Uncomfortable's Advice from /r/ArtFundamentals
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Uncomfortable in the post "NEW TO /r/ARTFUNDAMENTALS? Don't know what Drawabox is? Read this first."

2021-01-22 03:52

You're talking about a skill (drawing) and a tool (digital media). Don't mix them together, as they are two separate things. The lessons on drawabox.com will help you start learning to draw, although they recommend the use of pens and paper (for the reasons explained in this article). Those skills are transferrable to digital tools, but separately from learning the fundamentals of drawing you'll also want to learn the use of digital tools.

Uncomfortable in the post "NEW TO /r/ARTFUNDAMENTALS? Don't know what Drawabox is? Read this first."

2021-01-21 21:22

Well we're glad to have you along!

Uncomfortable in the post "Uncomfy's dropped a new video: Overcoming the Fear of a Blank Page"

2020-12-01 01:34

It's already on page 2 of Lesson 0, just after the whole 50/50 rule thing.

Uncomfortable in the post "Uncomfy's dropped a new video: Overcoming the Fear of a Blank Page"

2020-11-30 21:34

That's awesome! I'll definitely check them out. BlenderGuru's videos have been a huge help to me already, so it'll be interesting to see his perspective on this sort of thing.

Uncomfortable in the post "Uncomfy's dropped a new video: Overcoming the Fear of a Blank Page"

2020-11-30 18:04

Yup! For now updating a lot of the recorded video demos/lectures for the lessons is a higher priority, and I'm going to be starting on that in the new year, but I do want to sprinkle in some standalone videos like this one.

Uncomfortable in the post "Uncomfy's dropped a new video: Overcoming the Fear of a Blank Page"

2020-11-30 17:26

I do have a number of topics I'd like to touch upon, so it's not a one-off. I do however have other things higher on my to-do list, including a pretty hefty rerecording spree of the lesson video demos/lectures. Many of them are several years old now and are due for some updating.

Uncomfortable in the post "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."

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.

Uncomfortable in the post "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."

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."

Uncomfortable in the post "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."

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.

Uncomfortable in the post "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."

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.

Uncomfortable in the post "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."

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.

Uncomfortable in the post "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."

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.

Uncomfortable in the post "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."

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.

Uncomfortable in the post "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."

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.

Uncomfortable in the post "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."

2020-05-07 14:50

It was definitely getting on my nerves too.

Uncomfortable in the post "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."

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.

Uncomfortable in the post "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."

2020-05-07 14:48

Domino's it is!

Uncomfortable in the post "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."

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.

Uncomfortable in the post "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."

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.

Uncomfortable in the post "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."

2020-05-05 23:54

We looked into that, but it seemed that only certain shipping types were eligible.

Uncomfortable in the post "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."

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.

Uncomfortable in the post "New? Lost? Read this intro to /r/ArtFundamentals and Drawabox.com before you post anything"

2020-01-21 02:37

While I haven't heard of those particular issues (reddit may just be experiencing heavy server load today, I've had a few minor lag spikes myself), reddit honestly is not a particularly effective platform for this community anymore. As such, I've been working on building a dedicated platform into the website itself that is more tailored to our particular needs.

That platform is scheduled to launch at the beginning of February, so you won't have to worry about reddit for too much longer.

For the time being though, as we are primarily doing things on reddit until then (unless, as you mentioned, you want to use discord which may well be worthwhile at is a large, active community there), I'd recommend hosting your images on imgur.com and submitting a single link to your hosted album to the subreddit.

Uncomfortable in the post "Unfortunate Delays to the Drawabox Community Platform, and a short pause on Lesson 2-7 Critiques"

2019-12-28 13:42

Thank you, I appreciate that - and my condolences for your loss. I can't imagine what it would be like to lose my father, and the thought is something that has weighed on me today.

Uncomfortable in the post "Unfortunate Delays to the Drawabox Community Platform, and a short pause on Lesson 2-7 Critiques"

2019-12-28 13:40

Thanks for the kind words of understanding and support. Sorry that I can't reply to each and every one, but know that I have been reading them and that they are appreciated.

Uncomfortable in the post "Unfortunate Delays to the Drawabox Community Platform, and a short pause on Lesson 2-7 Critiques"

2019-12-28 01:33

It is what it is. I haven't yet had the chance to process the loss - just have to set aside the stress over the community platform and focus on getting across the continent and being away from home and my other responsibilities for an undetermined period of time. Things will be back to normal before too long though, so I just need to get through it all and try to help my grandmother and mother through this as best I can.

Uncomfortable in the post "New? Lost? Read this intro to /r/ArtFundamentals and Drawabox.com before you post anything"

2019-12-19 16:47

So I'd definitely recommend sharing your work wherever - on the subreddit, on the discord, etc. as there's really no harm in doing that. Ultimately the responses you get will depend on time of day, who's online, how many other people are posting at the time, etc. It's pretty inconsistent.

I think asking me "should I support the Patreon" isn't likely to yield you an unbiased answer, given that you're basically asking "should I give you money". Should you? Of course! People doing that is what keeps Drawabox around.

In the context of critiques, it is also the only real way to get a guarantee that you'll receive useful feedback. We are constantly trying to nurture the community, improve the reliability of free feedback, and encourage people to help each other out (and also not to offer erroneous advice that demonstrates a misunderstanding of the material) but it won't compare to the guarantees one receives from a paid service.

That said, the Drawabox Community Platform will be out in under two weeks (aiming for a new years release), so it's not exactly a far-off thing anymore. It will be more direct in the separation of partial and complete submissions, while taking other steps to have submissions that have not received enough feedback or confirmation to keep recirculating.

Uncomfortable in the post "New? Lost? Read this intro to /r/ArtFundamentals and Drawabox.com before you post anything"

2019-12-16 04:01

You probably would have been better off posting this directly to the subreddit (since no one sees this but me), but for what it's worth, I've seen plenty of crazy grips from artists over the years, including at least one who drew the way you do. If it's comfortable for you and allows you to apply variable amounts of pressure to the tip, then it's fine.

Uncomfortable in the post "New? Lost? Read this intro to /r/ArtFundamentals and Drawabox.com before you post anything"

2019-12-13 19:17

You may want to ask this on /r/learnart or /r/learntodraw, though you'll be hard pressed to find a youtube series that really starts from the beginning. Keep in mind that most free resources out there have to focus on the things that are actually entertaining, and so they'll glaze over the basics (which can be pretty dry). That's why I created this subreddit, and drawabox as a whole in the first place - though our youtube videos, while I intend to expand them further in the coming month, are intended as complementary to the written content, not standalone.

Uncomfortable in the post "What to Draw Aside from Draw-a-Box Exercises?"

2019-12-11 15:03

As far as the drawing-for-fun thing stipulated in lesson 0, you're kind of misunderstanding the point. The goal there is not to fuss over ensuring that time is spent productively. This time should not be spent with any intent on learning or improving your skills.

The point is to get used to drawing purely for the sake of drawing - to remind yourself why you're learning this still in the first place, and to displace the natural tendency to focus on the end result as your source of fulfillment and pleasure, and instead find that from the process itself. We've usually been able to do this as children, but by the time that we bother to properly study drawing as a skill, we forget how to do that.

It's entirely common for students to think "I'm not ready to draw this", leaving them with nothing to draw. The fact of the matter is that they are conflating the idea of "drawing" with "drawing well". You can draw anything - just not necessarily well. That doesn't mean you shouldn't, or can't. So imagine that you have all the skill in the world and nothing left to learn: what would you draw? Draw that.

Uncomfortable in the post "New? Lost? Read this intro to /r/ArtFundamentals and Drawabox.com before you post anything"

2019-12-10 21:14

Pen is highly encouraged for the drawabox exercises, for the reasons explained in this article, though where lesson 0 explains the importance of spending half your time drawing for fun, you're welcome to use digital.

Uncomfortable in the post "After being out of stock for almost a month, we're back with more Drawabox Pens!"

2019-11-26 14:52

Glad to hear it!

Uncomfortable in the post "After being out of stock for almost a month, we're back with more Drawabox Pens!"

2019-11-23 09:16

Sorry to hear that! It's definitely true that they're not ideal for long distance shipping (although I think people in Europe are still tempted if they're buying two packs at once).

They're called 'Superior', it's a pretty generic brand intended for wholesale export and there's an option to do custom branding on them with higher order quantities so they may be sold under other names as well.

Uncomfortable in the post "After being out of stock for almost a month, we're back with more Drawabox Pens!"

2019-11-23 08:36

That's more or less been our thinking on the matter. At least with what we're doing now, it's largely meant to improve students' access to good quality pens, and to allow us to move towards developing our own in the future. Selling them on Amazon would probably just suck up stock intended for Drawabox students anyway.

Uncomfortable in the post "After being out of stock for almost a month, we're back with more Drawabox Pens!"

2019-11-23 03:16

For the time being that's not really something we're looking to do. We might think about it once we've actually been able to move from reselling to producing our own.

Uncomfortable in the post "After being out of stock for almost a month, we're back with more Drawabox Pens!"

2019-11-22 22:08

Thanks! We'll get them out to you as soon as we can!

Uncomfortable in the post "After being out of stock for almost a month, we're back with more Drawabox Pens!"

2019-11-22 21:10

Awesome! I hope you like e'm when you get e'm!

Uncomfortable in the post "After being out of stock for almost a month, we're back with more Drawabox Pens!"

2019-11-22 21:09

Hahaha, /u/svendogee (the one who handles all the sourcing, testing and distribution) is very prompt!

Uncomfortable in the post "After being out of stock for almost a month, we're back with more Drawabox Pens!"

2019-11-22 20:57

I'm glad to hear it! It's always great to hear feedback from past customers - especially when it's a glowing review :P

Uncomfortable in the post "After being out of stock for almost a month, we're back with more Drawabox Pens!"

2019-11-22 19:33

We ended up getting dinged extra by the changes in US import taxes, but no matter - we're still selling them in packs of 10 for $16.50, with free shipping in the continental United States.

The pens themselves perform well (we've had a single pen last through all of lesson 1 with no sign of slowing down). They're not perfect - the writing on the outer shell can rub off with intense use - but they're up there with Staedtler Pigment liners, Faber Castell PITT Artist Pens and Copic Multiliners in terms of their results. The main difference is that we're focusing on keeping them accessible, so we're selling them for a fraction of the price of the others (at least in the US - some countries get better prices so definitely shop around and compare). In addition, all the pens in the packs are of the same size (0.5mm), so no more buying a pack only to toss all but one in a drawer. We also hand-test them for nib damage and cracks from the factory before sending them out.

As we continue selling these, we're working towards having our own Drawabox branded pens fabricated - custom designed from the ground up. We're only finally in a position to start looking into how to go about it, so it'll be a while, but we're looking forward to being able to pull that off.

Uncomfortable in the post "New? Lost? Read this intro to /r/ArtFundamentals and Drawabox.com before you post anything"

2019-11-13 21:37

Best of luck!

Uncomfortable in the post "Lesson 5: Drawing Animals (Patreon Critique Thread)"

2019-10-23 20:49

There is definitely a lot of improvement here, but there are some key spots where you've got an arrangement of forms that simply isn't believable.

These are stacked quite well and appear to mostly respect how gravity works.

It's the ones that you add along the sides that start to feel rather weak - they don't feel well grounded, like they could tip over at any point. There are also still many cases where you've got forms that don't respect the properties of a simple sausage. Most of yours do, but there are a few that get skinnier through their length, or show wobbling. The one on the top of this stack is a pretty bad example of wobbling, and the one on the far left there gets much smaller on one end than the other.

Lastly, continue to keep an eye on how you project your shadows, as explained here. I can definitely see signs that you're thinking about how those shadows are going to be cast onto the other surfaces, but when you get cracks between forms, you seem to be pretty hesitant to really let the shadow plunge into them.

All in all you are getting better, and I am going to mark this lesson as complete. You still definitely have a lot of work to fully develop your grasp of how these forms interact with one another in 3D space to be able to sell those illusions however.

Feel free to move onto the next step, which is the 250 cylinder challenge, as it's a prerequisite for lesson 6.

Uncomfortable in the post "Lesson 5: Drawing Animals (Patreon Critique Thread)"

2019-10-22 20:45

This is defintiely a peculiar submission, in that overall you're demonstrating a strong grasp of 3D space and construction, but there are a number of exercises that came out quite poorly. Generally when those exercises come out as poorly as that, it has a visible impact on your animal constructions, but the correlation seemed to be quite minimal. Very strange.

So, starting out with your organic intersections, these do not really capture the illusion that these are solid, three dimensional forms that are interacting with one another in 3D space. There are definitely pockets and sections that are reasonably well done - for example if we zero in on sections like this, and to a degree, like this, we get a better sense of how gravity is being applied to these forms to have them sag down where their weight is not supported and wrap around the forms beneath them.

Looking down here, the relationship between these smaller sausages and the larger one are as shapes on a flat page - like you drew the shapes themselves without thinking about how they'd be interacting in a 3D world, and then tried to resolve that as an afterthought using contour lines and shadows.

When doing this exercise, there are a few things I want you to adhere to:

I do very much get the impression that you may have rushed through this exercise, to the point that you perhaps may have been thinking more about the next drawings you were going to do, rather than what you were doing at that very moment. It's common and can result in students making mistakes early on in an exercise (like not thinking about how the forms interact as they draw each form's silhouette) and instead having to try and come back afterwards to fix things up. My theory is somewhat bolstered by the fact that your work on this exercise back in lesson 2, while not perfect, was vastly better than this.

Now, moving on, your animal constructions are considerably better, and for the most part, are well done. They convey a strong understanding of how your forms exist in 3D space, and how they can be combined with one another achieve greater complexity while maintaining the underlying solidity.

There are a few issues that I'll touch upon, but by and large you've done a good job.

Firstly, when it comes to where you add additional masses to bulk out your constructions, you're somewhat missing the sense of how those forms wrap around the underlying structure. You do a better job here than you did with your organic intersections, but you're not really selling the illusion all that well when drawing the silhouette of the mass (and instead try to rely very heavily on contour curves after the fact).

When you draw the actual silhouette of the form, you need to think about how it's going to be wrapping around the structure it's attaching to - think about how it's meant to run along the surface of this form, as shown here. If you are thinking about this sort of thing, then you need to exaggerate it much further. You're generally pretty good at contour lines, so you need to be channelling that kind of curvature.

You can also see how I've demonstrated it here on another student's drawing. Also be sure to reread the notes on this from the lesson as the diagram there also shows that need for curvature quite well.

The next thing I want to touch upon is your snake. There are a few important issues:

For all intents and purposes I should be considering your lesson as complete as your animal constructions are very solid. I am not however, as I am very concerned about the state of your organic intersections. I want you to go back and do four more pages of that exercise, demonstrating to me that you understand the concepts involved. Be sure to read through that exercise's instructions before doing so.

Uncomfortable in the post "Lesson 5: Drawing Animals (Patreon Critique Thread)"

2019-10-20 18:31

Starting with your organic intersections, these are coming along reasonably well. You've kept the sausage forms simple, they wrap around one another quite well and your shadows are generally well placed (although not always perfect, they're not sticking to the form casting them which is good). Looking at the second page, it is worth pointing out though that the shadow being cast at the bottom left of the stack suggests a different incline to the ground plane than all the others, so that's something to be aware of. Additionally, the S curving sausage towards the upper right is probably the only one that doesn't quite behave in an entirely believable fashion when it comes to gravity.

Your actual animal constructions have a mix of overall demonstrating a good grasp of how forms come together and relate to one another in 3D space, and some notable mistakes when it comes to applying various techniques that hold you back from what you could be achieving.

To start with, your first bird has a core construction that is quite well built. Looking at how the major masses are laid in, and how you've clearly defined the intersection between the torso and the neck and so on, this s coming along great.

There are a few issues here however that also come u pin other drawings. For example, when laying features into the wing, you're treating the wing as more of a flat shape into which you can cut back. It's important to understand that every single form we put down as part of our construction is itself a solid mass that exists in the world. While the act of drawing allows us full control over how we play with what's put down on the page, we still must adhere to certain rules in order to ensure that what we draw still holds onto the illusion that they're 3D. We're given the freedom to do what we want, and with that comes the freedom to sabotage our viewer's suspension of disbelief.

As such, when adding feathers here, you envisioned the wing as being a shape that you could fill in with feathers. Instead, you need to think of it as a solid structure upon which you are attaching feather forms. The pieces that are not yet covered with feathers still remain peeking through, and so in order to ensure that it is fully covered, you want your feathers to stick out of that initial form's silhouette.

Also worth mentioning, you've drawn these feathers by outlining each individual one. What you should instead be doing is implying their presence by drawing the shadows they cast on their surroundings, as explained here.

Here's a demonstration of what you should/shouldn't do when tackling these wings: https://i.imgur.com/RByw2DS.png

Now, another issue I'm seeing throughout your work conveniently rears its head in your pelican. Elsewhere it's not as bad as this, so this is probably the best example to use to bring it to light. Basically, you're severely overusing contour lines. With every constructional drawing tool we are taught here, it's important to always keep in mind exactly what you're intending to achieve, and then to think about whether another mark is already accomplishing that task, or if a different mark might do it better. Past a certain point, contour lines will no longer be all that effective, and they can even start to hurt a drawing by causing it to feel a little stiff or robotic.

Additionally, I'm noticing a tendency to make your contour curves/ellipses fairly similar in degree as they move along the length of a form, rather than shifting that degree naturally as the orientation of each cross-sectional slice is slightly different relative to the viewer.

When it comes to contour lines, where you'll find the most effective point to include them is at the joint between two forms. We can see this as a critical component of the sausage method which we use for constructing legs. The method is so valuable because it allows us to construct an armature that conveys both solidity (by focusing contour curves only at the joints and none through the segments' lengths) and gesture/flow (by using flexible sausage forms). The contour curves at the joints basically produces a repeating effect where it uses the relationship between the forms to make each one in turn feel three dimensional. If one form is 3D, and this is the relationship between them both, then the other form must be 3D, in which case the first one must be 3D, and on and on. Sometimes we are stuck drawing contour lines in the middle of a form and defining no relationship with it, because that's all we've got - but if you can find a joint to reinforce in this manner, it's likely to be effective enough not to even need any more contour curves.

So, if we look at the toucan, the relationship between the cranial sphere and the neck is really solid because of how it's defined there. The relationship between its neck and its torso however is much less so. Also to a similar point, the way the beak form wraps around the cranial sphere helps define this relationship very nicely, and has the same effect. We see similarly strong use of construction when we look at the heads on this drawing and this one.

This does however bring us around to your use of additional masses. I can definitely see attempts being made at having these forms wrap around the underlying structure, but this is definitely something you still need to work on as the way you're having them wrap around is not quite right. Additionally, I noticed several cases where you allow those masses to basically mould their profile/silhouette right into the forms they're being added to. You should not be treating their volume as being so malleable - we're not dealing with clay or putty, but rather it's more like balloons filled with water. They have their own volume, and you can look at it as there being a certain "cost" to each form you add. Each one brings something of itself to the construction, and that has to be somehow resolved while being respected rather than disregarded.

I demonstrate this over a few of your drawings in these redline notes. I also added a few extra points at the end there, touching on the overabundance of contour curves (and their degrees) which I mentioned above, along with how to avoid having your feet feel blobby and non-descript and the fact that you're using stretched ellipses rather than sausages for your leg construction. To this last point, I noticed that you weren't consistently using the sausage method across the board - it's common for students to feel that the sausage method doesn't match their reference, so they'll use another approach entirely. Instead, think of the sausage method as being a way to construct the underlying armature rather than the final form of the leg. You can always add more forms to it to flesh and bulk it out, so it is generally still an excellent starting point, and should be used across the board.

Now, you do have a lot of great construction going on but the points I mentioned here are important, so I want to make sure that you're able to apply them. So I'd like to see four more animal drawings, each of them purely focused on construction with no detail or texture.

Uncomfortable in the post "Lesson 5: Drawing Animals (Patreon Critique Thread)"

2019-10-19 19:16

Whew, this is a HUGE improvement! You're definitely showing a much more purposeful use of construction, along with a stronger grasp of how these forms exist in 3D space and how they wrap around one another. The only minor recommendation I have has to do with feet.

Feet are often things that get added as afterthoughts, and it's understandable why. They tend to be very small with very minor form information, and at the scale we draw they don't end up being more than teeny tiny shapes. So the one thing you can do to improve upon them is to keep the fact that these things are planar forms with (somewhat) clear distinctions between their front, top, side planes, and to keep this in mind while actually crafting their silhouette. This means putting specific bends in that silhouette's outlines to show a distinction between two planes, rather than simply using basic curves and blobs.

Anyway! I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete, so feel free to move onto the 250 cylinder challenge, which is a prerequisite for lesson 6.

Uncomfortable in the post "Lesson 5: Drawing Animals (Patreon Critique Thread)"

2019-10-18 18:18

Yes, do the donkey demo before the other drawings. As for what kind of animals, hooved/quadruped/etc. are fine. Avoid anything particularly novel like fish or whales. Birds, lizards, amphibians like frogs, etc. are generally okay but use your best judgment in terms of whether or not an animal falls in line with the kinds of techniques/demonstrations that are shown in the lesson.

For your last question, when you started these lessons by reading through Lesson 0, you will have come across this warning about the importance of drawing for fun. That is what I am referring to - the fact that you should be splitting up your time spent drawing, half for going through courses/doing exercises/learning where your focus is on developing your skills (drawabox, proko, whatever else), and the other half on drawing purely for the fun of it, taking risks and getting used to not focusing on whether your time has yielded some kind of a result other than enjoyment. That is, you shouldn't be expecting to improve your skills or even produce something impressive (or even good) in that section.

Uncomfortable in the post "Lesson 5: Drawing Animals (Patreon Critique Thread)"

2019-10-17 02:35

This critique's going to be a bit tricky, largely because it's hard to make things out under all the ink you put down with your brush pen - it obscures a lot of the construction underneath, which was in a way the intent here. It's fairly common for students who haven't quite been able to establish strong underlying structure to try and compensate with detail, shadows, or other tricks. The unfortunate truth of it is that when a drawing is lacking proper structure, detail simply falls flat.

Starting with your organic intersections, these are okay, though the key issue is that the sausage forms themselves aren't quite holding to the simple characteristics they ought to. Especially as we get into construction, it's very important that we get used to capturing forms as simple as possible, only conveying complexity by adding more simple forms rather than making those base forms themselves more complex.

Among these forms, you've got several that pinch through their midsection, rather than maintaining a consistent width. I also noticed some forms that remained fairly straight even when their midsection is not supported by something underneath. In these cases, those forms should definitely be sagging.

Lastly, the liberal use of line weight has definitely served to flatten things out a great deal. Line weight itself should never be heavy - it should be a subtle addition used to clarify how different forms overlap, applied only in specific areas rather than along the entire length of a line. You're trying to communicate with the viewer's subconscious, which can pick up slight changes in weight. You're not shouting at their conscious brain. There's also a distinction between line weight and the shadows these forms cast upon each other - as explained here you're largely keeping your shadows stuck to the forms that cast them, rather than allowing them to wrap around the forms upon which they are projected.

Now looking at your animal constructions closely - attempting to look beyond the line weight and detail - many of these are constructed reasonably well. For example, with your ostrich you're doing a good job with the head construction and how the neck connects to the torso form. The torso itself does feel somewhat flat however, as do the legs - using the sausage method here - that is specifically using simpler sausage forms and most importantly reinforcing the joint between them with a specific contour line would help a great deal. Additionally, don't let the feet get cut off - you're welcome to find other reference images to help determine what the feet should look like when they're hidden in your main reference, but don't let them just stop with open edges, as this flattens out the form.

In your foxes, there are a few issues I want to point out:

Again, I cannot stress enough how important it is that you get used to applying the sausage method to your leg structures. Even when the legs in your reference don't look like simple sausages, we can use these sausages to create a simple, solid armature to serve as a base. We can then pile on more additional masses to help bulk them out. The critical thing about this sausage technique is that it captures solid forms while also allowing us to capture the gesture and flow of the limb.

Conversely, looking at how you've tackled this cougar's limbs, the contour lines at the joints are at least moving in the right direction, but there are two critical issues with them:

The last thing I want to say is that your work here is a mixture of two mindsets:

So, in order to get you back on track, I want you to do 5 pages of animal drawings, with no detail or texture whatsoever. Focus on construction alone, and take that construction as far as it can go. Before you do so, reread the first page of lesson 5, and do so carefully. Take note of the diagrams. I'd also like you to do a separate drawing (aside from the 5 pages) where you follow along with the donkey demo, matching the steps as carefully and closely as possible.

After all that harsh critique, I do want to congratulate you on being accepted to FZD! I expect that this application may have played a role in wanting to make your drawings impressive - as far as complementary exercises and such, please don't let yourself get distracted. What you need to do most of all is focus on the lessons that are in front of you, rather than looking ahead or trying to assign yourself something different. You should still be holding to lesson 0's rule of half your time being spent on drawing for fun without the intent on learning or growing (in order to keep yourself well balanced and prepared for the inevitably brutal time you'll have at FZD), but when it comes to the lessons, follow the instructions to the letter.

Uncomfortable in the post "Lesson 5: Drawing Animals (Patreon Critique Thread)"

2019-10-15 22:43

Starting with your organic intersections, there are two main issues I'm noticing. First and foremost, on your second page specifically you've got a few sausage forms that jut out with nothing supporting their weight from below, and yet they still hold their position rather than sagging over. This suggests to me that you're not necessarily thinking in terms of how these forms exist, with weight and solidity to them, and so they're not behaving in a manner that would be natural or realistic.

The other issue is with the shadows those forms cast. Yours tend to stick to the form casting them, rather than wrapping around the surface upon which they are projected, as explained here.

Moving onto your animal constructions, you've got a variety of results here, and I'm especially pleased with aspects of this horse - it conveys a strong grasp of how the whole construction exists in three dimensions, which is impressive considering that having the animal half-facing the viewer can be quite tough to pull off.

There are a few significant issues with how you're approaching things however:

First and foremost, the way you're applying the additional masses is not quite correct. As you can see here, when you draw those additional forms, you tend to draw the silhouette as though it cuts right across the structure onto which it is being appended. Sometimes you add a bit of curvature, but because we don't get any kind of an impression that the form is really gripping the structure, it doesn't build any sort of a convincing relationship between two three dimensional forms. Instead we get more of an impression that they're just flat shapes being piled on top of one another.

Now, you're clearly aware of this to an extent, because you attempt to resolve it by adding more contour lines on top to reinforce the idea that these shapes you've drawn are in fact three dimensional - unfortunately contour lines don't really work to add volume where there was none to begin with. It merely helps us to emphasize what already exists.

As a last point on these additional masses, notice how in this diagram, the contour lines I've drawn over those forms hook around sharply as they reach the edge to give the impression that these masses have thickness to them. This will also help - it's like taking a big mass of flesh and piling it on top of your structure. You're not melding clay into it to the point that the clay fuses perfectly and seamlessly - you're adding new volumes that, while adhering to the underlying structure, still maintains its own independence.

The other issue I wanted to point out has to do with how you draw your legs. It seems that for the most part, you've not been using the sausage method which was introduced in the last lesson, to construct your leg structures and have largely instead just done whatever felt appropriate. This specific method is important because it allows us to construct an armature for our limbs that both conveys a sense of gesture and flow, while also maintaining an impression of solidity by purely focusing very few contour lines on the intersections between forms, where they can be the most effective. It's not that these sausages need to be a perfect representation of the leg, but rather that they give us something to build upon while maintaining both solidity and gesture.

In some cases you apply something similar to the sausage method but you don't stick to simple sausages that match the characteristics of two equal spheres connected by a tube of consistent width as explained here. As such, it does not end up being nearly as effective as it could be.

An area you're definitely seeing a lot of progress is with your animal heads - you've clearly taken to heart the concept of the heads being like three dimensional puzzles (and I can see that to a point you're applying the same concept to how the additional masses are used in bodies, like with your chicken drawing). This is great to see, and is helping you develop heads (and in some cases bodies) that do feel solid and three dimensional.

Before I mark this lesson as complete, I'd like to see another four pages of animal drawings. This time, I'd like you to leave detail out altogether (no fur for example). Focus entirely on construction and apply the techniques as covered in the lesson rather than trying to find your own particular solutions. You'll find that at least with a number of these kinds of animals (mainly quadrupeds), the demonstrations can be applied to get you 80% of the way.

Additionally, before you get started on those extra 4 pages, I'd like you to follow through the donkey demonstration, drawing along with it without any deviation.

Uncomfortable in the post "Lesson 5: Drawing Animals (Patreon Critique Thread)"

2019-10-14 17:26

I don't really think drawing on top is really necessary in this case, because you've got a clear example where you invested a great deal of time analyzing and breaking down a subject, took your time working through the steps of construction, and achieved a pretty solid drawing as a result. That is, of course, the goat.

Here your construction is quite solid, with clear relationships between the forms and a good sense of how those additional masses wrap around one another.

There are just a few issues with it that are worth pointing out:

I actually lied, here's some redlining.

Your other drawings were not nearly at the level of the ram, because they didn't exhibit anywhere near the same amount of attention, observation and analysis. This is what you should essentially be doing for every animal you draw. Many of these drawings were also quite small and cramped, resulting in much clumsier construction and a harder time working through spatial reasoning. Lastly, you also had a tendency to completely neglect the feet.

All in all, the ram is the only one that really demonstrated the limits if what you're currently capable of - you pushed yourself, did your absolute best, and didn't rush. That's what I want to see, and so give me another 5 drawings like that.

Uncomfortable in the post "Lesson 5: Drawing Animals (Patreon Critique Thread)"

2019-10-12 19:53

You've definitely developed quite a bit throughout this lesson! You're clearly working hard to employ the concepts covered in the lesson, and have a number of important successes. Overall your grasp of space and form is coming along well, and while there are some things I want to point out to you, you're moving in the right direction.

Starting with your organic intersections, these are generally coming along well. You're doing a pretty good job of capturing just how they slump and sag over one another. My only concern is when you've got forms that start to lose their sense of solidity, in cases like this one on the first page, you allow the sausage form to get quite wiggly, undermining the solidity and weight of its form. When drawing these forms, think of them as being filled waterballoons, and always remember that they have weight. In this particular case yours seems to be floating somewhat.

As you mentioned about your shadows, there is definitely room for improvement here - they're not awful, but there are places where they're sticking too much to the form that casts them, rather than being able to wrap around the forms they're projected upon as explained here.

There are just a few major issues in your animals that I want to point out. The first and foremost of these is how you handle the additional forms. Right now you're not really treating them as though they have their own volume - they flatten out very easily to conform to the object they're being added to, rather than bringing something of their own to it. It's a very similar concept to the organic intersections - each one is an independent form, and you're not melding them together like putty - you're stacking them together in a way that allows one to wrap around the other without losing its own independent characteristics.

So, if you look at this fox and compare the mass added to its back to the ones shown in this section of the lesson, you'll see how where yours lays flat, mine pushes past the silhouette of the original form and actually creates a sort of mountain/valley configuration of bumps going up and coming back down. This comes from each form having its own volume, and how they stack up over one another.

As as side note, this is usually a lot more successful when we pile the additional forms on top of the torso sausage, largely because we work with gravity. Conversely, configurations like your capybara's belly tend to be a lot more difficult because it works against gravity. For this reason I'll usually sag the torso sausage to include the belly and mainly focus building up on the back where possible.

Coming back to the comparison between your fox and my demonstration, another key thing to look at is how in my diagram I show the contour curves as they near the edge hooking around to give the impression of thickness. This is another key component that is missing from yours.

Something in your work that is often present but not always consistent is establishing the relationships between 3D forms you've put down. A big example of this is your barn owl - notice how its cranial mass and torso mass float somewhat independently of one another? They never have any clear relationship being established between them, which leaves us in the limbo of uncertainty as to whether we're looking at 3D forms or flat shapes. Now, usually this is fairly straight forward because all we have to do for overlapping/intersecting shapes is to define the joint/intersection between them with a single well drawn contour line, [as shown here](https://i.imgur.com/VIJp769.png. This is immensely effective, much moreso than any contour line sitting on the length of a single form, at establishing the illusion that these forms are three dimensional. Being shared as a defined relationship between two forms is very powerful, and a useful tool to establishing our forms as 3D.

That said, the cranial and torso masses here are not intersecting - this suggests to us that there is a missing element - the neck. Instead, you ended up enveloping the whole of the bird in a complex shape which itself did not have any real structure to it, and the result was that this flattened out the drawing. This kind of "enveloping" in a more complex shape should generally be avoided - instead, think in terms of the individual forms and masses that would exist underneath, which help convey the volume and mass of those sections.

I see similar things with some of your legs, like the bump added at the back of this markhor's foreleg. There's no actual form with clear 3D relationships being established here, just a two dimensional bump being added to the silhouette. Throughout all of these drawing exercises, it's critical that you always build things up as they exist in 3D, rather than treating them as though they're 2D drawings where liberties and shortcuts can presumably be taken.

The last thing I wanted to mention was that while your texture and detail is coming along very well, I do feel that you may have a tendency to be distracted by your eagerness to get to it. This is common, especially in this lesson since drawing wonderfully detailed animals is a lot of fun - but you need to make sure that when you work on the underlying construction, that you focus on it completely. Don't let your brain look ahead to what you will do - set yourself to what you're doing now. Something that can help with this is breaking the detail/texture phase away from the construction altogether and doing them in different sittings. For example, get the construction done in a bunch of animals, then come back to add detail. This way you'll be able to focus on whether or not your construction is ultimately able to stand on its own before deciding to move onto detail.

One last thing - On this wolf you've fallen back to using stretched ellipses for your leg segments rather than sausages as defined here. The sausage method is really important for being able to construct solid, well structured legs that can still maintain a sense of flow and gesture to them. While it's not always obvious how they can be applied to each and every leg, if you think of them as an armature upon which you'll add whatever additional forms that are needed to bulk up in the appropriate places, you'll yield much more successful results.

It's worth mentioning that one of the biggest tests of whether or not a student understands the core principles of construction and how their forms exist in 3D space is how their hybrids worked out, since they require us to jump through certain mental hoops to stitch something from one reference onto another. Yours turned out great, so I'm confident that you understand the core of this lesson - there are still issues to iron out, but I'm more than happy to mark this lesson as complete. Feel free to move onto the 250 cylinder challenge, which is a prerequisite for lesson 6.

Uncomfortable in the post "Dealing with off-topic posts, spam, etc."

2019-10-11 23:37

I've been working on it periodically, and I'm hoping to be able to release it as this year's big end-of-year/christmas update, but I can't guarantee that it'll be ready by then. Either way, it is progressing.