Uncomfortable

2022-12-01 21:00

Ultimately it comes down to this - humans have only so much energy and focus they can put to use on a given task. Learning requires use of that resource. When we try to pack in more things to worry about at the same time, there's no extra resources to put towards them. Rather, what we do have gets divided up and spread out.

Thus, every task needs to be considered in terms of just what are we allocating those resources towards, and whether or not that expenditure of resources is towards a clear purpose. Freehanding your lines for every exercise isn't inherently valuable - when we get to Lessons 6 and 7, I encourage students to use rulers there because they've already been armed with a ton of different exercises where they can practice their freehanded linework. Those lessons however involve a lot of complex spatial reasoning and concepts that we need to pay careful attention to, all of which would be severely undermined by further complicating the task.

Similarly, with the plotted perspective exercise, its purpose is very narrow - to ensure that students understand the mechanics of vanishing points, something we end up using a great deal throughout the rest of the course. Thus, it's very important that the student be able to focus on that alone in the exercise, and not on ensuring that their lines are straight.

Keep in mind above all else that Drawabox is a course with its own goals for its students. While you can certainly use the information provided to whatever ends you wish, to follow the course is to adopt its goals (even if you don't fully understand them). So, your own individual priorities (like the focus on learning to draw straight lines well) don't factor in. Sure, we do happen to help students with that a great deal, but it's not because that's what they're interested in - it's because freehanding smooth, confident linework helps us work towards the course's core focus of developing strong spatial reasoning skills, and one's understanding of 3D space.