to nail the front in this drawing (despite the back still falling out of whack). The troubles were definitely grounded in proportion, and may have been exacerbated a little by tackling such a challenging subject in particularly extreme perspective. You'll notice that your first couple attempts at this one had a lot of convergence towards the vanishing point, which would have made it even more difficult to deal with nail your proportions. Overall I think you had a tendency to stretch the cab too much, and perhaps didn't slope the windshield down enough (at least in that last page). One key element that stands out to me is that the car door on the last one feels enormous if you try and imagine a human in the scene.
Now, none of that is worrying in the least. As I mentioned in my very first critique of this lesson, some vehicles have such a specific character to them that it can be very difficult to pick up on their nuances - it really just takes extended practicing to familiarize yourself with that specific car. I had to draw my favourite, the 1967 Shelby Mustang GT500 a couple dozen times before I really developed a half decent grasp of it, and even then it was rather shoddy. That was years ago though, so I bet if I drew one now it'd be a mess.
What is important though is that your wheels are looking fantastic, and your vehicles carry a sort of solidity that they didn't when you first started tackling this subject matter. You've developed a much keener eye for the little things that impact your construction, and have pushed your overall confidence with vehicles to a new level. I'm sure the ellipse guide helped, but the improvement speaks to a much deeper shift in how you approach the topic.
So, I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete. Congratulations on completing the dynamic sketching curriculum! I certainly hope you feel these lessons have helped develop your sense of form and space, as from where I'm sitting, you've improved by considerable leaps and bounds over the course of the last few months (though admittedly you did enter with a solid grasp of many of the mechanics).
Here's my lesson for critique! I realized halfway through that I had been aligning the minor axis of my wheel's ellipses to the wrong vanishing point. Overall though, I'm happy with the last few vehicles ,and I got much faster at proportion measurements and overall construction by the last few drawings. Thank you in advance! https://imgur.com/a/MWOUhsb (oops. here's the link. my brain is fried from all these vehicles).
You've demonstrated a really remarkable growth over the course of this set. It's clear that towards the beginning you were struggling with how to handle constructions of this complexity, and at this kind of scale. I noticed that you had some confusion on that very first page, towards the left side, where things got a bit wacky due to being outside of the two vanishing points (technically it was correct, but it sure as hell didn't look it due to the inevitable distortion).
You definitely approached things the right way though, as far as blocking everything out into its major forms and focusing largely on nailing their proportions and the relationships between the various components. One of the important things in my eyes is that as soon as you hit this truck, you were showing a lot of careful attention to the nuanced design decisions that went into the truck itself. It's very easy, while attempting to nail the solidity of the construction, to lose track of how careful and intentional the angles and relationships within the design generally are, and to gloss over seemingly superficial details in the interest of focusing purely on solid forms. That's what makes the difference between something being a believable object but feeling more like a child's toy, and something actually feeling like a truck you'd see on the road. You've done a great job of nailing that.
Through most of these drawings, you did stick pretty closely to laying out your two vanishing points. This definitely comes with challenges of its own, and personally it's not something I'd recommend - sure, you can be more specific about how you're plotting your lines back, to ensure things maintain their alignment and everything converges consistently, but it also forces you into a fairly dramatic rate of foreshortening. This can come out as feeling quite awkward, since the foreshortening suggests that the object is entire enormous (like building-sized), or that it is extremely close to the viewer, and uncomfortably so.
Now, this is an issue that you seemed to come to terms with yourself, and you shed that reliance more and more as you pushed on through. I was especially pleased with the motorbike at the end, where you were more interested in the patterns of convergence that imply certain vanishing points, rather than the vanishing points themselves. The one thing that I would suggest in regard is to put down a specific horizon line. This can really help solidify your own sense of the space you're working in without having to worry about where the VPs are in specific terms.
Honestly, your work is excellent - and it reminds me a lot of things in the vein of Scott Robertson's work. I'm assuming you've looked at his books (like the ever-recommended How to Draw). If you haven't, I think it'd serve as an excellent next step, as you're definitely leaning into this subject matter. I do think that it's rather dense for beginners, but someone at your stage would definitely benefit from a lot of the more technical principles, and I think that you'd find Scott's work in general quite inspiring.
With that, I'll go ahead and mark this lesson (and the curriculum) as complete. Keep up the fantastic work! It's worth mentioning that in the next month or two, (once I've had the chance to finish rebuilding the website to better deliver the existing content), I'm planning on expanding into lessons that talk more about design. That is, lessons on shape and form language, manipulating proportion and creating new designs from different kinds of source material. It's the kind of skills that I leverage frequently in my work as a concept artist - I just need to pin down how exactly I want to organize and communicate the principles.
Thanks so much for all your feedback during these lessons, and for drawabox as a whole. I actually just ordered Scott Robertsons book as a reward for finishing lesson 8! Anyway, Ill keep your feedback about vanishing points in mind as I go forwards (they definitely feel like a crutch that adds stiffness to my work when I overuse them/ have them directly on the page). Also, I will definitely be back for the design-oriented lessons! Good luck moving forwards with the website rebuild, and again, thank you for these awesome lessons!!
I've never really been into vehicles much less drawing them, but I was surprised by how much I actually enjoyed this lesson. All the art stores around me had the same set of ellipse templates and I didn't really feel like ordering them on amazon and having to wait for shipping so I just used what I could get and in some cases had to free hand some of them or just use the closest template I had which didn't always match up 100%. Also I was wondering if you could give me some advice on what to do after this, I plan on going through Scott Robertson's How to Draw book, but what do you recommend I do? What would be some good next steps to keep learning and getting better? Thank you for your time! https://imgur.com/a/OdnjwSg
All in all you've done some really fantastic work here. You've got big, bold forms with a strong sense of weight and solidity. I really love the earlier ones, as you carry the flavour of each vehicle, but simplify them quite beautifully.
When it comes to getting into the details, you start off doing a decent job with some notable issues here and there. Your proportions were usually very close (aside from this one, which feels quite squashed), and your approach to putting in smaller forms was good to start - but what's most important is that I can see a gradual trend of improvement over the course of the set.
Something about the front of the lawn mower really... for lack of a better word, stirs my loins. That is a sexy goddamn grill. The way you've hinted with cast shadows, the way you've fleshed out what is fairly minute and delicate formwork in the bars (or whatever) that fit in across the front.. you've even suggested just the slightest pattern behind them. It's fantastic.
The only issue that I saw likely relates to the point you raised about the ellipse templates you were able to get a hold of - you had a tendency to have your wheels set at a degree that was slightly off in a number of these drawings. It doesn't always stand out a lot, but I did pick up on it here and there, and when I really focused it threw the drawing off a bit.
One area where an ellipse throws things off a lot is with the very front of the locomotive (though it looks like you recognized that, based on your notes). Anyways, it happens. One thought would be, at least in regards to your ellipse templates, to actually try and build your box based off the degree of a given ellipse. So, draw a unit cube in the scene using your ellipse template, and have that determine where your lines converge towards. Then extend that cube to build out the rest of your enclosing box, and work with that. At least this will guarantee that your ellipses will represent circles in 3D space.
Aside from that, you're really doing fantastic work here. I definitely agree with your decision to go through scott robertson's books, and I strongly encourage you to keep up with constructional drawings like these (and like those covered in earlier lessons) to ensure that you're getting a healthy coverage with plants, animals, vehicles - everything between organics and hard surface. At the end of the day, drawabox isn't meant to teach you how to draw, but rather to teach you how to practice, and how to learn.
In the next several months, I'm rolling out a multi-phase update to drawabox as a whole. It starts off with rebuilding the website's design to better communicate the lesson content (and frankly, to make it a little better at generating revenue without being any more intrusive with ads than it is currently). Second phase is to expand the lessons into more advanced topics relating to design - such as shape and form language. Those are the sort of things that took me from where you are now to being able to think about creating new things.
So, I'd hope that you'd jump on that once they come out (though it'll be a couple months at least). Until then, do a lot of studies. And if you're interested in moving onto digital painting and that sort of thing, I'd recommend trying to do full photo studies. That is, replicating an entire photograph, first by focusing on value (only greyscale), and eventually moving into colour. It can be a bit of a jolt to have to apply construction to an actual illustration or scene, so it's good to get used to that early.
Anyway, I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete. Congratulations on completing the entirety of the drawabox curriculum (so far).
I'm kind of nervous turning this in, but also proud of myself that I've made it this far :)
What I didn't get out of the 'ellipses in planes' video right away was that you are expected to draw the circle with the degree fitted to the degree of the plane one draws the circle in, is that correct?
As always, thanks for the lesson and the critique!
Honestly this shows considerable improvement over your previous lesson, especially when it comes to the enclosing boxes and other major forms you employ. Being able to use a ruler probably helped, but the reason it would have is that it allowed you to separate the process into two distinct areas - demonstrating your knowledge of space (which appears to be pretty strong), and executing your marks.
I think as you get into it, you definitely get a lot bolder with your mark making, and it helps a great deal. This tank, for instance, is pretty fantastic. I also think throughout this lesson, you allowed yourself to really get into the intricacies of your subject matter without necessarily forgetting the major forms and how everything sits in 3D space. I'd say this boat did skip some steps, but at the same time you demonstrated that you still held the principle forms in your mind as you worked, and that you understood how the details you drew existed in space. It's actually quite a tricky thing to balance, and you did a great job of it.
Now, you definitely did struggle with the ellipses. In regards to your question, the Measuring in Perspective: Constructing to Scale video demonstrates how you might apply it. That is, using an ellipse with a semi-formed plane to establish a "square" in space, and then repeating that square in perspective several times. While this means you'll have planes that are equal in height and width (and therefore can contain circles), you still have to be able to draw an ellipse within that plane. That's where it gets difficult.
If you remember the box challenge, you'd basically give it a shot, then analyze it to see where things went wrong by extending your lines. You can do something similar with ellipses, and it's something I plan on explaining more specifically in the cylinder challenge when I get around to rewriting it (during my multi-phase drawabox rebuild process). Just like you extend the lines of a box, you can take a cylinder drawn in a box, or an ellipse drawn in a plane, and you can identify the vanishing points the plane's edges converge towards, and then compare them towards two vanishing points defined by the ellipse (one by the minor axis, the other by how the vertical contact points to the plane are aligned). This gives you a way to test the two criteria. Of course, in order to really work, you have to do it quite a bit, and over time your internal sense of how to execute that ellipse improves.
That is ultimately the most beneficial way of approaching it, and it is important to have experience with that. In this exercise, you are however allowed to use an ellipse guide if you can get your hands on one, and it can definitely make things a little easier (in the way the ruler did for your straight lines).
The other area you do need some work on is with your cars. It's a pretty broad topic, but the reason for this is that cars tend to have a very specific set of relationships and proportions that define them, and it's very easy to get them wrong. I can't tell you how much I've struggled with cars - I probably did dozens of studies of a single model just to come vaguely close to getting it right. They're tricky little shits, and they've all got their own character and personality. But in that, they're a very interesting thing to practice.
Instead of jumping back into cars however, I want you to try something else - it's a mini exercise I assigned to another student who struggled with the same thing, and it seemed to be quite helpful there. I want you to draw 30 wheels.
The funny thing about wheels is that they're a lot like cars, in that they tend to have their own unique character, their own little features that set them apart from one another. From the beveling of the tire (they're not just simple cylinders after all, there's a lot more going on!) to the tread in the rubber, the intricacies of the hubcaps, etc. It'll also be a great opportunity to help you work with those ellipses.
Give that a shot, and we'll decide what to do from there. Overall you are making great progress, so you should be quite pleased with yourself. Keep up the great work.
I think figuring out how to draw the tread in the rubber of the wheels was one of the main challenges, making them look 3D and barely having any space to draw them.
Maybe I should've drawn the whole wheel bigger but that would've meant a lot more work for this mini-exercise.
And as always keeping things proportionate was difficult, because you need to think about so much stuff while drawing that it's
challenging.
I'm probably a little bit lazy on that end.
Towards the end I got used to some construction steps so thinking about proportions was easier.
I feel like proportions are the last thing to think of after learning the construction steps, etc.
I'm going to be a little brutally honest here, but given that this is your 21st homework submission, you've probably developed a thick enough skin to bare it.
This is not what I was asking for. Not even close. You went in with some very, very inaccurate assumptions, and what you've written there really does reflect that. Ultimately, it happens - all that's lost is some time, but I know for a fact that you can absolutely do much better than this.
I think figuring out how to draw the tread in the rubber of the wheels was one of the main challenges, making them look 3D and barely having any space to draw them. Maybe I should've drawn the whole wheel bigger but that would've meant a lot more work for this mini-exercise.
Every submission for drawabox should absolutely be the best you can manage at this stage. If you could have put in more effort, more time, and yielded better and more meaningful results, then that is exactly what you should do. I can't give you any sort of useful advice if what I see is not the best of your current ability.
Yes, you should have drawn the wheels much bigger. You should have also constructed them using cylinders as a starting point - meaning, making good use of the minor axis to do so.
The focus of this exercise is not on detail. It's still about construction, and 80% of it is based on nailing that underlying form, starting with a cylinder, and going down into a more nuanced wheel with bevelled edges. It is, after all, a drawabox exercise, and as you well know form and construction is everything around these parts. It needs to feel solid and confident, and this is VERY MUCH a spatial problem. As I've probably mentioned before, our brains benefit considerably from having more room to think when dealing with these kinds of challenges.
It may help to look at this video, created by the first student I had go through this wheel exercise. She did use an ellipse guide for this (she mentions it in the video and talks about where she got them), and I still strongly recommend that you pick some up.
Now, I do want you to do this exercise again (although you may cut it down to 15 wheels instead of 30) - but before that, I did notice that you haven't actually completed the 250 cylinder challenge, and your work here makes me think that perhaps you should do that first. But maybe before any of that, you should give yourself a little break. Whether you did the exercise correctly or not, you did put a lot of time and effort into this, and I imagine that it did take a lot out of you.
We all make mistakes, and sometimes we accidentally veer down the wrong path. Give yourself a little time to recover from that, then dust yourself off and get back on the road.
OK here it is. I took my time and tried to do it right. It'll be pretty obvious that I was unable to obtain a set of ellipse guides. Despite my best efforts with using axes and ghosting etc, my poor ellipses did ruin more than one of these drawings. I did take a break to practice a few pages of ellipses and I think that helped with the later drawings. I did however come to the conclusion after watching your video a couple of times, that it's pretty much impossible to use a free-hand drawn ellipse to work out a perfect square in perspective. I do understand the theory of it, but in practice it's another thing. Seems like it's pretty tricky even when you're working digitally. Anyway it did make me study the whole thing quite closely, and I went off and learned some other methods for doing the same thing, like the measurement method (using the horizon line and 90 degree angles to work out a square in perspective) - not practical for this lesson, but interesting none-the-less.
Another thing I found interesting about this lesson was the comparison between simply using the info in the isometrics to extrapolate where my lines should go vs. relying more on the reference photo and just drawing what I see. Of course in a perfect world those 2 things would be the same but, yeah.. I did focus more on the former, as I think that's more in the spirit of the lesson, and just used the latter to check that my decisions made sense. I'll admit that I do still struggle with estimating vanishing points. Usually I'm cruising along thinking everything looks good, or at least in the correct ball park, then when it comes time for the final lines to converge I learn just how far out I am. Quite a pain when you're working in ink.
Speaking of ink, is it me or does every ballpoint pen eventually go blotchy when using a steel ruler a lot? Went through about 4 of them, sorry about the smears.
Honestly, this is REALLY well done. You're employing the concepts covered in the lesson really well, and are demonstrating a propensity for thinking through the process of construction and the manipulation of form in space.
Furthermore, despite your struggles with your ellipses, I think you did a pretty good job with them considering how you were limited, especially towards the end. The wheels on your mustang came out really well, as did those on the 14 wheeler and the DeLorean. Really, you were nailing them pretty well later in the lesson.
There certainly is room for improvement, but you show a great deal of it over the set, as well as a solid grasp of the foundational elements and more. Mostly it's a matter of observation, and an awareness of how - especially in vehicles - each one has its own very specific personality to it, in the way that the curves, and proportions and relationships all come together to give the extremely distinct sense of that specific model. The design of these vehicles is so particular that any one piece being off by more than a certain margin will throw us into that sort of uncanny valley, where we know something's wrong but can't put our finger on what.
That's all very normal, and it explains why, say, your mustang felt a little squat, and other vehicles may not have felt entirely right. It's the sort of thing that'll improve with continued study of a specific object (during one exercise I probably drew a 67 shelby mustang 20-30 times before I could even start to really get the personality right), but I have an exercise that should help you in regards to this particular challenge.
The kind of relationships and character that we find in a car can also be found in their wheels. From the shape of the tires and the extent they're bevelled (tires are not actually simple cylinders, they're more complex than that), the style of their tread, the complexity of their rims, and so on, tires have the same kind of personalities we see in the larger vehicle. So, I've lately been trying to have students try getting more familiar with the finer points of wheels in order to tweak how they see entire cars. And as such, I've been field-testing a "30 wheel challenge".
As it sounds - I'd like you to try drawing 30 wheels, all with as much attention to construction and detail as you can manage. Try all kinds - motorcycle wheels, standard sedan wheels, lawn mower wheels, the wheels on those giant industrial trucks you find in quarries... go nuts. Use it as an opportunity to continue refining your ellipses (which are already coming out really nicely), construction as a whole, and your observation of the finer points of these kinds of subjects.
Once you're done with the wheels, I want to see two car drawings.
As far as I'm concerned, you are done this lesson, and with it the whole lesson set, as you're demonstrating a strong grasp of all the concepts - strong enough to continue pushing them forwards on your own. But before I mark it as complete, I figured I'd give you a little something more to solidify these points.
So, keep up the great work, and I look forward to seeing your wheels.
Hey, I completed this a while ago but uh didn't really submit it because doing these drained my soul. So things might be a bit out of order of completion (aside from the first few which I remember).
All in all you've got a lot of good work here. There are a few things I can point out to help you continue improving, but you're generally heading in the right direction. Also, while your widths are usually somewhat exaggerated, the length and height proportions are pretty well done and you capture a good sense of each car's particular personality and characteristics.
The first thing that jumps out at me when looking at these drawings is that there's definitely a sense of subtle misalignment in a lot of places. Often times it's a matter of your starting point - the enclosing box - where its sets of parallel lines may not be converging consistently enough.
I also feel that you are being pretty thorough in the early stages of construction (subdividing your box as needed, finding all your anchoring guidelines and such), but one thing that will likely help a great deal is to continue to carry over that thoroughness into actually drawing through the simpler forms you lay into that defined, subdivided space. For example, breaking your car down into fully drawn, concrete boxes and such rather than jumping so soon into the more intricate details of the vehicle. There's just too big of a gap from the scaffolding you have down and the next step you're trying to produce, and you need something to bridge it.
This should remedy a couple major concerns I have in regards to the solidity of some of these drawings. The biggest of these is the fact that whenever you have to draw some kind of a curve, because it doesn't have enough supporting structure preceding it, it ends up being somewhat arbitrary. Remember the nature of a curve - it exists as an approximation of many possible combinations of straight lines, and so it's very easy to end up with a curve that looks as though it could represent a variety of different configurations, and this is what contributes to the resulting lack of solidity.
Instead, we need to draw curves that feel like they represent something very specific and limited - we do that by working in the reverse. We establish the configuration of straight lines first, then round them out whilst sticking as close to that original configuration as possible. Deviate too much, and we lose the specificity and solidity.
The other issue is specifically with the giant meatballs you used for tires on your backhoe. Generally companies like Caterpillar, Deere, Ford, etc. don't use meatballs because they simply don't have the toughness to withstand the kinds of weight and pressure those tires are exposed to on a daily basis. I'd be surprised if a meatball would even manage to hold itself together while standing still.
The issue here is pretty similar to one I see students doing when drawing leaves with intricate edge detail. They'll often make two common mistakes:
They'll draw that edge detail going in and out of the simpler constructional scaffolding (both building additively and subtractively, which essentially means they're treating that previous stage as more of a suggestion rather than building directly off of it).
They'll zigzag a single continuous stroke back and forth, mushing all of the little details and features into a single, smoothed, averaged craptacular line that loses any of the nuance and specificity it would have required.
The solution is to build it up with individual marks, and to do so additively - that is, you have a form, now you're tacking more stuff onto it. You're not cutting back into it, and you're ensuring that every further element builds directly off of your original. I demonstrate that in this leaf demo.
In the case of your meatballs tires, it's even simpler than that. The cylinder is a concrete form - as are the treads you're adding to it. These things have thickness, they're solid, you're tacking on smaller forms. Of course, as is with most textures, it may be more worthwhile to draw the shadows these tread forms cast rather than constructing each individual chunky form on its own. It depends on the situation.
All in all, you're doing a pretty good job, but there are some things I want you to work on. So here's what you're going to do:
30 wheels. Wheels are fucking magnificent, they're like a microcosm of the whole car, in that they have their own particular personality to them. They come in a variety of shapes and configurations with differently bevelled tires, different treads, different hub caps, etc. This is actually an exercise I'll be adding to the start of this exercise once I've gotten around to rewriting this stuff. Once you're done, submit this to me and I'll do a quick critique.
Once I've critiqued your wheels, 3 more pages of vehicle drawings. You'll have learned a lot from the wheels, but I also want you to take to heart what i've said here and try to apply it.
Uncomfortable
2018-05-03 17:26
Old thread got locked, those eligible for private critiques can submit their work here (and all others are welcome to submit their work to the main subreddit for a community critique).
Tarrazan
2018-05-09 09:24
Here it is : https://imgur.com/a/OKzyBKk
Uncomfortable
2018-05-09 23:50
You start out alright. Your construction on the first two pages are careful, conscientious and measured. You're patient and willing to take the time to subdivide wherever needed, and you generally avoid relying on guesswork where it can be helped. This shows that you have the capacity for patience, and that you are absolutely able to draw these things properly.
By the end of the set (with the exception of this boat), you're guessing the vast majority of things, focusing on drawing oversimplified details, and in a lot of cases throwing construction to the wind.
What I see here is that whenever you approach a drawing knowing that you're going to add detail, your brain decides to switch to wanting to draw something impressive. Something with a lot of flare to it, something to make you feel like an artist. Of course, that has nothing to do with this lesson. This lesson's about construction, it's about understanding the forms that make up complex objects and how they relate to each other in 3D space.
We're not here to draw pretty, impressive things. Each drawing is an exercise, and we're meant to learn from it. We may as well be burning them at the end regardless of how nice they look, because the point isn't to create something beautiful. It's to learn.
Now, for most students when I see this issue, I'll have them draw however many pages with no detail whatsoever, so they focus on construction and really grind it down. In fact, I've probably had you do that very same thing more than a few times. And when you focus on construction, you do what's necessary, for the most part. You probably could stand to go further. For example, on this page you built your wheels as basic cylinders - there's a lot more to be done form-wise there without delving into what we regard as superficial detail. You could have placed inset ellipses on the end of each cylinder to create the inner portions of the tires, and hubcaps, etc. That's all form, after all. But anyway, you're definitely going in the right direction when you know you're not going to delve into trying to make a drawing pretty.
When you DO decide to take a drawing "all the way", you lose track of all those good habits.
So, we're going to do it a little differently. I want you to draw five vehicles. I want you to first draw each of them focusing purely on form and construction with no superficial detail, taking that as far as you possibly can. Subdivide wherever needed, draw through all your forms, and so on. Do this for all five vehicles, then take pictures of your work.
Then come back and add detail. Observe carefully, make sure every mark you put down here is with the intention of capturing some feature you see in your reference, and take it as far as you want.
One other thing - do all your work in ballpoint pen this time. Set the fineliners and brush pens aside for now. Also, use a ruler as much as possible, and if you can get your hands on one, use an ellipse template as well (though those can be expensive, so I totally understand if you can't). Use ballpoint for everything, including adding line weight. Try to avoid hatching, but if you must, make sure it's neat and tidy, not scribbly and chaotic like this.
Tarrazan
2018-06-04 23:50
Here are my five drawings before and after details: https://imgur.com/a/eGZy99Q ! I used a black ballpoint ben, rulers and some ellipse templates i got from ebay preatty cheap! I did some hatching on one of the drawings because i simply forgot that i was supposed not to. To be honest this homework took me some time to go through, and i'm not at all satisfied with it, but with a 7 week old newborn and an undergraduate project on the way, i haven't had as much energy to focus on this as much as possible. I hope it's alright though
Uncomfortable
2018-06-05 22:45
It's great that you were able to get an ellipse guide pretty cheap! I've heard a lot of students who've only been able to find them being sold for exorbitant prices. I even had one guy make his own out of acrylic, as he had access to a laser cutter.
So one issue I noticed (much moreso in your later few pages) was that lines that ought to be parallel in 3D space tended to go off towards wildly different vanishing points, with entirely different horizon lines. Take a look at this.
There's a few differently coloured lines. The magenta one is the horizon line based on the body of the bus (we'll treat that as the correct one since it's the biggest form in the construction). The other colours all belong to a different component - the wheels, the body, etc. Each of the wheels appear to have a different vanishing point, and more than that, those vanishing points sit WAAAY above the horizon line. This tells us that the wheels by that construction are actually not sitting properly on the ground plane.
Ensuring that all the lines that are parallel in 3D space sit go off towards roughly the same vanishing point is extremely important. Without that, your construction will start to fall apart.
Now there are areas where you've shown definitely improvement - you're much more aware of the basic construction, and you're less eager to jump off into drawing based on guesswork. That's a big step forward, and I think that's part of what's bringing these inconsistencies to light.
There are still issues with observation however, which will improve as you continue to train your eye (basically by doing more and more studies). For example, this construction was pretty good, but the slope of that windshield is probably too gradual, and the front section of the truck is too short.
You are making progress - but there's a lot of room for improvement. At this point, all I can really say is keep at it. Follow the same structure as before, focusing only on construction, then coming back later to add your details. Try another five pages, keeping in mind what I've said here about consistent vanishing points, and then we'll see where you've gotten.
And congratulations on the (sort of) new born! I hope things aren't too hectic!
Tarrazan
2018-07-13 21:44
Thanks! There has been a lot of stuff to do, but fortunately it hasn't been too hectic :P
Here are my five new drawings! https://imgur.com/a/cDsXAhL I have tried my best to follow your advice when drawing these and i hope it shows! And if doesn't i'll just try harder and draw some more :D
Uncomfortable
2018-07-14 00:52
These are definitely headed in the right direction. Your sense of perspective is continuing to improve, but more importantly I get a general sense that your overall understanding of 3D space, and your own belief that what you're drawing is actually 3D (rather than just a flat drawing on a flat page) is jumping forward significantly.
There is of course things to work on:
Try to avoid the kind of guesswork you did for the top half of the car here. Admittedly you did a pretty okay job of it (it was a little off, but not bad), but it's best to avoid those kinds of situations altogether.
I'm not a big fan of how you rounded off your corners - it's kind of like you covered the car in a big blanket. You don't want to stray away from the edges of your forms as much as you did at the far end of the hood/windshield.
I quite like the form you constructed here, but it does feel like the farther side of the car is a little higher up. So things feel like they're tilting/twisting upwards. You may have guessed more than you ought to have there.
This one's a bit of a mess. The box you started out with seemed off, and the ellipses for the wheels aren't correct (rather than laying flat against the box, they seem to be set at an angle).
Avoid hatching, you tend to be pretty scribbly with it, and usually it's better just to focus on line weight to clarify your forms instead.
As I said, you're headed down the right path. All I can prescribe at this point is more practice. What I'd recommend is to spread your practice out over all the subjects from lesson 3-7, and to submit them in chunks once a month. I'll give you what advice I can, and point out anything particularly egregious.
Tarrazan
2018-07-16 10:03
That's amazing feedback :D Thank you so much!
Im definitely gonna submit some monthly drawings! Under what post should I do it? Or should I just create a separate post for it?
Also, I've exclusively done drawabox style drawing for the last 2-3 years I think it's been now, and I want to try and learn from other sources as well. I have wondered about trying to follow proko's lessons but I don't really now If that is the best approach. Could you recommend me anything?
Uncomfortable
2018-07-16 15:53
I generally recommend Proko, as I've given his videos a cursory glance and they seem solid. Unfortunately I haven't had the time to dive into any online figure drawing courses or books at any sort of depth due to my time being taken up by drawabox (and I learned what I know on the topic from a course I took in person).
Tarrazan
2018-09-09 21:42
Hi Uncomfortable. Here are some drawings i have done since last time. I don't really know where to post them tough, as they aren't focused on a single lesson. https://imgur.com/a/4pavYl4
Uncomfortable
2018-09-09 23:53
Here's a bunch of notes.
There are a few major overarching issues that need to be addressed:
You're viewing construction and your "final drawing" as two separate things. It's extremely important to understand that there should be no such distinction when doing these exercises. That's what they are - you're not drawing horses, you're studying how horses are composed of simple forms combined in a specific fashion. So when you draw the construction lightly and sparsely, obviously skipping a number of steps, you're taking away a good chunk of the value from the exercise itself.
Every single mark you put down should be drawn confidently. You don't give any thought to which ones are better off hidden, or which ones constitute your "final drawing". You only weigh whether or not a mark you're putting down is going to contribute to the overall process, and what it is meant to bring to the table. If it contributes in a meaningful way - be it through construction or communicating a specific aspect of its surface textures or other details, then you draw it. If it doesn't contribute, or if it attempts to accomplish something that another mark already does, then you don't draw it. Simple as that. Afterwards, once the full drawing is fleshed out, you can go back to add line weight to specific key places. That doesn't mean covering the entirety of your drawing with fresh lines, it means adding a little extra thickness to local segments of existing lines to clarify how forms overlap. I talk about the idea of "local line weight" in the video for lesson 2's form intersections, so I suggest you take a look at it.
You are very distracted by detail, and it is distracting you from working through the spatial and constructional problems. It comes back to the whole exercise vs. final drawing deal. There are plenty of opportunities to draw clean things outside of drawabox, but that is not what these exercises of critiques are targeted towards.
If there is one overarching goal for all of drawabox, it is as follows: to teach a student to truly believe that what they are drawing is three dimensional - that they are crafting solid, unyielding, 3D forms within a 3D space to which the page is just a window, rather than simply drawing 2D lines on a flat piece of paper to make people think it's 3D. To put it simply, when someone starts learning to draw, they still understand the difference between an actual 3D object they can see, and the marks they're making on the page, and that comes through.
Conversely, as a student really starts to internalize the material, the border between "i'm really just drawing 2D lines and fooling my audience" and "i'm constructing solid forms in a three dimensional space and I firmly believe it" gets thinner and thinner, and these exercises - pushing you to draw through your forms, reinforce them with contour lines where necessary, and so on are designed to whittle it down. It all comes down to the idea that the best way to convince someone else of something is to already believe in the lie yourself.
That is why we don't strive to limit our reliance on construction in these exercises, because our intent is not related to the results we produce. It's all about how it impacts and influences the way we think. We're rewiring our brains.
Now, I noticed you had some issues in adhering as closely to construction with your horses as you should, in a number of places. There's a few newer demos I've done for students that may help in this area, as long as you take them to heart:
for head construction
for general construction
Notice how explicit I am with every single constructional line I draw. I'm not cutting corners, or trying to hide things. I'm constructing all of my forms to completion, and then working out how they relate to one another as I go, then compare that to your own process. It's not so much about me having more experience - the process is something anyone can apply, and that's the first step. And with experience, the results and the general spatial understanding improves.
You are certainly continually improving, but that's what holds you back the most. The fact that you have a tough time internalizing the lessons however comes down to whether or not you are regularly applying the techniques and instructions as they're explained. So you'll learn the stuff, and then slack off a little in terms of applying them, doing so half-heartedly instead. You're still benefitting from them, but you need to push yourself to be a lot more direct in your application of the concepts.
Tarrazan
2018-10-28 01:00
Hi Uncomfortable.
This is not a submission of a drawing, but rather a question about how i should structure my drawings, now when i'm not doing lessons by them selves.
I want to try drawing stuff outside of drawabox, namely humans and landscapes, but i still want to do my drawabox drawings. But i don't really now how to proceed. I want to try drawing with other techniques etc. but i kind of feel "guilty" when i try other stuff, and with other techniques.
I'm not totally sure what i'm asking. But can you give my any advice in regards to incorporating stuff outside of drawabox?
Uncomfortable
2018-10-28 01:16
Drawabox as a whole is less about teaching a specific way of drawing, and more of a course that is meant to use certain approaches and techniques to increase your understanding and awareness of core concepts that exist underneath the surface. Specifically, we use concepts like construction, drawing through forms, using contour lines, etc. all to build up your understanding of 3D space, and to develop your own belief and view that what you draw is not simply lines on a flat page masquerading as 3D objects, but rather that what you're doing is creating solid objects that exist in a three dimensional world. If you truly believe that lie, then it becomes a lot more natural for your resulting drawings to actually convince others of that illusion more effectively, due to how your subconscious behaves while drawing, adjusting lines one way or another in a manner that your audience's subconscious picks up on.
I've probably mentioned this a number of times - all drawabox is, is a series of exercises. Lesson 1 and 2 is obvious in this regard, but lessons 3-7, where you're drawing actual things and building them up - those are also exercises that just happen to use specific kinds of objects as an example. So when you talk about drawing things "the drawabox way", while there's obviously a particular manner that implies, in truth there's no such thing. It's not a technique for drawing, it's a technique for learning how to think about space and form.
And sure, you can and will incorporate some of those techniques into actual drawing, in parts at least, it's only because it's something that helps you to think through those spatial problems. So you can certainly still do your drawabox exercises whenever, but if you're following along with another instructor's lessons, you should be following along with their instructions to the letter and not replacing their instructions with someone else's wherever you see fit. I tell people the same thing when they're following my lessons - follow my instructions to the letter, and if you think you know better because of something you've heard or read elsewhere, it doesn't matter because you won't truly know what you're meant to learn from this until you're all the way at the end - and perhaps not even then.
There's a lot of good that comes from trying many different things and different approaches, as long as you're throwing yourself into them completely - the only thing you should ever feel guilty about is if you're following someone else's material, but replacing their instructions wherever you see fit. It's something a lot of beginners do because they prefer one way over another, but without any understanding of what it's all for.
The other thing that's worth mentioning is that one should not be grinding any lessons 24/7 - I strongly encourage my students to spend only half of the time they're drawing specifically on trying to learn and improve. The other half of their time should be spent drawing for the sake of drawing - we all learn drawing because we want to do something, otherwise there would be no point, but many of us feel like we shouldn't start attempting it until we're ready. But in truth there's no such thing as being ready - you just do it, it turns out like shit, and you keep doing it anyway. If you don't, and spend all your time focusing only on "I need to get better", you'll either burn out (although I doubt you would, given how long you've kept at this, you've got an iron will to be sure) or you'll end up with polished technical skills and no sense of how to apply it.
AAARRN
2018-06-01 08:58
https://imgur.com/gallery/JB5KeIn
Well this took way longer than expected.
I took vehicles I observed in my neighbourhood and at a show as references. Going out was more fun than grinding google for references.
Partly why it took so long was because of the ellips template. The ones they had at my local art and supply store were quite expensive and the shipping costs online were quite high. Luckily I have access to a laser cutter so I made my own one in clear acrylic. Still took quite a bit of work and time but it was fun to do and now I have all the angles and sizes.
Because of the waiting with the ellips template I started out with some planes. I figured ellipses weren't very needed here. I was quite mistaken when it came to wheels and propellers. In general I'm not too happy with my planes (have more lying around), but I learned a lot from it. The more boxier vehicles seemed to go much smoother. Finally having the ellips template also did wonders. The hardest part was usually transitioning from the scaffolding to the definitive design. Followed up by adding some shadow and weight to it. I know I added too much black ink in some pieces, but it made realise how much is needed and that there is difference between black and shadow.
I also added an unfinished construction of a Vespa motorcycle. It was making too many mistakes which made it disappear in its own scaffolding. Maybe if you want you can give me some tips on how to approach this better.
It was very fun to do and I still feel inspired to draw many more vehicles. But for the sake of meeting personal deadlines I show you what I have now. I hope you enjoy them and I'm looking forward for your critique
Uncomfortable
2018-06-02 18:01
I think it's pretty amazing that you were able to laser cut your own ellipse guides - most definitely find that they're way too expensive (I've heard people talking about cheaper ellipse master templates, but they definitely cover fewer cases).
Overall, you definitely did a phenomenal job. Earlier on in the set (I'm not sure if these are in chronological order) with some of your planes, things were definitely a lot more simplistic, but as you progressed you seemed to gain a much greater awareness of how forms could be broken down further. It's clear that you did struggle a fair bit with some of the fuselages, especially those with more specific, nuanced curves to them. These are notoriously difficult, it's really the specificity of those curves that makes them tricky, and it'll take a good deal of practice to really get over that last 10%. To be completely honest, due to the fact that I've rarely ever drawn airplanes, it's not something I've gotten past either (though with some targeted practice, I have no doubt that you'll get over that barrier if you so choose to).
The rest of your constructions are really fantastic, and convey a really strong sense of solid form. Your proportions are spot on, and even those that stray from the symmetrical nature of most vehicles (like the industrial lift at the end).
I do agree that you went overboard in many cases with the black sections - the key here is to remember that at least in these construction drawings, our main use of solid black "shadow" areas is to separate things out from one another. A little cast shadow here and there can help focus the eye on one form over another. In this regard, having solid black areas on the parts of a construction that sit closest to the viewer (so not serving to clarify any form overlapping that section) becomes largely pointless.
I can definitely see the draw aesthetically (this one came out beautifully), but the cases where it really helped were those where they did function at least partially to help separate things out. Here and here on the other hand, it actually worked to your detriment as it hid a lot of the valuable contour lines you had in there, which would have helped define the form (especially in the latter).
As for your Vespa, I actually think it was going pretty well, and it's too bad that it went unfinished. That said, when I draw things with an overbearing amount of construction and subdivision, I have a tendency to factor considerations towards line weight in throughout the process, rather than only at the end. It's usually very subtle, and I'll still find places to push things further at the end, but I'll usually try and pull some forms out as I build them up, so as to keep things from getting too visually confusing.
At the same time, as you practice dealing with complex constructions like this, it does become easier to see the hidden vehicle. In this regard, I can make out your vespa without too much trouble - so as much as being a matter of technique, it's also a question of continuing to train your eyes.
Anyway, you've done some more excellent work here. I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete - and with that, you've completed the dynamic sketching curriculum! So congratulations on that. Right now there isn't really much else as far as drawabox goes to tackle next, but in the coming months (after I've had a chance to rebuild the website, which I should be starting in the next week or so) I'm planning on developing another lesson set focused on design and form language - basically taking what we've learned about drawing real objects and leveraging it to create fresh and interesting designs. It is worth mentioning though that the critique tier for these will likely be the $20 one, due to the more general and flexible nature of that subject matter. The lesson material, as always, will be completely free.
AAARRN
2018-06-03 15:38
Thank you for the wealthy feedback. I agree with all your points and I'll give the Vespa another shot. I think the principle of less is more is quite applicable in how I need to apply shadow.
I'm very much looking forward to the new lessons you are making. For now there are still the treasure chest and texture challenges that I can do. I also started following the proko figure drawing courses. It has an assignment quite similar as lesson 6 which gives me a head start.
BeccaRand
2018-07-01 22:38
Here are my vehicles for critique. There's definitely improvement and increased complexity, but all in all these still look pretty goofy. I do feel like I was able to use a lot of the techniques laid out in the videos, though, so I obviously understand the basics, but wish I could get these to look more refined/less awkward. Thanks for your time!
https://imgur.com/a/SoI0y5q
Uncomfortable
2018-07-02 18:07
So it's clear you're heading down the right track. There are some issues that I'll point out, but fundamentally you're focusing a great deal on your major forms and establishing everything as components that sit firmly grounded in 3D space. The reason they're looking "goofy" comes down to your observational skills.
Up to this point, your observational skills have always been ahead of what's been required. I think that's because the previous courses you've taken really leaned into developing those, so you had a pretty significant head start. While you've certainly been flexing those muscles throughout these past lessons, most of your focus and development has been concentrated on handling those 3D forms.
Vehicles are complex and nuanced in ways that we haven't quite seen just yet. The everyday objects from lesson 6 start treading into this sort of territory, but their scale tends to make them a lot more relatable. On top of this, in that lesson we were mostly looking at objects we had in front of us, whereas this one forces us to rely more on photo reference. All of this comes together to really push the limits of our observational skills.
This has an impact in several areas:
Proportions. This is a huge one, and it really bites people in the ass with this lesson. I can definitely see you improving quite a bit with this over the course of the set, but while I can't be certain without seeing the references you were drawing from, I feel like you have a tendency to make the wheels smaller than they ought to be.
Nuance. This is definitely the most frustrating part, as it plays such a huge role, but it's the sort of thing that can only be developed through a lot of targeted practice. With all that is going on in these various vehicle designs, it's quite challenging to distill out the key features and details that really carry the entire thing. Sometimes it's the precise flow of the curvature of the hood, or the angle of one piece relative to another, but with vehicles when the mark is missed, it tends to be terribly obvious (without being entirely clear as to what was missed - just that something has been). On the flipside, when you really nail a particular point of the vehicle's character, it's equally obvious. For example, we know this piece has proportions that are all kinds of goofy - but if you look at the way you've handled the hood and the headlights, despite the relatively simple level of detail, you can see that the character of that piece has been nailed down quite well. Conversely, look at this one, the angle of the windshield feels off, despite having no idea what the reference actually looks like. It's the nature of the subject matter - vehicles, especially consumer ones, are so meticulously designed, that the margin for acceptable error is pretty slim.
Aside from those issues, I did notice areas where your ellipses were off by a fair bit. It usually comes down to the ellipses-in-planes, and applying the criteria for whether or not an ellipse represents a circle in 3D space. Here's an example where things were off. The red one closely matches yours, while the blue one is what would have been more correct. As you can see, the minor axis was pretty close, but what really had a significant impact was the matter of the contact points to top and bottom of the enclosing plane. This suggests that the degree of your ellipse should have been quite a bit smaller in order to represent a circle at that orientation (based on the vanishing point towards the right side).
Another area of contention are the wheels as a whole - and to an extent, this excites me. The reason is that your wheels tend to capture the essence of most of the problems I've raised above. Obviously, ellipses and maintaining the illusion that they represent circles are extremely important when it comes to drawing wheels. Beyond that however, wheels and tires have a lot of nuance to their own designs, and can be quite complex if taken so far as to worry about tread, rims, etc.
So, I want you to set aside the vehicles for the time being and instead focus on drawing 30 wheels, from reference. Focus first on making them feel solid (so constructing sturdy, consistent cylinders), then pay attention to the tires (you'll notice that their edges are a little beveled, so they bulge more than basic cylinders), give some consideration to tread, and finally play with their rims. Look at a variety of kinds of wheels - basic sedans, SUVs, sports cars, jeeps, motorcycles... hell, even the landing gears from air planes.
You're going to be a bit of a guinea pig on this - I may turn this into an exercise tied to lesson 7, kind of like how lesson 3 has the leaves and branches exercises.
I dwelled a lot on the criticism side of the critique, but I figure it's worth mentioning - I think you did an excellent job with the helicopter, and you did some pretty good work nailing the particular design nuance of this car (and its wheels look pretty good too!). The very last thing I want to mention is that once we get back to vehicles after the 30 wheel bit, I want you to try leveraging the constructing to scale methodology more to construct your enclosing boxes to specific measurements. There does appear to be a fair bit of winging it here, where you accidentally end up having to build outside of your initial boxes, due to a misinterpretation of scale.
BeccaRand
2018-07-15 15:20
Thank you for your feedback! Very helpful, I understand your points. I tool a little mental health break but I'm starting on the wheels now.
Uncomfortable
2018-07-15 15:51
Sounds good! Nothing wrong with taking a little break. This stuff, especially the hard surface constructions with the vehicles being the most challenging among them, can definitely wear a person down. Some time away can definitely be beneficial, but I'm glad to hear that you're back at it now.
BeccaRand
2018-08-10 16:13
Hi! I'm back! Here are my wheel drawings:
https://imgur.com/a/QsZPQ2r
I bought some ellipse templatesyou can see that the drawings where I used the guides vs the freehand ones are night and day.
Minimal success with the tire tread (couldn't figure out how to estimate that without pulling the circle out of perspective and plotting back), but I think they are looking better in general.
Uncomfortable
2018-08-10 22:33
This is fantastic. I got your submission while I was travelling between cities (I'm on vacation with family at the moment), and I was so pleased by your results that I showed them to my grandmother. She was quite pleased too (though she doesn't know a whole lot about drawing).
Here you've demonstrated an exceptional grasp of how these wheels both exist as cylinders in 3D space, as well as how to approach the finer, smaller points of their details as form rather than sticker-like throwaway features. Personally, I'm also very pleased with your tire treads (despite your own assessment), and found that while you're right that the ellipse guide ones were considerably cleaner and better, those you constructed freehand were still reasonably solid all things considered.
I think this will serve as an excellent exercise to add to this lesson - and I particularly liked how you played with connecting some with an axel. I think I'll be stealing that, if you don't mind!
So, to round this off, I'd like you to do 3 more vehicle drawings, taking what you've learned here and applying them. Obviously stick to vehicles with wheels, as you've already proved yourself with helicopters and such. I'm keen on seeing these new pages, and I expect you'll see a considerable bump up.
The exercise aside, your brief break from drawabox may also have helped in a number of ways.
BeccaRand
2018-08-13 17:33
I am honored!!! There is truly no higher praise than grandma praise. Working on the cars now. :)
BeccaRand
2018-08-21 16:21
Okay, here are the rest of the vehicle drawings (added to the same album):
https://imgur.com/a/SoI0y5q
I think the second van and the Model T show a lot of improvement, the Porsche attempts not so much. I couldn't figure that one out after a few tries so I decided to give it a break. I kept getting confused by the cab because it's so far inset from the body.
Though the wheels look better on all of them so that was good!
/u/uncomfortable Can you take a look when you have a chance? Thank you!
Uncomfortable
2018-08-30 19:24
The vans are alright, and definitely show an overall developing grasp of the content, but that model T is something entirely different. You've got a number of complex forms that are meant to play against each other with very specific relationships, and you've really nailed them. More than the drawing being pretty, you've captured the impression of the model T down to, well.. a tee. This speaks to an understanding of its form language - the kind of thing you can pull out from a study like this and apply to a completely fresh design (the kind of thing I want to tackle in future lessons). Stunning work.
You certainly did struggle with that porsche, though I think you started to nail the front in this drawing (despite the back still falling out of whack). The troubles were definitely grounded in proportion, and may have been exacerbated a little by tackling such a challenging subject in particularly extreme perspective. You'll notice that your first couple attempts at this one had a lot of convergence towards the vanishing point, which would have made it even more difficult to deal with nail your proportions. Overall I think you had a tendency to stretch the cab too much, and perhaps didn't slope the windshield down enough (at least in that last page). One key element that stands out to me is that the car door on the last one feels enormous if you try and imagine a human in the scene.
Now, none of that is worrying in the least. As I mentioned in my very first critique of this lesson, some vehicles have such a specific character to them that it can be very difficult to pick up on their nuances - it really just takes extended practicing to familiarize yourself with that specific car. I had to draw my favourite, the 1967 Shelby Mustang GT500 a couple dozen times before I really developed a half decent grasp of it, and even then it was rather shoddy. That was years ago though, so I bet if I drew one now it'd be a mess.
What is important though is that your wheels are looking fantastic, and your vehicles carry a sort of solidity that they didn't when you first started tackling this subject matter. You've developed a much keener eye for the little things that impact your construction, and have pushed your overall confidence with vehicles to a new level. I'm sure the ellipse guide helped, but the improvement speaks to a much deeper shift in how you approach the topic.
So, I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete. Congratulations on completing the dynamic sketching curriculum! I certainly hope you feel these lessons have helped develop your sense of form and space, as from where I'm sitting, you've improved by considerable leaps and bounds over the course of the last few months (though admittedly you did enter with a solid grasp of many of the mechanics).
BeccaRand
2018-08-30 22:15
THIS IS THE BEST DAY OF MY LIFE!!! I mean, my wedding day was cool but this is next level.
You should sell shirts or pins or something! I would buy everything.
Thank you for all of your thorough critiquesI'm very happy with my improvement and look forward to checking out what you come up with next. :)
jordan_dean
2018-07-02 04:34
Here's my lesson for critique! I realized halfway through that I had been aligning the minor axis of my wheel's ellipses to the wrong vanishing point. Overall though, I'm happy with the last few vehicles ,and I got much faster at proportion measurements and overall construction by the last few drawings. Thank you in advance! https://imgur.com/a/MWOUhsb (oops. here's the link. my brain is fried from all these vehicles).
Uncomfortable
2018-07-02 04:36
Looks like you forgot to include a link to your work!
Uncomfortable
2018-07-02 18:27
You've demonstrated a really remarkable growth over the course of this set. It's clear that towards the beginning you were struggling with how to handle constructions of this complexity, and at this kind of scale. I noticed that you had some confusion on that very first page, towards the left side, where things got a bit wacky due to being outside of the two vanishing points (technically it was correct, but it sure as hell didn't look it due to the inevitable distortion).
You definitely approached things the right way though, as far as blocking everything out into its major forms and focusing largely on nailing their proportions and the relationships between the various components. One of the important things in my eyes is that as soon as you hit this truck, you were showing a lot of careful attention to the nuanced design decisions that went into the truck itself. It's very easy, while attempting to nail the solidity of the construction, to lose track of how careful and intentional the angles and relationships within the design generally are, and to gloss over seemingly superficial details in the interest of focusing purely on solid forms. That's what makes the difference between something being a believable object but feeling more like a child's toy, and something actually feeling like a truck you'd see on the road. You've done a great job of nailing that.
Through most of these drawings, you did stick pretty closely to laying out your two vanishing points. This definitely comes with challenges of its own, and personally it's not something I'd recommend - sure, you can be more specific about how you're plotting your lines back, to ensure things maintain their alignment and everything converges consistently, but it also forces you into a fairly dramatic rate of foreshortening. This can come out as feeling quite awkward, since the foreshortening suggests that the object is entire enormous (like building-sized), or that it is extremely close to the viewer, and uncomfortably so.
Now, this is an issue that you seemed to come to terms with yourself, and you shed that reliance more and more as you pushed on through. I was especially pleased with the motorbike at the end, where you were more interested in the patterns of convergence that imply certain vanishing points, rather than the vanishing points themselves. The one thing that I would suggest in regard is to put down a specific horizon line. This can really help solidify your own sense of the space you're working in without having to worry about where the VPs are in specific terms.
Honestly, your work is excellent - and it reminds me a lot of things in the vein of Scott Robertson's work. I'm assuming you've looked at his books (like the ever-recommended How to Draw). If you haven't, I think it'd serve as an excellent next step, as you're definitely leaning into this subject matter. I do think that it's rather dense for beginners, but someone at your stage would definitely benefit from a lot of the more technical principles, and I think that you'd find Scott's work in general quite inspiring.
With that, I'll go ahead and mark this lesson (and the curriculum) as complete. Keep up the fantastic work! It's worth mentioning that in the next month or two, (once I've had the chance to finish rebuilding the website to better deliver the existing content), I'm planning on expanding into lessons that talk more about design. That is, lessons on shape and form language, manipulating proportion and creating new designs from different kinds of source material. It's the kind of skills that I leverage frequently in my work as a concept artist - I just need to pin down how exactly I want to organize and communicate the principles.
jordan_dean
2018-07-02 19:31
Thanks so much for all your feedback during these lessons, and for drawabox as a whole. I actually just ordered Scott Robertsons book as a reward for finishing lesson 8! Anyway, Ill keep your feedback about vanishing points in mind as I go forwards (they definitely feel like a crutch that adds stiffness to my work when I overuse them/ have them directly on the page). Also, I will definitely be back for the design-oriented lessons! Good luck moving forwards with the website rebuild, and again, thank you for these awesome lessons!!
Zeon1xx
2018-07-30 02:02
I've never really been into vehicles much less drawing them, but I was surprised by how much I actually enjoyed this lesson. All the art stores around me had the same set of ellipse templates and I didn't really feel like ordering them on amazon and having to wait for shipping so I just used what I could get and in some cases had to free hand some of them or just use the closest template I had which didn't always match up 100%. Also I was wondering if you could give me some advice on what to do after this, I plan on going through Scott Robertson's How to Draw book, but what do you recommend I do? What would be some good next steps to keep learning and getting better? Thank you for your time! https://imgur.com/a/OdnjwSg
Uncomfortable
2018-07-30 23:32
All in all you've done some really fantastic work here. You've got big, bold forms with a strong sense of weight and solidity. I really love the earlier ones, as you carry the flavour of each vehicle, but simplify them quite beautifully.
When it comes to getting into the details, you start off doing a decent job with some notable issues here and there. Your proportions were usually very close (aside from this one, which feels quite squashed), and your approach to putting in smaller forms was good to start - but what's most important is that I can see a gradual trend of improvement over the course of the set.
Something about the front of the lawn mower really... for lack of a better word, stirs my loins. That is a sexy goddamn grill. The way you've hinted with cast shadows, the way you've fleshed out what is fairly minute and delicate formwork in the bars (or whatever) that fit in across the front.. you've even suggested just the slightest pattern behind them. It's fantastic.
The only issue that I saw likely relates to the point you raised about the ellipse templates you were able to get a hold of - you had a tendency to have your wheels set at a degree that was slightly off in a number of these drawings. It doesn't always stand out a lot, but I did pick up on it here and there, and when I really focused it threw the drawing off a bit.
One area where an ellipse throws things off a lot is with the very front of the locomotive (though it looks like you recognized that, based on your notes). Anyways, it happens. One thought would be, at least in regards to your ellipse templates, to actually try and build your box based off the degree of a given ellipse. So, draw a unit cube in the scene using your ellipse template, and have that determine where your lines converge towards. Then extend that cube to build out the rest of your enclosing box, and work with that. At least this will guarantee that your ellipses will represent circles in 3D space.
Aside from that, you're really doing fantastic work here. I definitely agree with your decision to go through scott robertson's books, and I strongly encourage you to keep up with constructional drawings like these (and like those covered in earlier lessons) to ensure that you're getting a healthy coverage with plants, animals, vehicles - everything between organics and hard surface. At the end of the day, drawabox isn't meant to teach you how to draw, but rather to teach you how to practice, and how to learn.
In the next several months, I'm rolling out a multi-phase update to drawabox as a whole. It starts off with rebuilding the website's design to better communicate the lesson content (and frankly, to make it a little better at generating revenue without being any more intrusive with ads than it is currently). Second phase is to expand the lessons into more advanced topics relating to design - such as shape and form language. Those are the sort of things that took me from where you are now to being able to think about creating new things.
So, I'd hope that you'd jump on that once they come out (though it'll be a couple months at least). Until then, do a lot of studies. And if you're interested in moving onto digital painting and that sort of thing, I'd recommend trying to do full photo studies. That is, replicating an entire photograph, first by focusing on value (only greyscale), and eventually moving into colour. It can be a bit of a jolt to have to apply construction to an actual illustration or scene, so it's good to get used to that early.
Anyway, I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete. Congratulations on completing the entirety of the drawabox curriculum (so far).
Zeon1xx
2018-07-30 23:46
Thank you very much for the feedback! I'll definitely be looking forward to those new lessons!
Leerxyz
2018-09-05 20:58
Hey, here is my lesson 7 homework: https://imgur.com/a/XJMwNFY
I'm kind of nervous turning this in, but also proud of myself that I've made it this far :)
What I didn't get out of the 'ellipses in planes' video right away was that you are expected to draw the circle with the degree fitted to the degree of the plane one draws the circle in, is that correct?
As always, thanks for the lesson and the critique!
Uncomfortable
2018-09-06 00:53
Honestly this shows considerable improvement over your previous lesson, especially when it comes to the enclosing boxes and other major forms you employ. Being able to use a ruler probably helped, but the reason it would have is that it allowed you to separate the process into two distinct areas - demonstrating your knowledge of space (which appears to be pretty strong), and executing your marks.
I think as you get into it, you definitely get a lot bolder with your mark making, and it helps a great deal. This tank, for instance, is pretty fantastic. I also think throughout this lesson, you allowed yourself to really get into the intricacies of your subject matter without necessarily forgetting the major forms and how everything sits in 3D space. I'd say this boat did skip some steps, but at the same time you demonstrated that you still held the principle forms in your mind as you worked, and that you understood how the details you drew existed in space. It's actually quite a tricky thing to balance, and you did a great job of it.
Now, you definitely did struggle with the ellipses. In regards to your question, the Measuring in Perspective: Constructing to Scale video demonstrates how you might apply it. That is, using an ellipse with a semi-formed plane to establish a "square" in space, and then repeating that square in perspective several times. While this means you'll have planes that are equal in height and width (and therefore can contain circles), you still have to be able to draw an ellipse within that plane. That's where it gets difficult.
If you remember the box challenge, you'd basically give it a shot, then analyze it to see where things went wrong by extending your lines. You can do something similar with ellipses, and it's something I plan on explaining more specifically in the cylinder challenge when I get around to rewriting it (during my multi-phase drawabox rebuild process). Just like you extend the lines of a box, you can take a cylinder drawn in a box, or an ellipse drawn in a plane, and you can identify the vanishing points the plane's edges converge towards, and then compare them towards two vanishing points defined by the ellipse (one by the minor axis, the other by how the vertical contact points to the plane are aligned). This gives you a way to test the two criteria. Of course, in order to really work, you have to do it quite a bit, and over time your internal sense of how to execute that ellipse improves.
That is ultimately the most beneficial way of approaching it, and it is important to have experience with that. In this exercise, you are however allowed to use an ellipse guide if you can get your hands on one, and it can definitely make things a little easier (in the way the ruler did for your straight lines).
The other area you do need some work on is with your cars. It's a pretty broad topic, but the reason for this is that cars tend to have a very specific set of relationships and proportions that define them, and it's very easy to get them wrong. I can't tell you how much I've struggled with cars - I probably did dozens of studies of a single model just to come vaguely close to getting it right. They're tricky little shits, and they've all got their own character and personality. But in that, they're a very interesting thing to practice.
Instead of jumping back into cars however, I want you to try something else - it's a mini exercise I assigned to another student who struggled with the same thing, and it seemed to be quite helpful there. I want you to draw 30 wheels.
The funny thing about wheels is that they're a lot like cars, in that they tend to have their own unique character, their own little features that set them apart from one another. From the beveling of the tire (they're not just simple cylinders after all, there's a lot more going on!) to the tread in the rubber, the intricacies of the hubcaps, etc. It'll also be a great opportunity to help you work with those ellipses.
Give that a shot, and we'll decide what to do from there. Overall you are making great progress, so you should be quite pleased with yourself. Keep up the great work.
Leerxyz
2018-10-24 17:44
Hey, this took a while, here are the wheels: https://imgur.com/a/GabHKxX
I think figuring out how to draw the tread in the rubber of the wheels was one of the main challenges, making them look 3D and barely having any space to draw them.
Maybe I should've drawn the whole wheel bigger but that would've meant a lot more work for this mini-exercise.
And as always keeping things proportionate was difficult, because you need to think about so much stuff while drawing that it's
challenging.
I'm probably a little bit lazy on that end.
Towards the end I got used to some construction steps so thinking about proportions was easier.
I feel like proportions are the last thing to think of after learning the construction steps, etc.
Like always, thanks in advance for your advice :)
Uncomfortable
2018-10-24 18:29
I'm going to be a little brutally honest here, but given that this is your 21st homework submission, you've probably developed a thick enough skin to bare it.
This is not what I was asking for. Not even close. You went in with some very, very inaccurate assumptions, and what you've written there really does reflect that. Ultimately, it happens - all that's lost is some time, but I know for a fact that you can absolutely do much better than this.
Every submission for drawabox should absolutely be the best you can manage at this stage. If you could have put in more effort, more time, and yielded better and more meaningful results, then that is exactly what you should do. I can't give you any sort of useful advice if what I see is not the best of your current ability.
Yes, you should have drawn the wheels much bigger. You should have also constructed them using cylinders as a starting point - meaning, making good use of the minor axis to do so.
The focus of this exercise is not on detail. It's still about construction, and 80% of it is based on nailing that underlying form, starting with a cylinder, and going down into a more nuanced wheel with bevelled edges. It is, after all, a drawabox exercise, and as you well know form and construction is everything around these parts. It needs to feel solid and confident, and this is VERY MUCH a spatial problem. As I've probably mentioned before, our brains benefit considerably from having more room to think when dealing with these kinds of challenges.
It may help to look at this video, created by the first student I had go through this wheel exercise. She did use an ellipse guide for this (she mentions it in the video and talks about where she got them), and I still strongly recommend that you pick some up.
Now, I do want you to do this exercise again (although you may cut it down to 15 wheels instead of 30) - but before that, I did notice that you haven't actually completed the 250 cylinder challenge, and your work here makes me think that perhaps you should do that first. But maybe before any of that, you should give yourself a little break. Whether you did the exercise correctly or not, you did put a lot of time and effort into this, and I imagine that it did take a lot out of you.
We all make mistakes, and sometimes we accidentally veer down the wrong path. Give yourself a little time to recover from that, then dust yourself off and get back on the road.
MegaMikeNZ
2018-09-20 10:38
OK here it is. I took my time and tried to do it right. It'll be pretty obvious that I was unable to obtain a set of ellipse guides. Despite my best efforts with using axes and ghosting etc, my poor ellipses did ruin more than one of these drawings. I did take a break to practice a few pages of ellipses and I think that helped with the later drawings. I did however come to the conclusion after watching your video a couple of times, that it's pretty much impossible to use a free-hand drawn ellipse to work out a perfect square in perspective. I do understand the theory of it, but in practice it's another thing. Seems like it's pretty tricky even when you're working digitally. Anyway it did make me study the whole thing quite closely, and I went off and learned some other methods for doing the same thing, like the measurement method (using the horizon line and 90 degree angles to work out a square in perspective) - not practical for this lesson, but interesting none-the-less.
Another thing I found interesting about this lesson was the comparison between simply using the info in the isometrics to extrapolate where my lines should go vs. relying more on the reference photo and just drawing what I see. Of course in a perfect world those 2 things would be the same but, yeah.. I did focus more on the former, as I think that's more in the spirit of the lesson, and just used the latter to check that my decisions made sense. I'll admit that I do still struggle with estimating vanishing points. Usually I'm cruising along thinking everything looks good, or at least in the correct ball park, then when it comes time for the final lines to converge I learn just how far out I am. Quite a pain when you're working in ink.
Speaking of ink, is it me or does every ballpoint pen eventually go blotchy when using a steel ruler a lot? Went through about 4 of them, sorry about the smears.
Anyway, looking forward to your feedback. https://imgur.com/a/2R6d7q9
Uncomfortable
2018-09-21 21:49
Honestly, this is REALLY well done. You're employing the concepts covered in the lesson really well, and are demonstrating a propensity for thinking through the process of construction and the manipulation of form in space.
Furthermore, despite your struggles with your ellipses, I think you did a pretty good job with them considering how you were limited, especially towards the end. The wheels on your mustang came out really well, as did those on the 14 wheeler and the DeLorean. Really, you were nailing them pretty well later in the lesson.
There certainly is room for improvement, but you show a great deal of it over the set, as well as a solid grasp of the foundational elements and more. Mostly it's a matter of observation, and an awareness of how - especially in vehicles - each one has its own very specific personality to it, in the way that the curves, and proportions and relationships all come together to give the extremely distinct sense of that specific model. The design of these vehicles is so particular that any one piece being off by more than a certain margin will throw us into that sort of uncanny valley, where we know something's wrong but can't put our finger on what.
That's all very normal, and it explains why, say, your mustang felt a little squat, and other vehicles may not have felt entirely right. It's the sort of thing that'll improve with continued study of a specific object (during one exercise I probably drew a 67 shelby mustang 20-30 times before I could even start to really get the personality right), but I have an exercise that should help you in regards to this particular challenge.
The kind of relationships and character that we find in a car can also be found in their wheels. From the shape of the tires and the extent they're bevelled (tires are not actually simple cylinders, they're more complex than that), the style of their tread, the complexity of their rims, and so on, tires have the same kind of personalities we see in the larger vehicle. So, I've lately been trying to have students try getting more familiar with the finer points of wheels in order to tweak how they see entire cars. And as such, I've been field-testing a "30 wheel challenge".
As it sounds - I'd like you to try drawing 30 wheels, all with as much attention to construction and detail as you can manage. Try all kinds - motorcycle wheels, standard sedan wheels, lawn mower wheels, the wheels on those giant industrial trucks you find in quarries... go nuts. Use it as an opportunity to continue refining your ellipses (which are already coming out really nicely), construction as a whole, and your observation of the finer points of these kinds of subjects.
Once you're done with the wheels, I want to see two car drawings.
As far as I'm concerned, you are done this lesson, and with it the whole lesson set, as you're demonstrating a strong grasp of all the concepts - strong enough to continue pushing them forwards on your own. But before I mark it as complete, I figured I'd give you a little something more to solidify these points.
So, keep up the great work, and I look forward to seeing your wheels.
MegaMikeNZ
2018-09-24 03:41
Thanks for all your notes and good advice.
Turkopauto
2018-10-14 22:01
Hey, I completed this a while ago but uh didn't really submit it because doing these drained my soul. So things might be a bit out of order of completion (aside from the first few which I remember).
Imgur: https://imgur.com/a/Mxzm4Jl
Any suggestions on where I should go from here? I've been all over the place doing digital studies and some snippets of anatomy.
Uncomfortable
2018-10-15 16:13
All in all you've got a lot of good work here. There are a few things I can point out to help you continue improving, but you're generally heading in the right direction. Also, while your widths are usually somewhat exaggerated, the length and height proportions are pretty well done and you capture a good sense of each car's particular personality and characteristics.
The first thing that jumps out at me when looking at these drawings is that there's definitely a sense of subtle misalignment in a lot of places. Often times it's a matter of your starting point - the enclosing box - where its sets of parallel lines may not be converging consistently enough.
I also feel that you are being pretty thorough in the early stages of construction (subdividing your box as needed, finding all your anchoring guidelines and such), but one thing that will likely help a great deal is to continue to carry over that thoroughness into actually drawing through the simpler forms you lay into that defined, subdivided space. For example, breaking your car down into fully drawn, concrete boxes and such rather than jumping so soon into the more intricate details of the vehicle. There's just too big of a gap from the scaffolding you have down and the next step you're trying to produce, and you need something to bridge it.
This should remedy a couple major concerns I have in regards to the solidity of some of these drawings. The biggest of these is the fact that whenever you have to draw some kind of a curve, because it doesn't have enough supporting structure preceding it, it ends up being somewhat arbitrary. Remember the nature of a curve - it exists as an approximation of many possible combinations of straight lines, and so it's very easy to end up with a curve that looks as though it could represent a variety of different configurations, and this is what contributes to the resulting lack of solidity.
Instead, we need to draw curves that feel like they represent something very specific and limited - we do that by working in the reverse. We establish the configuration of straight lines first, then round them out whilst sticking as close to that original configuration as possible. Deviate too much, and we lose the specificity and solidity.
The other issue is specifically with the giant meatballs you used for tires on your backhoe. Generally companies like Caterpillar, Deere, Ford, etc. don't use meatballs because they simply don't have the toughness to withstand the kinds of weight and pressure those tires are exposed to on a daily basis. I'd be surprised if a meatball would even manage to hold itself together while standing still.
The issue here is pretty similar to one I see students doing when drawing leaves with intricate edge detail. They'll often make two common mistakes:
They'll draw that edge detail going in and out of the simpler constructional scaffolding (both building additively and subtractively, which essentially means they're treating that previous stage as more of a suggestion rather than building directly off of it).
They'll zigzag a single continuous stroke back and forth, mushing all of the little details and features into a single, smoothed, averaged craptacular line that loses any of the nuance and specificity it would have required.
The solution is to build it up with individual marks, and to do so additively - that is, you have a form, now you're tacking more stuff onto it. You're not cutting back into it, and you're ensuring that every further element builds directly off of your original. I demonstrate that in this leaf demo.
In the case of your
meatballstires, it's even simpler than that. The cylinder is a concrete form - as are the treads you're adding to it. These things have thickness, they're solid, you're tacking on smaller forms. Of course, as is with most textures, it may be more worthwhile to draw the shadows these tread forms cast rather than constructing each individual chunky form on its own. It depends on the situation.All in all, you're doing a pretty good job, but there are some things I want you to work on. So here's what you're going to do:
30 wheels. Wheels are fucking magnificent, they're like a microcosm of the whole car, in that they have their own particular personality to them. They come in a variety of shapes and configurations with differently bevelled tires, different treads, different hub caps, etc. This is actually an exercise I'll be adding to the start of this exercise once I've gotten around to rewriting this stuff. Once you're done, submit this to me and I'll do a quick critique.
Once I've critiqued your wheels, 3 more pages of vehicle drawings. You'll have learned a lot from the wheels, but I also want you to take to heart what i've said here and try to apply it.