Uncomfortable

2022-08-31 14:27

There are a couple things to keep in mind here:

• Firstly, Drawabox is not a perspective course - it's a course that, as discussed in Lesson 0, focuses primarily on building students' spatial reasoning skills. You can think of this as an instinctual application of perspective - but perspective on its own generally implies a more technical understanding of all the rules and maths underpinning depicting 3D space as seen by humans.

• Secondly, just drawing boxes endlessly is not an effective way of developing one's spatial reasoning skills - which is why in the grand scheme of the course as a whole, drawing boxes is something we do for a short time towards the beginning (short in relation to everything else we do in this course), focused on giving students a kickstart to their spatial reasoning skills, but one that eventually sees diminishing returns if it is the entirely of how we spend our time. So, we have students draw 250 of them - not a particularly high number, mind you - but we spend only a minority of our time on that because it is not the best way to develop our spatial reasoning skills. On its own, anyway.

The box challenge plays a part, but the most effective way we tackle that spatial reasoning skills are the constructional drawing exercises we explore from lessons 3 to 7. These involve having the student build up their constructions through the combination of solid, simple forms. In building the constructions up, they're forced to consider the relationships between the forms in 3D space. It's this kind of three dimensional puzzle that forces us to consider how the forms we draw relate to one another in 3D space.

We do these over and over, looking at the same problem through the lens of different subject matter - plants, insects, animals, vehicles, etc. - to gradually rewire the student's internal understanding of 3D space on a subconscious and instinctual level.

Brettinabox

2022-08-31 15:05

The rough perspective exercise was the most helpful for me. I started to experiment with different compositions on boxes that could be refined. Doing study and creative sketching I feel are still separate disciplines as sketching will put into practice what you study.