Partial lesson submissions and single exercises will no longer be accepted on this subreddit, but you can get feedback on individual exercises on the Discord Chat Server. More information in this post.
https://www.reddit.com/r/ArtFundamentals/comments/ge2xco/partial_lesson_submissions_and_single_exercises/
2020-05-05 18:13
Uncomfortable
For quite a while, this subreddit has accepted partial submissions despite encouraging students to wait to complete entire lessons. Due to the sheer size of the community and the volume of submissions each day, we are now only going to be allowing full homework submissions and other questions related to the Drawabox lessons.
I understand that many of you are excited to share your work as soon as you've completed it, and I've resisted making this change for quite some time, as I didn't want people to put in what they felt was a considerable amount of effort, and not be able to share their work immediately. Unfortunately with all of the submissions, there are too many cases where people put the work in to complete a full lesson as instructed, only to be buried under submissions of one exercise at a time.
But Uncomfortable! I'm still working through the lesson and I want to know if I'm doing things correctly!
If you have a specific question to ask, you are still allowed to do so here. Alternatively, if you want people to look over the exercises you've done thus far, you can still get feedback on partial work on the Discord Chat Server where you'll find channels for each and every lesson.
There are a lot of people however who desperately seek feedback after every action they take, and they do this out of a lack of confidence and a tendency to constantly second-guess themselves. They want to avoid developing "bad habits" and don't want to waste their time.
The fact of the matter is that the process of learning involves developing many habits - both good and bad. You're going to make mistakes, you're going to do things wrong. None of this is a waste of time, but if you don't develop the confidence to be decisive and move forwards boldly, then you will get stuck second-guessing yourself at every turn.
Keep in mind that the students who pay for official feedback are forced to wait until the whole lesson is complete, and they are better off for it.
I'd like to submit everything, but I don't know how. Reddit only allows me to post one image at a time!
No problem. Instead of using Reddit's image uploader, you can upload all your images to imgur.com (it does not require an account and supports albums). You can also use whatever other third party image host you like. Then submit a link to your album to the subreddit.
This change is entirely in the interest of getting people feedback more reliably. At the end of the day, getting feedback is not guaranteed, as it depends entirely on the generosity and good will of the community. For all the people looking to get feedback, there is a small subset who are willing and able to give it - by reducing the number of submissions overall, we should be able to shine more attention on those who've actually completed whole lessons.
Totala-mad
2020-05-05 20:11
Thank you!
enterthegalactic
2020-05-05 22:35
any plans to restock the fineliner pens?
Uncomfortable
2020-05-05 23:39
Basically they won't be available until things open up more in the US and the general state of things is safer. We have the pens (/u/svendogee is the one who imports them and ships them out, so they're at his place) but I don't want him going out for daily trips to the post office.
[deleted]
2020-05-05 23:47
[removed]
Uncomfortable
2020-05-05 23:54
We looked into that, but it seemed that only certain shipping types were eligible.
Billy1121
2020-06-15 12:11
Can we do these lessons with oencil or do we need to get pens? I was planning to learn with just pencils
Uncomfortable
2020-06-15 14:59
If you aren't planning on submitting the work for official critique then you are not restricted to doing the lessons in a particular way. That said, Lesson 0 explains that the lessons are intended to be done in pen, with fineliners specifically, for the reasons explained in this article. Doing them in pencil would be doing yourself a disservice.
Billy1121
2020-06-15 22:29
I understand. I wanted to eventually become proficient with sketching pencils. Will doing these lessons with fineliners make me better with pencil? Im starting from zero, but i have heard that many people go over pencil sketches in pen for darker lines.
Uncomfortable
2020-06-15 22:32
So the main thing to keep in mind here is that these lessons aren't about teaching you how to draw with pen. Instead, they're just using pen as a tool because it will force you to develop the kinds of good habits and mindset that will help you regardless of what you end up working with later on.
For now, don't worry about what your eventual goals and intentions are - you're here to learn the fundamental skills, the basics of drawing and of thinking in 3D rather than in two dimensions. That's all we're going to be focusing on, and these skills will be useful to you regardless of what you want to draw later on, and what tools you may want to use.
Long story short, yes - doing the lessons with fineliners will help you draw better with pencils.
Billy1121
2020-06-18 11:35
That sounds neat. I picked up a staedtler ffineliner and a F fineliner by that german company but they were expensive.
One thing not in your faq is how long this takes. I want to improve my lines and perspective so i can passably draw landscapes, churches, and architecture by April 2021. Is that possible?
Uncomfortable
2020-06-18 12:58
We don't get into how long it'll get to particular milestones for two reasons: first of all, students who focus on specific deadlines and targets when tackling these fundamental bedrock skills have a tendency to rush more or hold themselves to some arbitrary standard. If they feel that they're not holding up to where they "ought to be" they end up trying to cut through faster, taking shortcuts and ultimately impeding their own progress.
Secondly, everyone progresses through the material at a different rate. The fastest I've seen this course completed without obvious rushing was around 5-6 months. Many however have taken far longer than that, with plenty exceeding a year. There's nothing wrong with that.
Of course, we're still talking about this course teaching students the fundamentals of drawing, spatial reasoning, etc. and while that would help you grasp a lot of the principles involved in drawing architecture and such, we don't get into any concepts like composition, colour theory, values, etc. which would inevitably be a big part of things like landscapes.
If there's a deadline you need to work towards, then set yourself a point in time at which you will assess your development and recalculate your trajectory/path. Setting yourself a goal of "I want to be able to draw this particular kind of thing at X skill level by such and such date" will distract you. What may be more functional however is to say, "I'm going to work through this course for this many months, and at this particular time I will look back at how much progress I've been able to make and assess whether I want to continue on this path or apply what I have learned to better determine the path I want to follow from there."
Mamsi7
2020-05-06 03:05
The box daddy has spoken.
wowohwowza
2020-05-06 08:35
This kills the subreddit.
People barely post anything other than what you've just banned. I can't see this going well personally, but I hope I'm wrong
Uncomfortable
2020-05-06 14:59
It comes down to the fact that a subreddit with loads of activity is not necessarily a healthy one. If everyone is posting their work, but most of them - especially those who've put loads of time into it - are getting no feedback because they're getting drowned out by single-exercise submissions, then there may be plenty of activity but no one's really getting much out of it.
It's better that there be fewer posts in the feed, but more of them actually get feedback. Whether or not that'll be the case though is yet to be seen.
Malabrace
2020-05-06 09:29
Thank you I was mildly annoyed by people doing that
[deleted]
2020-05-06 11:43
[deleted]
Uncomfortable
2020-05-06 15:00
It could go either way. With a full lesson there are more options to pick at, even if one doesn't have time, but some may feel pressure to talk about everything. All comes down to how people see things.
[deleted]
2020-05-07 11:00
[deleted]
Uncomfortable
2020-05-07 14:48
Domino's it is!
kmai270
2020-05-06 15:22
I been on this sub for awhile and I think this is a good move
It will be like how it used to be
pranavjitvirdi
2020-05-07 04:23
Finally, thank god, as someone who seeks to help this is a great change, too many posters posting too frequently and the same couple of exercises annoyed the hell out of me.
Uncomfortable
2020-05-07 14:50
It was definitely getting on my nerves too.
hanareader
2020-05-07 04:43
will there be a way to sort through submissions on the drawabox website? like if I want to see only lesson 5 submissions even if they're dated. There's a lot of lesson 1/250 box submissions.
Uncomfortable
2020-05-07 14:49
While I plan on eventually adding more complex filtering features, there already is a way to just view submissions for a particular lesson. If you go to that lesson's page (like, say, Lesson 5) you'll see a button labelled "View Homework Submissions" which will take you here. That'll show only submissions for that lesson.
FOXCONLON
2020-05-08 17:06
I personally foresee this deadening activity on the sub. Full lessons are available on the website hub for critique. Posting single exercises for feedback gives people who stumble on this sub (I was one of these people) something to look at. Now its just going to be a bunch of links to albums with similar titles.
Kinda de-incentivizes the appeal of the subreddit. Look which posts get the most engagement.
Uncomfortable
2020-05-08 17:18
Those are valid points, but my priority isn't towards the subreddit from a social media standpoint.
We'll see how things turn out, and it may well reduce activity on this subreddit as a whole, but the bigger issue that I was seeing was that this subreddit encouraged certain mindsets that I feel are detrimental to students overall - seeking immediate feedback after completing one or a few exercises out of a fear of making mistakes and "wasting" their time, primarily. It's not sustainable overall, and seeing students who'd actually done as instructed and complete a full lesson's worth of work before submitting go ignored due to the inundation of posts essentially encouraged students to flood the subreddit more in order to compete for attention.
These days I don't think reddit is a good platform for this sort of thing, but the subreddit still exists, and people are still using it - so I want to give those completing the full lessons a greater chance of getting feedback, while funneling those who feel they need more immediate feedback towards a platform better suited to that (the discord server).
I genuinely do hope that by cutting down the number of posts overall, those actually taking time out of their day to offer feedback will be able to focus on a more limited number of posts. I'm not convinced that'll happen (people willing to give feedback are rare and precious things), but one can hope.
FOXCONLON
2020-05-08 17:32
I think a good compromise could be laying ground rules for partial submissions. Maybe they could be limited to 1 per lesson per user? And you could encourage them to be more pictorial exercises that require more time (plotted perspective as opposed to ghosted lines.)
Long-form feedback is already encouraged on the website and all of those lessons are consolidated into one place. I think having single exercises available on the subreddit (with ground rules laid out) would give people some cool stuff to look at.
I personally stumbled across this sub and saw some nicely done exercises and went to the users post history and saw how they improved, so I hopped on board. Im sure some other people have done so as well since the reason I visited was I had seen the subreddit linked numerous times in other art subs.
I understand your reasoning but as I said, I think theres a middle ground approach that might work well here. If theres an implementation of some rules in a FAQ that people are encouraged to read, that could reduce single exercise spamming and encourage quality-over-quantity posting.
Uncomfortable
2020-05-08 17:52
That would be nice, but the unfortunate truth is that people don't read the rules. Even a rule as simple as "no single exercise or partial work submissions" go overlooked because it is human nature to identify one's goal (posting their work) and find the quickest way to get there. That's why on the drawabox website, I set up the submission form such that the user would simply check off which exercises were included, and thus the submission would be automatically relegated to the appropriate section. That is ultimately why Reddit is not an ideal platform for this sort of thing. You have to keep things simple, otherwise your administrative overhead goes through the roof.
And you're not even talking about a period of time where people need to be taught how to do things, because with the majority of submissions being Lesson 1, most people are new to the community and all need to be taught the complicated rules.
Complexity is the enemy when it comes to managing a community. That's one of the biggest things I've learned over the last five years.
FOXCONLON
2020-05-08 18:03
Fair enough. I can see where the community management would get out of hand with something like this. There's a lot of information to juggle (in terms of both the classwork and the rules) and Reddit's UI can make it difficult to direct user's attention in the right direction.
I'll be bummed to see the single exercise posts go! Maybe someday on the site users can have featured pieces on their profile for critique or something along those lines? Not sure how feasible implementing this would be given that images are mostly hosted off-site on imgur.
I personally enjoy being able to see a single exercise that someone put a lot of time into in their coursework, but sometimes don't have the time to address all of the other exercises in a critique, so I'll skip out on saying something.
Uncomfortable
2020-05-08 18:24
I'm sure there will be new features that may or may not help cater to that particular desire. As I keep watching how people interact with the system, I'll continue making changes to better encourage the kind of activity and mindset I believe is helpful for the community.
FOXCONLON
2020-05-08 19:40
Looking forward to seeing how it develops! Ill be around for awhile.
CosmicPickleGames
2020-05-09 08:35
I read through most of the comments on this and I can see divided views. I gotta say I understand both. What you are saying about the size of the community makes perfect sense. With the sheer amount of posts, the ones that are actually cull lessons do get lost as they are naturally less. However, I see the other point of view too. I think many people, myself included, draw not only knowledge but inspiration of this sub. While seeing people post the WHOLE 250 box challenge kept me going, seeing separate texture exercises got me excited and thinking about textures. Also sharing my work with people on the same well journey is a real nice way to boost motivation.
So here is my idea. Why not make a separate subreddit, that can be for sharing any and all types of posts connected with drawabox - partial lesson shares, drawings in which people used techniques learned from drawabox etc. The purpose of this subreddid would be more inspirational than educational. It wouldn't be about searching for feedback for your every exercise and thus not gaining confidence. It would be more like sharing your progress with others. That way people that want to post or feedback whole lessons would look here. Others that want to share their work can post there. I would personally use both for sure.
Uncomfortable
2020-05-09 21:36
Technically speaking, the Discord Chat Server and the Drawabox Community Platform (on the website itself) kind of fit the bill of places for sharing your exercises. While another subreddit isn't a bad idea by any stretch, with all of the existing communities, I'm hesitant to look into further separation.
anfs888
2020-05-11 02:56
I think it's a great idea. I would be more inclined to give feedback / chat on complete lesson submissions. (To the best of my ability since i am only on Lesson 4)
The issue I have is that I felt like there were just too many pages of incomplete Lesson 1 submissions. From what I remember, Lesson 1 is mostly to get you thinking and failing was almost impossible (assuming you took the time to read the lesson and tried your best). It was okay to not understand everything.
I think if people really struggled on Lesson 1 and want feedback, they are better off paying Uncomfortable for a lesson review (to ensure they start the course correctly) otherwise just move on to the next part. I found moving on helped me understand the previous lessons more.
RadicalEggSausage
2020-05-15 00:45
Does uncomfortable still take commission for feedback? And if so, how do I contact him? is it still his patrion
anfs888
2020-05-15 06:03
I'm pretty sure he never stopped.
https://www.patreon.com/uncomfortable
Also, I've been reading Uncomfortable's feedback to other patreons on old reddit posts and on his website (I'm on Lesson 4) and it is a treasure trove of information! Highly recommended reading for reinforcing the lesson materials.
RadicalEggSausage
2020-05-15 13:29
okay thank you
chawisssse
2020-08-17 18:02
Drawabox is basically community service - I don't understand why we can't make it easier on the people who want to help us...especially when many of us aren't paying
Uncomfortable
2020-08-17 18:07
That's ultimately the mindset I'd like to promote - the more time and effort the student can put in to making the people giving the feedback's what they need to do their task more easily, the better. Dropping in one page at a time very clearly gives the impression of "I'd like to do the bare minimum, so I'll leave it to you to pick up my slack" - even if it's not necessarily intended that way.