Uncomfortable in the post "For those who've had trouble getting fineliner pens for a reasonable price (and who've been settling for multi-size packs), Drawabox is finally selling them in packs of 10, at $1.65/pen"

2019-05-28 15:40

There certainly are cheaper options out there, but we tried to keep close to those prices while offering quality that compares better to the more expensive ones.

Uncomfortable in the post "For those who've had trouble getting fineliner pens for a reasonable price (and who've been settling for multi-size packs), Drawabox is finally selling them in packs of 10, at $1.65/pen"

2019-05-28 15:37

We'll be gathering different kinds of pens to test against, and will eventually put together some kind of video to show where they stand on the spectrum. Microns are definitely the cheapest option, but I've always found them to be sub-par in quality. Not so much their ink, but as you mentioned - those nibs don't hold up too well. Still, the price point is definitely why we've included them on the recommendations list alongside staedtler pigment liners and faber castell PITT artist pens.

These pens definitely compare better to the staedtlers and faber castells. I usually go for staedtlers myself, but I find these to be a somewhat more pleasant (but still similar) drawing experience to those. Anyway, we'll be working towards a way to properly demonstrate the comparisons, though it may take a bit to set that up and get a video out.

Uncomfortable in the post "For those who've had trouble getting fineliner pens for a reasonable price (and who've been settling for multi-size packs), Drawabox is finally selling them in packs of 10, at $1.65/pen"

2019-05-28 15:33

As to your initial problem, what kind of paper are you using? If all pens come out faded/scratchy, then that suggests it might not be the pens, but rather what they're being used on.

It doesn't seem to be broken on my phone, but there's a few things that come to mind. The resulting window opens in a different tab - is it possible that the tab is being opened and then immediately jumping back to the previous one? What kind of phone/browser are you using? I'd like to try to match your specific setup so I can test it out myself. And thank you for mentioning it, finding bugs like that is really important for us.

Uncomfortable in the post "For those who've had trouble getting fineliner pens for a reasonable price (and who've been settling for multi-size packs), Drawabox is finally selling them in packs of 10, at $1.65/pen"

2019-05-28 14:02

I'm glad we were able to help! The 4 packs are definitely annoying as hell, especially if you're not going to find a good use for the other 3 sizes. The refills do end up having a pretty high up-front cost, but I'd assume that'd mean their refills should be cheaper... although a quick googling suggests that maybe they're not. What kind of a racket is this?!

Uncomfortable in the post "For those who've had trouble getting fineliner pens for a reasonable price (and who've been settling for multi-size packs), Drawabox is finally selling them in packs of 10, at $1.65/pen"

2019-05-28 13:58

I won't commit to that, but it's certainly something we can keep in mind as we move forwards. This first order we placed (of 2000 pens, the minimum order our supplier was willing to fulfill) is really to test the market out and see whether this demand actually exists. Right now our focus is on keeping prices as low as possible.

Alternative options may be added in the future, of course, as we flesh out the boundaries of what we're doing, though that will likely require us to go to other suppliers if our current one doesn't carry refillable pens.

Uncomfortable in the post "For those who've had trouble getting fineliner pens for a reasonable price (and who've been settling for multi-size packs), Drawabox is finally selling them in packs of 10, at $1.65/pen"

2019-05-28 13:55

Unfortunately we don't have any plans for that. We're not really looking to get into the general art supply business - instead, we want to try and solve specific problems our students are encountering, and ultimately lowering the barrier to entry to jumping into Drawabox (without compromising the lessons themselves).

Uncomfortable in the post "For those who've had trouble getting fineliner pens for a reasonable price (and who've been settling for multi-size packs), Drawabox is finally selling them in packs of 10, at $1.65/pen"

2019-05-28 13:53

That really is the million dollar question. We're dealing with a supplier from Shanghai, but they still seem to be a middleman for their manufacturer. It's likely that the actual manufacturer isn't public facing, which is why it's so hard to find. Instead they probably deal with a variety of exporters to get their products in the hands of merchants.

Uncomfortable in the post "For those who've had trouble getting fineliner pens for a reasonable price (and who've been settling for multi-size packs), Drawabox is finally selling them in packs of 10, at $1.65/pen"

2019-05-28 04:06

Hm.. that's certainly something we could (and probably should) do. That said, I think I might get my girlfriend to do it, once she moves here next month. I'll add it to the list of things, and I'll start picking up pens from different brands for comparison.

Uncomfortable in the post "For those who've had trouble getting fineliner pens for a reasonable price (and who've been settling for multi-size packs), Drawabox is finally selling them in packs of 10, at $1.65/pen"

2019-05-28 04:04

I'll try and pick one up! I'm always keen to try out new pens.

Uncomfortable in the post "For those who've had trouble getting fineliner pens for a reasonable price (and who've been settling for multi-size packs), Drawabox is finally selling them in packs of 10, at $1.65/pen"

2019-05-28 01:49

For curiosity's sake, what brand did you get, and how much did they cost you?

Uncomfortable in the post "For those who've had trouble getting fineliner pens for a reasonable price (and who've been settling for multi-size packs), Drawabox is finally selling them in packs of 10, at $1.65/pen"

2019-05-28 00:59

I genuinely hope this works out! I long for reasonably priced, drawabox branded pens to disrupt the market!

Uncomfortable in the post "For those who've had trouble getting fineliner pens for a reasonable price (and who've been settling for multi-size packs), Drawabox is finally selling them in packs of 10, at $1.65/pen"

2019-05-28 00:55

I don't do much with watercolors, but luckily my girlfriend does - so I got her to climb out of bed and try them out. And the results are in!

They seem to hold up pretty well, though once she went particularly aggressively over it, it did start to leech the ink into the colour. The lines didn't smudge, but the paint did pick up a bit of the ink. Here's her tests. It's worth mentioning that she drew the lines and immediately went over them with paint, not really giving them any additional time to dry.

Uncomfortable in the post "For those who've had trouble getting fineliner pens for a reasonable price (and who've been settling for multi-size packs), Drawabox is finally selling them in packs of 10, at $1.65/pen"

2019-05-28 00:43

Glad to hear it!

Uncomfortable in the post "For those who've had trouble getting fineliner pens for a reasonable price (and who've been settling for multi-size packs), Drawabox is finally selling them in packs of 10, at $1.65/pen"

2019-05-27 23:58

For years I've had students asking where to get pens, which brands are good, etc. There are a lot of options out there, but generally speaking they can get quite pricey, and a lot of students get duped into buying packs including many different sizes, resulting in getting a lot of pens that won't be too useful for Drawabox.

So we've spent several months, testing the offerings of different suppliers, and we settled on a pretty solid quality brand (in my opinion, they feel better than the Staedtler Pigment Liners I usually use). Then we did our math, figured out the wonderful world of shipping, and finally settled on $16.50 per pack, with free shipping in the continental United States. We do ship internationally, but those prices vary.

This effort has mostly been shouldered by long-time drawabox student and more recently, teaching assistant, /u/svendogee.

Now if you can get to an art supply store - especially one that lets you test your pens individually - then I'd still recommend buying them from there. For those who can't, we're doing our best to keep our prices reasonable, and we test the pens on a card that is provided in the pack to ensure that they're all working as intended. We've currently got around 200 packs to sell, and if things go well, we'll restock. If it goes very well, then eventually we can get some properly drawabox-branded high-quality fineliners.

Uncomfortable in the post "Lesson 2: Contour Lines, Texture and Construction (Patreon Critique Thread)"

2019-05-27 19:57

These are certainly looking better. Couple things not to forget:

• The same bit I applied about your contour ellipses' degrees apply here as well (read these notes). Right now your curves are of relatively similar degrees, where they should be changing gradually over the course of the form's length due to the fact that each cross-section is oriented slightly differently relative to our point of view.

• At the end of the day, contour ellipses and contour curves are all really the same - when we're only drawing what we can physically see, they come out as curves in most cases, and when we draw through the form (drawing the parts we can't physically see because they're on the opposite side) they are drawn as full ellipses, going all thew ay around. That said, when we have the end of a sausage form facing towards us, we would physically be able to see the entirety of the contour line as it goes all the way around. As such, adding a contour ellipse at the end as the form rounds out and the surface orients towards us really helps to push the illusion that this is a three dimensional form. I frequently refer to it as the "pole" of a globe. You can see the ellipses included on the contour curves exercise on the right side of this image.

Keep that stuff in mind. I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete, so feel free to move onto lesson 3.

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

2019-05-26 19:40

I'm thrilled to hear that the first page is the last one you drew, because it shows an enormous improvement, both over the other pages, as well as over the previous submission. The other pages shown here are also coming along well, but that first page is ideal. You're demonstrating a much clearer understanding of the material, of how these compound forms come together to create a more complex object, and how the forms relate to one another as they wrap around your major elements to add bumps and masses as needed.

I have no critiques to offer for that first page, but a couple things to mention your somewhat earlier drawings. The main thing I noticed was that you're getting the grasp here of carving into your head constructions, but that you still had a tendency to use curving, organic lines, rather than the decisive cuts that straight lines offer us. These straighter cuts tend to provide us with a clearer understanding of where the borders between planes rest.

This is actually something that lesson 6 goes into in a big way, so it is something you'll have the chance to play with there. For now, I'm going to mark this lesson as complete and reiterate - your most recent page is coming along GREAT, and shows that you've truly improved by leaps and bounds. Keep it up, and feel free to move onto the next step - which looks like the cylinder challenge, as it's a prerequisite for lesson 6.

Uncomfortable in the post "Lesson 2: Contour Lines, Texture and Construction (Patreon Critique Thread)"

2019-05-26 18:01

To start, your arrows flow quite nicely across the page. You've got a good, fluid quality to your lines. I can see that you're playing with the size of your arrows as they move farther away, and also playing a little with having the space between the zigzagging lengths compress as we look farther back, though be sure to keep exaggerating this. Don't be afraid to let those lengths overlap one another to get a real sense of the depth of the scene.

Also, I noticed that through some of these exercises, you've split the page up into sections - I'd rather you didn't, as this close-quarters boxing of each arrow/organic form causes them to feel more like they're just shapes on a page, rather than a bunch of forms floating together in space. As always, stick to the instructions as they're demonstrated in the lesson - each one has a clear example laying out what your page should look like at the end. Try not to deviate from that, as such changes can impede the effectiveness of the exercise.

Your organic forms with contour ellipses are looking okay, though there are a couple issues:

• I mention early on in this exercise's instructions that the sausage forms should essentially be like two spheres of equal size connected by a tube of consistent width. This is in the interest of keeping the forms as simple as possible. Try to avoid having one end being smaller than the other, as well as having any pinching or swelling through the midsection of the form.

• It looks like your ellipses are all roughly the same degree. As explained here, these cross-sections are going to be oriented more or less towards the viewer based on their position in space, so that degree will naturally shift through the length of the form.

Your contour curves also encounter similar problems, though I'm also seeing a tendency to have the curves fail to accelerate in their curvature appropriately to give the impression that they hook back around along the other side (as explained here). I see a few places where you attempt to overshoot those curves as directed in the instructions, but you generally do this outside of the silhouette of the form, rather than keeping them contained within it. Remember that these lines are meant to run along the surface of a 3D form, and we're overshooting those curves so we can get a better sense of hooking them back around. It's like we're taking the contour ellipses and following along the same path, but not quite allowing the ellipses to close completely.

You've got a great start on your dissections, and are demonstrating a good deal of patience and care in observing your reference images to identify specific information before carrying it over, bit by bit, into your drawing. This is definitely a great start. There are a few bits of advice I want to offer however to help you keep moving in the right direction:

• In your initial studies, I'm noticing a tendency to try and shade the individual surface forms that make up a given texture. As discussed here, don't worry about that. We don't deal with shading/rendering, but instead focus only on cast shadows. These are different, as they are shadows that are projected onto neighbouring surfaces. Shading on the other hand, is a technique used to self-describe a form or surface, which is something we do not cover at all in drawabox, as I find it to be more distracting than helpful at this time.

• As you draw these textures, you're approaching it with two different tools. You've got your cast shadows, as covered in the lesson, and you've also got the lines you're largely using to enclose each little surface form. Line is a very useful construct that we use to help define the barriers between distinct forms as we draw and construct, but in truth, line does not actually exist. It's something we make up to help define the borders between things. While they serve a very useful purpose, when we're drawing textures, we don't actually want to define clear borders between these little surface forms - we want it all to blend together as all of these little forms are subject to the overall surface on which they rest. When drawing these textures, I don't want you to utilize line at all, and I don't want you to outline each and every form that is present. Instead, we focus on communicating their presence purely by capturing the shadows they cast. These shadows are considerably more flexible, because we can increase or reduce their weight in a texture without changing the actual number of forms that we are suggesting are there. We can plunge a texture into darkness, while still having the viewer believe that there a, for example, scales there in that solid black area. Or conversely, we can overexpose the texture, blasting it with direct light such that the only shadows that remain are those in the crevasses so deep the light cannot penetrate. The key is that when working with line, we're very explicit - this is what is here, and anything I have not drawn is not present. With shadow, we are merely implying the presence of far more than we are necessarily drawing.

You're heading in the right direction with your form intersections, although the use of hatching lines, especially on your cylinders, is not working in your favour. These are generally drawn rather sloppily - remember that any line that runs along the surface of a form is going to describe that form, so if they are not hooking around properly, they will serve to flatten it out. Generally speaking, if I want to add hatching to a cylinder, I don't wrap the lines around it - instead, I run the hatching down the length of the form. Because these lines don't have to wrap around and instead can run straight from end to end, they're much easier to pull off and generally look less distracting.

Also worth mentioning, it seems you do need to work on getting your ellipses to align correctly to your intended minor axes - they have a tendency to slant.

Lastly, your organic intersections are actually looking very good. Some of the contour curves are a little rushed, but generally speaking they're much better than they were previously. You've done a great job of capturing forms that feel solid, of conveying how they relate to one another in that pile, and of demonstrating an understanding of how they each exist in space.

Now, you're almost there, but before I mark this lesson as complete, I'd like to see one page of organic forms with contour curves. I'm confident you can do this well, but handling each form in isolation will help me make sure that you do understand the concepts I outlined earlier in this critique.

Uncomfortable in the post "Lesson 2: Contour Lines, Texture and Construction (Patreon Critique Thread)"

2019-05-25 21:01

Overall you've done pretty well! I do have a few things to call out and a couple areas where you can improve, but it looks like you're moving in the right direction.

To start with, your arrows generally flow quite nicely over the page, and I can see you playing with the size of each end to push the idea of perspective and that the arrow pushes into the depth of the scene. One thing to keep in mind however is that the space between the zigzagging lengths of arrow/ribbon is also going to compress as we look farther away, as perspective applies to the distances between objects as well as to the objects themselves, as demonstrated here.

I've also got a couple things to share about your organic forms with contour lines:

• Your ellipses and curves are a little stiff - make sure you're applying the ghosting method, which involves planning and preparation first followed by a confident execution. Right now you're slowing down and attempting to mix them together, resulting in linework that wobbles a little, and ellipses that come out a little uneven.

• Remember that the sausage forms should be very simple. They are essentially like two equally sized spheres connected by a tube of consistent width, as demonstrated in this diagram from a later lesson. Avoid having ends with different sizes, pinching through the middle section, and having the roundedness at either end stretching over too great a distance.

You've got a good start on your texture analyses, and I can see you trying to figure out how to apply the techniques described in the notes. You do have a long way to go, but this is a good start. The first thing that jumps out at me is that you were very patient and observent with your lizard skin study (the first square on the left), but this definitely took a hit through the other two texture studies. Remember that this first square is intended to be an attempt at faithfully reproducing everything you see, without attempting to process or manipulate it. Continually look at your reference image, taking only a moment or two to put down a very specific mark to transfer some piece of information, before looking back at your reference.

As for the density gradients on the right, I can see that you are trying to apply the use of cast shadows, though you are still quite dependent on the idea of drawing everything first with line. Line is a very useful tool that we use to define the boundaries between objects, but it doesn't actually exist, and it doesn't apply to every scenario. When it comes to texture, I want you to set line aside and capture the little forms that exist on the surface of your object with shadow alone. The reason this is important is that when you're, say, enclosing each scale with an outline, it becomes very difficult to let those scales bleed together. You're committing to saying that every scale that exists in my drawing is going to be drawn - any scales that have not been drawn are not present. Instead, when we work purely in cast shadows, we can start with having many discrete, specific scales, but we can slowly start to reduce the amount of those cast shadows we draw, until eventually all we can see are the deepest gaps between scales where light cannot penetrate. Finally, when we put no cast shadows at all, we're left with blank space, but the viewer will still interpret it as being full of scales - scales they cannot see. We achieve this by convincing the viewer that we are not reducing the number of scales that are present, but rather by changing the intensity of the light that is shining on them. When we leave everything blank, we're "overexposing" the drawing, blasting all of those shadows away with direct light. This is the same as taking the light away completely and filling that area with black ink.

Both of these points - in terms of taking more time to observe your reference carefully and carrying over specific information you see, and focusing on implying those details with shadows rather than imaginary lines - apply to your dissections exercises as well. You've done a good job of thinking about how those sausage forms have rounded surfaces however, and how the textures wrap around them.

Your form intersections are very, very well done. Your forms both read as solid and three dimensional, and also show a strong grasp of how they all relate to one another in space. I do believe there is room for improvement in terms of understanding how the specific intersection lines between the forms would actually work (especially when you introduce a rounded surface to a flat surface - rereading the notes in the lesson and focusing on the idea of an intersection line existing on the surfaces of both forms simultaneously may help), but this is quite normal. Understanding how intersections work is something that students take time to grasp, and is intended to develop as you push through these lessons. This exercise is specifically focused on getting students to show that they can draw forms existing within the same scene such that they feel consistent, and you have done that quite well.

Your organic intersections are a good start. You are showing a grasp of what the exercise focuses on - that is, getting these forms to slump and pile up on top of one another, showing you understand how they relate to each other without having them feel like flat shapes pasted on top of each other. I can clearly understand the volumes involved, and they are pushing each other aside as they find a state of equilibrium rather than cutting into one another and occupying the same space. That's exactly on point.

That said, you have definitely given yourself some extra difficulty in this exercise by drawing so small. These kinds of challenges are spatial problems, and our brains benefit considerably from being given more room to think and work when faced with them. By drawing the sausages relatively small on the page, you end up cramping it up and impeding your ability to work through them. So make sure you draw bigger in the future. Additionally, the points about keeping your sausage forms simple (two spheres connected by a tube of consistent width) from before help here as well.

I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete. You're doing a good job, and while you do have room for improvement, you're headed in the right direction. Keep the points I've mentioned here in mind and feel free to move onto lesson 3.

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

2019-05-25 18:41

Alright, so this is definitely looking a lot better. Your ellipses in planes are solid. Your organic forms with contour ellipses/curves are pretty good - definitely moving in the right direction. There's a little stiffness to the curves/ellipses but it's better than I was seeing before. Your organic intersections are looking quite well done, and convey a strong grasp of how these forms exist in 3D space, and how they relate to one another as they pile up and try to find a state of equilibrium.

I noticed a couple boxes you doodled - they look pretty haphazardly done so I'm reticent to actually comment on them, but it's worth mentioning that they could have had a lot more planning and consideration for how those sets of parallel lines all converge towards their shared vanishing points.

I do agree that your otter is definitely somewhat disappointing, but your dog demonstrates a considerably improved grasp of construction, with its forms feeling much more solid and the relationships defined between them giving the impression of a cohesive, three dimensional object. This is most relevant for the standing dog, as it's definitely the strongest drawing you've done thus far.

Going back to the otter, proportions definitely play a significant role, which is generally okay - plenty of students struggle with proportion at this point. You also aren't taking full advantage of the whole page, resulting in your drawing occupying half (or perhaps less) of all the room you're actually given. Those little study drawings on the side are good and helpful, but if they're going to impede the overall size of your drawing, put them on a separate page to ensure that your brain is given as much room as possible to navigate these spatial problems.

Additionally, the way you've been handling paws isn't quite right. From what I can see, you create a blocky form and then add the toes onto it, which is fine - but you're not treating that initial block like a solid mass that exists in the scene.

Looking at this one, you add the toes on it but entirely ignore what's left of the initial block in between the toes. You do that on this foot in the actual drawing as well.

This one makes more sense from a constructional standpoint but you don't define how the actual toes connect to the initial block. We can certainly infer how they might connect, but as far as these constructional exercises go, I want you to define them more clearly. The other attempts I pointed out so far didn't quite reach a point where even a clear connection for each toe could be understood, since they didn't respect the underlying form. This one, at least, does.

One last thing I wanted to mention was the way you drew fur on the otter. The size of the drawing definitely has an impact (packing detail into a small space is considerably more difficult), though in general it does look like this is something you need to continue to practice. It looks like the tufts of fur along the silhouette have been drawn as a sort of continuous spiky pattern - try to avoid repetitive patterns and take more time to craft/design each stroke of the tuft, thinking about how it creates a shape that is added onto the object's silhouette.

So! I've picked on the otter quite a bit, but I'm still rather pleased with the dog. I am going to mark this lesson as complete, though you have plenty of room for growth and improvement, and I'm sure you'll continue practicing this on your own. You're headed in the right direction, but don't let those warmup exercises fall by the wayside. Remember that at its core, drawabox is about understanding how the forms we draw exist in 3D space, and how these forms all relate to one another.

Feel free to move onto the next step, which from the looks of it is going to be the cylinder challenge, as that is a prerequisite for lesson 6.

Uncomfortable in the post "Lesson 3: Applying Construction to Plants (Patreon Critique Thread)"

2019-05-24 19:35

Whew, okay. So, good news - I am going to mark this lesson as complete. You've shown enough to be able to move forward, though you still have a ways to go and plenty of room to grow. What's important is that you're moving in the right direction, but you cannot get complacent.

Looking at your exercises from the previous lessons, there are some points that I want to mention:

• For your organic forms with contour curves, remember that you need to keep the sausage forms simple. Treat them as though they're two equally sized spheres connected by a tube of consistent width. Don't stretch the rounded ends out along too much of the sausage form, you want to keep that to the ends, and avoid having one end smaller than the other, or having pinching through the midsection.

• This happens across all your linework, but it really stood out to me in your 'wavy hair' texture analysis. Your lines are very, very uniform. Throughout their entire length, they maintain roughly the same line weight. This causes them to feel somewhat stiff and uneven, and usually happens either if a student is pressing too hard or drawing too slowly. Both these situations obliterate the natural tapering that occurs when we lift the pen up at the end of a stroke. That subtle tapering makes our strokes feel much more fluid and natural, which is something your drawings as a whole tend to lack. I explain this further in the bottom half of these notes.

• In your texture analyses, you primarily think in terms of lines, specifically using them to delineate the barriers between individual forms/sections. When you push into the density gradients you mix in some cast shadows, which is a good start, but the most important thing here is that you shouldn't be dealing in line at all. Line doesn't exist, it's a construct we use to help us with construction, and it doesn't serve us at all in this particular case. Instead of drawing things down in line and then adding shadows on top, I want you to try to imply the presence of the little surface forms through shadow alone. This goes for both the gradient and the original observational study. What we see are all just shadows, places where the light has been unable to penetrate, and that is what you're capturing.

• Same applies to your dissections - you're defining the borders between every little surface form. No lines, only shadow shapes that can be impacted by how we decide to vary the play of light, either plunging areas into darkness or overexposing them to blast all the shadows away as needed.

• One other point - on your corn, you filled in some of the kernels, I'm assuming because those kernels were dark. When dealing with texture, ignore "local" colour of the surface. The colour something is, whether it's actually white or black or yellow or red doesn't matter - we're treating objects like they're all a flat grey and focusing on the areas where light is occluded and shadows are cast. We want to describe the forms along the surface of these objects, not their colours.

• Your super imposed lines are okay, but there's definitely a bit of stiffness there. This exercise is ENTIRELY about drawing confidently with your whole arm, accuracy has nothing to do with it. You're close, but I can see slight signs of your brain interfering to bring your line back to its intended trajectory rather than letting it maintain its course and go where it means to.

• Your rough perspective boxes are admittedly a bit sloppy. I can see signs that you're not necessarily thinking about the intended behaviour you want your line to follow before you draw it. Being that this exercise is specifically one point perspective and all the boxes are to run parallel to the ground plane and to each other, we're left with three possible behaviours our lines can follow. Either the line is horizontal and must therefore run parallel to the horizon, or it is vertical and must run perpendicular to the horizon, or it runs off into the distance and must therefore converge towards the vanishing point. Looking at your work, you don't take the time to determine the specifics of which category a line falls into before drawing it, resulting in a lot of horizontals and verticals that slant or go awry.

• I also don't see you applying the line extensions to your rough perspective boxes after completing the exercise.

Moving onto the plant studies I requested, these are done well enough that I'm marking the lesson as complete. There was one thing I noticed however - on the cactus, the two arms to the left side, you started them out as big ellipses, then placed the arm's proper shape inside of it.

I can entirely understand why you'd use this approach, but it has one critical problem. Every mark we put down in our drawing as we construct the object represents a solid, three dimensional form. Like a piece of clay that has been laid into the scene. Once it's there, it has to be dealt with somehow. If ever we want to cut away from it, we have to establish both how the piece that remains and the piece that has been cut away sit in 3D space. This is not something you did here (understandably, as it's a more advanced use of construction), and as a result, we basically have a big ball placed in the scene which is then ignored in favour of a different form. That ball ends up reading as a flat ellipse, which in turn starts to flatten out the rest of the drawing.

In this case, I would have used a sausage form without the initial ellipse.

It's worth mentioning that I noticed you attempting to focus on the shadows between the little rocks at the base of the cactus rather than outlining them all. This is a move in the right direction, though you're still very much working with uniform line rather than shadow shapes. Still, a good start.

Anyway, keep all of this in mind as you move onto lesson 4. As I mentioned, there is room for growth in all of these areas - your basic linework, those lesson 1 exercises, your texturework, etc.

Uncomfortable in the post "Lesson 2: Contour Lines, Texture and Construction (Patreon Critique Thread)"

2019-05-23 20:10

Overall you've done some great work here, there are just a few things I want to point out.

To start with, your arrows flow quite nicely across the page. When you've got places where they overlap, don't be afraid to draw through them (drawing each arrow in its entirety rather than letting it stop when it gets passed over by another). We're really here to understand how the things we draw flow through space, and drawing each one in its entirety helps us relate it to an actual object rather than just lines on a piece of paper.

Additionally, you've done a good job of making the far end of the arrow small to play into the basics of perspective, though keep in mind that as we look farther away, the actual space between the zigzagging lengths of the arrow/ribbon will also shrink and compress, as shown here. This will help give your arrows more of a sense that they're coming at us from far into the depth of the scene.

Your organic forms with contour lines are coming along great. The lines wrap convincingly around the forms, and do a great job of imbuing them with a sense of volume and solidity. One minor point here - remember that we want our sausages to be really simple. As mentioned in the lesson, they should essentially behave like two equally sized spheres connected by a tube of consistent width. This kind of simplicity will come into play later on as we work on combining them to create more complex constructions. Constructional drawing itself relies heavily on the idea that we start as simple as possible and build up complexity. This diagram from a later lesson shows the whole spheres + tube combination.

It took me a second to understand the layout of your texture analyses - in general, try and stick to the instructions as closely as possible (for example, here your density gradient boxes should have been much wider to give you more room to make that gradual shift.

That said, you've demonstrated keen observational skills, and definitely shown a growing understanding of the material. I can see how you tried to focus on the shadows cast by the various textural forms, and how you attempted to use them to blend from more densely packed detail to sparser territory. At the same time, I am seeing that you're still a little trapped in terms of thinking in terms of line as being the barriers between objects and forms, with shadows being added on top of that. As you work on textures in the future, try and take line/borders out of the equation entirely. Every mark we put down is essentially a shadow - and therefore how it is drawn is entirely dependent on how we choose for light to interact with it. In the case of the mushrooms, the long lines used to define its gills didn't have to flow across continuously - they could have been lost-and-found along the way, allowing the area of solid white to pass through it.

I could see some of that approach towards the sparse side of your feathers, so you are getting there. There was some of it in the romanesco as well, though here instead of seeing individual flowing shadows that would get lost and found, the timidity and continually broken nature of the edges made it difficult at times to perceive the marks as actually being shadows cast by a present form.

Anyway, overall you're doing well, and heading in the right direction. Keep working at it, and you'll continue to see progress.

Your dissections continue along the same vein, with a lot of great textural exploration, keen observation, and experimentation on how to tackle different kinds of problems. I definitely think that many of these - for example the ice cream - continued to push a stronger understanding of working with cast shadows rather than outlined forms. Great work.

Lastly, both your form intersections and organic intersections demonstrate a great grasp of 3D space and how forms can interact with one another inside of it. The form intersections show a good understanding of how forms can intersect one another, while the organic intersections shows a grasp of how they can push each other aside until they find a state of believable equilibrium.

One thing worth mentioning is that in your form intersections, the way you added line weight was definitely somewhat clumsy. You ended up making a lot of rather stiff looking passes resulting in areas that were needlessly heavy. In general, always try to add weight to your lines with the same ghosting method you would have used to draw them initially. If you end up slipping up, you don't need to worry about correcting it - line weight is meant to be subtle, so fixing the mistake would end up adding far too much, which would do more harm than good.

Anyway, you're doing a great job across this lesson, so I'm going to go ahead and mark it as complete. Feel free to move onto lesson 3.

Uncomfortable in the post "Lesson 2: Contour Lines, Texture and Construction (Patreon Critique Thread)"

2019-05-21 20:01

I was a bit confused at first, until I dug through your history. Would have been best to provide the full lesson submission, with the newer pages you'd done replacing the same exercises from your previous attempt. So I'm going to try and piece them together across the two albums.

To start with, your arrows are looking fairly well done. A lot of these flow through all three dimensions of space, although you could definitely push that impression of depth in the scene by exaggerating the scale of your arrows more dramatically. That is, make one end much larger and the other smaller. Additionally, keep in mind that not only does the size shift across the course of the arrow, but the space between the zigzagging lengths of the ribbon will compress as well, as shown here.

Moving onto your organic forms with contour lines (from the new album), you've done a pretty good job at ensuring that the contour ellipses and contour curves fit snugly between the edges of the form, and you're fairly attentive to their alignment relative to the central minor axis line. I can also see a visible shift in the degree of the ellipses and curves, which suggests an understanding of how the orientation of these cross-sections shifts in 3D space, relative to the viewer.

One piece of advice I do have however is to ensure that you're sticking to relatively simple sausage forms here - that means a form that is akin to two equally sized spheres connected by a tube of consistent width (as shown here). No pinching through the midsection, and make sure that the rounded portion at the ends is not stretched across too much of your sausage form.

It looks like you neglected to complete the texture analysis exercise. I should have noticed previously and called it out, but unfortunately I was only giving your work a cursory glance since it had been submitted out of order. I am however going to waive this because your work on the dissections demonstrates a well developing grasp of the concepts the texture analysis exercise is meant to promote.

Specifically, I'm noticing that your observational skills are coming along well - you're not drawing from memory, but rather carrying over specific detail from your reference as you see it. You're also experimenting with the use of deeper shadows and combining areas into large shadow shapes of solid black.

One point I do want to mention is that you are still inclined to outline your textural forms a fair bit - for example, you're enclosing each individual kernel of corn. While these outlines are very useful to us when constructing large forms and establishing where they sit in space, this is far less useful when dealing with texture because it closes off the flow across a given surface. Instead, I want you to focus purely on the shadows cast by these forms onto one another, effectively describing and implying the presence of one object without actually drawing it directly. This is a better strategy because as you noticed when drawing the corn, you were unable to transition from a state of dense to sparse. You always had those outlines, and were forced to jump between binary states - that is, a state of having an outline, to a state of having no outline.

Instead, when dealing with shadows, you can gradually decrease the weight of each shadow, eventually wearing them away so much that it appears like a photograph that has been overexposed (with only the deepest pockets retaining their shadows).

Additionally, try to avoid any kind of chaotic scribbling. I noticed you being less controlled in some of the earlier texture work, and it appeared that you were trying to be rough and sketchy rather than controlling each mark you put down. Your later textures were considerably better in this regard.

Your form intersections are coming along well, though I noticed that your box constructions still do need work (your sets of parallel lines are fairly inconsistent in terms of how they converge). You also neglected to follow the instruction about avoiding overly stretched forms (like long cylinders). I specifically added this instruction because this exercise is challenging enough, and I wanted students to focus on specific spatial relationships without having to worry about extreme foreshortening.

Lastly, your organic intersections are coming along pretty well. I can see a good grasp of how these forms rest atop one another without infringing upon each others' space. Instead, they find a state of equilibrium by sagging and slumping against one another.

I'm going to go ahead and mark this lesson as complete. You do have room for improvement, but overall you're doing well. Feel free to move onto lesson 3.

Uncomfortable in the post "Lesson 2: Contour Lines, Texture and Construction (Patreon Critique Thread)"

2019-05-21 19:45

Here are a number of points from my previous critiques that you seem to have forgotten.

• "Stick to simple sausage forms - as mentioned before, two spheres connected by a tube of consistent width, and try not to make them too long."

• "... you tend to make one very big one and then a bunch of small ones. Try making them all roughly the same size."

• "You are vastly overusing your contour lines."

• "In my notes when I draw my own little sausages to demonstrate problems, (like here) you'll notice that I'm drawing a contour ellipse towards one end, where the surface is facing towards the viewer, kind of like the "pole" of a globe."

I really can't keep repeating myself - you need to be aware of the advice you've been given as you work through the exercise. This means reading through it just before. Hell, take notes as you read through the lesson and critiques if you have to, but you have to find some way to be able to actually apply what I'm saying.

You are applying some of it. I can see small changes - you're attempting to be more mindful of the how the forms stack on top of one another, rather than ignoring those underneath - though on occasion you still slip up and flatten the form underneath. You also did improve your use of cast shadows, though remember that these shadows are cast onto the surface of the object beneath them - yours tend to stick to the form that is casting them, which is not how shadows behave. You're also a bit arbitrary in terms of where you choose to add shadows or additional line weight. Since you're now drawing through each form, it's difficult to identify where forms are in front of others, and where they are behind. Use line weight to reinforce the overlaps between these forms - if an edge passes over top of another form, make sure to give it a little extra weight than the lines it's overlapping.

I'm going to ask you to do one single page of this exercise, but I want to see the following:

• No long sausage forms, stick to short ones as shown in the lesson example.

• Stick to simple sausage forms - two EQUALLY sized spheres connected by a tube of consistent width. No pinching, no swelling, etc.

• Do not overuse contour lines.

• Use line weight to clarify how certain forms overlap others.

• Make sure each form respects the volume and mass of the one underneath it.

I really want to make this clear - you're improving, but very slowly, and in very little steps, for the simple fact that you're not applying what I'm taking the time to point out to you. If your next page does not apply the things I've listed above, then I will not accept any more submissions from you until June 5th.

Uncomfortable in the post "Lesson 4: Applying Construction to Insects and Arachnids (Patreon Critique Thread)"

2019-05-20 17:57

Ghosting through the whole ellipse at first to get a sense for the intended curvature can help initially, but prior to making the mark, your ghosting should be limited to the mark you intend to make (otherwise you'll be giving your arm orders to draw all the way around). As for the execution, it should be done in one confident stroke. As with all use of the ghosting method, making sure that the line wraps around properly is the business of the planning and preparation phases - execution is always done trusting in what you've prepared for, trusting in your muscle memory.

As far as execution goes, you've definitely been doing so with good confidence, so that's not the issue. The issue is that the previous planning/preparation was insufficient, resulting in strokes that were less accurate, and therefore less effective at the task they were attempting to accomplish.

Uncomfortable in the post "Lesson 4: Applying Construction to Insects and Arachnids (Patreon Critique Thread)"

2019-05-20 17:40

Starting with your organic forms with contour curves, there's a couple things that stand out to me. They're okay, but I don't believe these are necessarily the best you're capable of:

• What stands out most is that the curves themselves seem rushed. They seem to lack a degree of control, and as a result their degrees - though they show a steady shift as one would expect - seem to have a lot more variance that suggests a lack of preparation/planning/forethought. Additionally, they have a tendency to fall outside of the silhouette of the organic form - the contour curves should be as close as possible to fitting snugly between the edges of the form so as to convey the illusion that they run along the surface of the object.

• Your sausage forms should essentially be two equally sized spheres connected by a tube of consistent width, as shown here. Right now your sausages have a tendency to stretch those spheres out, resulting in the rounded ends occupying more of the overall length of the sausage.

Now, moving onto the actual insect constructions, you're actually doing a really good job overall. The primary issue comes down to what I mentioned above - you're drawing more than you're thinking, resulting in a lot more marks going on the page that serve no real purpose. You're solving problems as you draw, rather than solving them and then putting the result down.

Some are definitely a bit messier, while others are considerably cleaner. For example, you've got a lot of experimental lines being put down here, whereas this one is generally better thought out.

On the bright side, you're doing a very good job in terms of demonstrating that you both understand and believe in how your forms sit in 3D space, and how they relate to one another. Aside from being a bit rough, they are believable and give a sense of solidity and tangibility that goes a long way to demonstrating an understanding of the concepts covered in the lesson. I'm very pleased with how you're wrapping forms around one another - especially when it comes to segmentation - and how your head constructions feel like a three dimensional puzzle where all the pieces snap together nicely.

So, as you continue to move forwards, what you need to work on is holding yourself back. Think before every single mark you put down, and remember the process of the ghosting method. You need to be aware of the purpose of every line you add to your drawing, and ensure that nothing is put to waste. That, of course, is something you can continue to work on in the next lesson.

I'll go ahead and mark this one as complete. Feel free to move onto lesson 5!

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

2019-05-19 17:36

You do seem to have shown some improvement. That said, there are still issues I'm noticing, some of which I mentioned in my previous critique:

• You're not drawing through all of your ellipses.

• Sometimes you draw your eye sockets as ellipses that have been distorted slightly, other times you put more effort into dividing them up into several cuts/edges, which is better. Most often though you tend to use three cuts or so, creating a sort of triangle form, which isn't really how eye sockets are shaped. I mentioned that you should take a look at the tiger head demo. As you can see, there are quite a few more cuts, creating a more complex shape.

• I saw one place where you treated the muzzle/eyesocket/etc as pieces of a 3D puzzle that fit together, as explained in the wolf demo, but in most of the others the pieces tend to float around arbitrarily, which in turn makes them feel less grounded. The example where you did apply that approach was the swan, and the result was definitely much more solid.

By and large I quite liked the panther construction. While the the proportions were somewhat off, it did feel believable, as though you were drawing a real animal with those particular proportions. Do keep an eye on those front legs though, where you were at times using stretched ellipses instead of sausages. That said, overall you did feel as though you were more aware of how your forms fit together in 3D space, and how they all were more than just 2D shapes on a page.

When you add texture, you have a tendency to add it as though you're adding lines to a flat drawing, and this does have a tendency to flatten things out. You've got to remember that you're describing a surface that flows through space - parts of that surface face towards the viewer, other parts face away from us. Every mark you draw that is meant to run along that surface needs to demonstrate an awareness of this fact.

Your texture as a whole is a bit of a mixed bag. I can see signs that you're trying to isolate limited areas to add texture to, so as to better control how you're communicating that information, but the actual lines you put down still appear rushed. For example, if we look at the tufts of hair, when you've got a sort of fluid triangular shape, it comes off as more of a pair of lines that may or may not touch, than a cohesive shape being added to the silhouette. There is still a lot of work you need to do in terms of your basic use of line, the confidence of your strokes, and your overall control.

This leads me to a question - are you still keeping up with the exercises from the previous lessons as part of a regular warmup routine, or have you left them in the past? Keeping up with them is critical to continue refining and honing them, and to keep them from getting rusty.

Now I'm not necessarily against marking this lesson as complete and letting you practice this material on your own as you continue to move forwards onto the next lesson, but the fact that you're not drawing through your ellipses really worries me. It suggests that you're not in fact revisiting those previous exercises (or at least, not doing them according to the instructions), and that you're not following my critiques as closely as you could.

Before I mark this lesson as complete, I want to see the following:

• 1 page of ellipses in planes.

• 1 page of organic forms with contour ellipses.

• 1 page of organic forms with contour curves.

• 1 page of organic intersections.

• 2 pages of animal drawings - I want you to complete the construction for each one, and take photos of those completed constructions. Then once both full constructions are done (in terms of what I mean by full construction, I mean up to something like step 12 on this donkey demo), I want you to go back and add texture/detail to them. Submit both the construction photos and the detailed photos.

Uncomfortable in the post "Lesson 3: Applying Construction to Plants (Patreon Critique Thread)"

2019-05-17 20:40

By and large you've done a very good job. There are a handful of minor issues I'm going to pick at, but they are primarily nitpicking. Overall you're demonstrating a good grasp of the material, of the use of form, of being mindful of how objects sit in and flow through space, and so on.

Overall your leaf constructions are really solid. You're generally sticking to the process of doing a simple construction and then building on top of it, though I noticed a couple cases where you were treating the underlying construction as more of a suggestion when adding additional edge detail. For example, if we look at these, we'll see that you're zigzagging your lines, which I warn against here.

You're doing a pretty good job with your branches, and are getting the overlapping segments to merge together fairly well. One thing that will continue to help in this area is to extend your segments further past the previous ellipse, thereby giving your next segment more of a "runway" to match up with. Try to aim for halfway to the next ellipse.

Moving onto your actual plant drawings, you're applying the simple leaf constructions quite well to achieve nicely flowing forms, and your other elements convey a good deal of solidity. Here are a few points I noticed that you'll want to keep in mind however as you move forwards:

• In general, try to avoid situations where you end up drawing half a form. For example, the flower pot on the bottom left of this page ended up getting cut off. Sometimes these situations are unavoidable, but in those cases I'd recommend actually cutting the form as you would any 3D form - that means capping it off rather than leaving the edges to suddenly stop without properly solidifying the resulting form.

• When constructing cylindrical objects like flower pots that have a bunch of ellipses that need to be aligned to one another, be sure to employ a minor axis line, as this will help you ensure that the ellipses are matching up to one another correctly. Same as you would with any cylinder.

• For the most part, you were pretty conscientious about drawing through all your forms, though I noticed that in the flower at the bottom of this page, you ended up drawing each petal only insofar as it was visible. Remember that the drawings are all exercises in spatial reasoning, so establishing each form in its entirety and clarifying how it sits in space is critical. This was pretty much the only place where I noticed you not drawing through your forms entirely - so by and large you're doing really well at this.

• On your cacti you were definitely making a good effort to focus on the shadows cast by the little textural nodes along the surface of the main object. That said, I do still feel like you're a little attached to outlining it in its entirety first (to kind of establish its position). Try to push yourself to rely less on these outlines when dealing with textural elements, instead trying to think purely in terms of the shadows they cast.

Aside from that, you're doing very well. I especially liked your potato plant - you didn't shy away from the sheer amount of work and complexity involved in it, and you did a really good job of applying detail and creating focal points. You also employed shadow and line weight very well to organize this otherwise messy visual problem.

Keep up the great work and feel free to move onto lesson 4.

Uncomfortable in the post "Lesson 2: Contour Lines, Texture and Construction (Patreon Critique Thread)"

2019-05-16 23:22

You're definitely making progress - your contour lines are doing a better job at wrapping around your forms and you've got some success in certain cases when wrapping forms around each other - but there are still a number of issues which I've outlined in these notes over your work.

• You have a lot of places where a sausage will pass on top of another one but completely ignore the fact that it's there. We won't see this new one bump up to accommodate the object underneath it - it just runs straight as if the other one isn't even there. That is at the core of this exercise - learning to acknowledge that other forms exist in the world in which we construct our objects.

• You are vastly overusing your contour lines. You need to be aware of what you're trying to achieve with every single mark you put down on the page. A contour line's purpose is to help describe how the surface of an object flows through 3D space. The first contour line you add to a form is going to have a big impact. The second will have a little less, because it'll be doing the same job as the first one, but helping support it. After that, you're going to have diminishing returns, where each one is less important than the one before it. You very quickly end up with contour lines that serve no purpose at all, and in fact make your forms look stiff and rigid. Instead of drawing many contour lines, I want you to think about what you're trying to achieve with each one you put down, and focus on making the two or three you put down as effective as they can be.

• You're approaching cast shadows in a strange fashion - you seem to draw them like crescents, which doesn't make a lot of sense.

• On the second page, towards the bottom right, while drawing the largest sausage you end up getting very close to the edge of the page. This causes you to suddenly change your trajectory and mess up the form. Generally try not to get too close to the edge to avoid this kind of a problem.

• If you look at my example from the lesson, you'll notice that my forms are all pretty close to the same size. In yours you tend to make one very big one and then a bunch of small ones. Try making them all roughly the same size.

• In my notes when I draw my own little sausages to demonstrate problems, (like here) you'll notice that I'm drawing a contour ellipse towards one end, where the surface is facing towards the viewer, kind of like the "pole" of a globe. This is just like any other contour line - it's a line that runs along the surface of the form. This in particular can help us feel like this end of the form is oriented towards us, which can help reinforce the illusion that it's 3D.

While you're making progress and are making your way there, you're still kind of iffy on some important concepts. As such I'm not yet confident in letting you move onto the next lesson until we can really hammer this out.

So, here's the plan. I want you to do 10 pages of organic intersections, and I don't want you to submit them to me until Monday at the earliest. This will give you ample time to read through my critique (more than once if necessary, because I've said a lot of things here) and to review the lesson material, and to take your time with each individual attempt. Remember that the focus is not on getting this done quickly, but rather demonstrating to me the best you are currently capable of.

Uncomfortable in the post "Lesson 2: Contour Lines, Texture and Construction (Patreon Critique Thread)"

2019-05-15 20:40

It looks like you're moving in the right direction, in that there's less complexity in your forms and they're generally much simpler, but there are still a number of issues:

• Your contour curves are far too shallow and do not give the impression that they hook back around and continue along the other side. This is explained in these notes.

• You should be drawing each form in its entirety, rather than allowing it to stop where it is overlapped by another form.

• You'll notice that in my example from the lesson, I use shorter, fatter sausages (I mentioned in my last critique that you should try not to make them particularly long)

• Take a look at this corner - notice how they're not adding to the silhouette of the form underneath, but rather flattening into it? Avoid approaching it like that. This example from the same set is considerably better, as it bumps up over the underlying form.

Try another two pages of the exercise. Focus on each sausage form individually, on making it feel solid and understanding how it sits in space.

Uncomfortable in the post "Lesson 2: Contour Lines, Texture and Construction (Patreon Critique Thread)"

2019-05-15 11:59

No, revisions can be sent in as soon as they're done. You don't have to wait 2 weeks.

Uncomfortable in the post "Lesson 2: Contour Lines, Texture and Construction (Patreon Critique Thread)"

2019-05-14 22:24

You've done a pretty good job! To start with, your arrows are flowing fairly nicely through all three dimensions of space, exploring the depth of the scene instead of lingering at the "surface" of the page. When practicing this in the future, while the large arrows are quite good, see what you can achieve with smaller ones as well, as subject matter like leaves and flower petals don't have the benefit of being quite so big, but still exhibit much of the same kind of flow.

Your organic forms with contour lines are coming along well, and I'm quite pleased with how you've packed each page full. There are a couple things I'd like you to adjust in your approach however:

• Remember that the forms should be simple sausages - that essentially means that they should be shaped like two equally sized spheres connected by a tube that remains consistent in width, as shown here from later in the lessons.

• It looks like you're not being entirely mindful of how the degree of your contour ellipses and contour curves should shift over the course of the form. Based on where the cross-sectional slice sits in space relative to the viewer, the degree will get wider or narrower, as explained here.

You've got a great start with your texture analyses, and I can signs that you're definitely grasping the idea of the marks we put down for our textures representing shadows rather than actual lines or features. Especially in the bottom right of that first page of this exercise (as it's oriented in the imgur album), you're showing a good sense of how you can manipulate those shadows. Very nicely done.

Your dissection studies were definitely very heavy on the detail. It shows that you're demonstrating well developing observational skills, which is great to see. Don't be afraid to let those areas that reach towards deep, solid blacks to go all the way, however. The reason that allowing for areas with lots of contrast (a lot of little bits of white and black all crammed together) can be problematic is that it draws the viewer's eye. Doing this unintentionally can have a negative impact on the result of a drawing. In the case of the carpet, it would have been more successful had you allowed areas to become full black, and to use the transition area from white to black to create your carpet texture.

It's also worth mentioning that while in many of your other textures, you were a lot more purposeful in the information you carried over from your reference. In the carpet, you relied a lot more on randomness and repeated strokes (rather than direct observation). In general, stay away from approaching things in this manner.

The last thing I wanted to mention about your dissections is in regards to the honeycomb and lizard scale textures. Remember that lines do not exist - try not to think in terms of line when building textures, always fall back to those shadow shapes. Lines are just a construct that we use to establish the boundaries between objects - but those boundaries themselves are just things that help us understand the real world, rather than the things that actually exist within it. In this regard, your second page of dissections was much stronger.

With your form intersections, you did a good job of demonstrating how these forms could exist within the same space together while remaining consistent and cohesive, as though they belong in the same scene. You also achieved this quite well in your organic intersections, especially the first page, with a similar challenge but where the forms were not allowed to cut into one another, and instead had to give the impression of slumping and resting against one another. Well done.

I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete. Keep the points I've mentioned here in mind as you continue onto lesson 3.

Uncomfortable in the post "Lesson 2: Contour Lines, Texture and Construction (Patreon Critique Thread)"

2019-05-14 22:10

To start, your arrows are flowing quite nicely across the page, though you do need to take greater lengths to push into the depth of the scene. Right now the arrows flow primarily along the surface. I can see you playing with the width of the arrows themselves as they move farther away from us, but a key point you're missing is that the space between the zigzagging lengths should also compress and grow smaller as they move farther away from the viewer. I explain this in this particular step.

You're doing a decent job with your contour ellipses and contour curves, but there's a couple things that stands out to me:

• Remember that the organic forms should essentially be like two spheres connected by a tube of consistent width (like this). Avoid any pinching through their midsection, keep the ends the same size and avoid situations where the roundedness at the end gets elongated along the form.

• There is a little stiffness to your contour lines here. A little bit on the contour ellipses, and moreso on the contour curves. Try to apply the ghosting method a little more to increase the overall confidence behind the execution of your marks. This will help keep them smooth and even. Right now you're definitely focusing a great deal on keeping things accurate and keeping your ellipses/curves snug between the edges of the form. That is certainly good, but it should never be done at the cost of the fluidity of your strokes. Increasing your accuracy all happens during the planning/preparation phases, not during the execution.

Moving onto your texture analysis, I'm noticing that you're definitely thinking about your textures very much in terms of lines. In the lesson itself, I talk a lot about how texture consists of little forms that exist along the surface of an object. The lines themselves that we may interpret to be present don't actually exist. They're a construct we use to define the borders between things, and to assert how much space the things we construct tend to take up. They're a useful tool, but they simply don't exist in reality. Instead, when drawing our textures, we need to realize that we are not defining the bounds of these little textural forms, as this would get far too cluttered and visually confusing. Instead, imply their presence by drawing around them. That is, we draw the shadows they cast, rather than the objects themselves. These shadows are solid black shapes, rather than lines. I talk about this more in these notes.

In your dissections, I'm noticing that you're falling back onto drawing less from direct observation of your reference images, and more from your memory. You have a tendency of looking at your reference and making a list in your head of the things you see. Then you go on to draw what you think those things look like. Due to the fact that we as a species have very poor memory when it comes to accurate detail, this doesn't end up working well.

Instead, you need to get in the habit of observing your reference almost constantly, only breaking away for a moment to carry a mark over onto your drawing - something specific that you saw in your the image - before returning to it. As a rule, try not to think in terms of details you can assign a name to. For example, you might be drawing a snake, so you might see a scale. Don't attempt to draw a scale - instead, focus on the shadows cast by that SPECIFIC scale, and try to draw those. The more you think in terms of things you can name, the more you will attempt to draw what you think that object looks like, resulting in representative symbols rather than an accurate depiction of what was present.

This of course is a skill that takes a great deal of time to develop and refine - this was the first step, so keep this stuff in mind.

You've done a pretty good job with your form intersections - you're demonstrating that you can draw many forms together within the same space such that they appeal consistent and cohesive. I did notice though that you seem to have missed the instruction about avoiding forms that are overly stretched (like longer cylinders), and to stick to those that are more equilateral (the same size in all three dimensions). Be mindful of the instructions, and make sure you follow them more closely.

Lastly, your organic intersections do leave something to be desired. While you are beginning to demoinstrate a grasp for how these forms relate and interact with one another, you definitely went to great lengths to make especially complicated forms. This was something you were instructed to avoid.

Stick to simple sausage forms - as mentioned before, two spheres connected by a tube of consistent width, and try not to make them too long. One of the reasons we stay away from complex forms is because construction - which we'll get into more in later lessons - focuses on building things up from their most basic elements. It is considerably more difficult to draw something complex as your first step, and to have it feel solid and three dimensional. This is exactly why you ended up way overdoing it with contour curves - your complex forms didn't read as solid, so you tried to get around that with contour lines. They can only do so much however, and they can never achieve what we can by starting simple and building up complexity as we go.

Before I mark this lesson as complete, I want you to reread the instructions on the organic intersections and do two more pages of that exercise.

Uncomfortable in the post "Lesson 3: Applying Construction to Plants (Patreon Critique Thread)"

2019-05-12 19:33

Those kinds of flowers definitely have easier approaches. As shown here in this quick demo I just threw together, I'd construct a cylinder and then wrap my petals around it rather than relying on individual flow lines.

More than anything, it demonstrates the kind of fluid manipulation of form and construction that a strong grasp of 3D space (as these lessons gradually develop) can achieve.

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

2019-05-12 19:26

So the first thing that jumped out at me in your organic intersections was that you were doing a pretty good job of conveying how these various forms relate to one another, how they deform around one another rather than cutting right through each other as they find a state of equilibrium. That said, your linework did have a tendency of being quite stiff and uncertain. This, along with other signs - such as a distinct uniformity to your individual strokes' line weight (specifically that there's no visible tapering towards the ends of the strokes that generally occurs naturally as the pen touches down) suggests that you are likely drawing a little too slowly and hesitantly.

As we move onto the animal drawings, this stiffness definitely continues to be a problem, and I can regularly see that you are not drawing through most of your ellipses (something you should be doing for each and every ellipse you draw for these lessons).

Looking at this page, there are aspects of your constructions that are well done - you're drawing through all of your forms, for example - but there are a few issues that cause many of your forms to flatten down into shapes.

I am very glad that you're applying the sausage method for your legs, though you're missing a critical step - clearly defining the intersection between sausage segments to help define how they relate to one another in 3D space, rather than just as flat shapes on the page. On the far left, the standalone construction there (which I assume to be a leg or something similar), you did make efforts to define that intersection between sausages, but the contour line's curvature was much too shallow, and didn't give the impression that it wrapped around the other side. Additionally, you seem to have attempted to add bulk around the joint, but instead of actually adding separate three dimensional forms to the construction in that area, you simply added a few individual line - similar to just adding a flat shape. This in turn, flattens things out. In case you're not sure which parts I'm talking about, I've pointed them out here.

On the following page, one of the birds caught my eye, though it's a bit hard to describe my observations here in text, so I've written some more notes directly on the page. It comes down to always building up your construction bit by bit and adhering to the solid forms established in the underlying phase of construction.

The (upside-down) bear on the top of this page was constructed fairly well. I'm seeing somewhat more appropriate use of the sausage method (though you do need to work on keeping your sausages consistent in width through their lengths, yours are tending a little more towards being like stretched ellipses, where they continue to get wider until they reach their middle, which in turn tends to stiffen them. I'm also pleased to see better use of the additional volumes - you're doing more to wrap them around the underlying body.

On both of these bear drawings though, I'm noticing that the feet tend to come out very flat. Whenever drawing any form, try and keep yourself aware of the divisions between the various planes of that form - in the case of the feet (and of most simple forms), consider where the form's top, side, front, etc. lay.

Moving down to the full page bear head, there are many elements of head construction that you're applying well, though your eye sockets are definitely too small. Take a look at the tiger head construction demo again. Also, consider how the ears attach to the head - especially the bear's right ear (on the left side of the page). It doesn't just stick out from the silhouette of the head like that - we would be able to see how it specifically connects to the cranial ball.

There is definitely further progress over the course of the submission, though I think certain points I've raised here continue to be a bit of an issue - especially the stiffness of your linework, not drawing through ellipses, and not fleshing out how certain forms connect to others.

Before I mark this lesson as complete, I'd like you to do 4 more pages of animal drawings. It's totally fine to do one drawing per page, drawing larger so as to engage more of your shoulder and focus on getting your marks to flow more fluidly and smoothly. This matter of flow and confidence is really critical to your drawings at the most basic level. If you take a look at the bottom half of these notes, they may help.

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

2019-05-11 19:38

This is an ENORMOUS improvement, and your bear construction specifically is quite phenomenal. Based on your previous success following along with demos, I was worried that you'd be able to nail those but not quite apply them to your own drawings without further guidance, but it looks like I was wrong. You're doing a much better job of capturing the flow and form of the legs, and the additional masses wrap much more convincingly around the solid forms of the torso and neck.

Your fur is also getting better, though there's still a ways to go on that - it'll come with continued practice, specifically focusing on how you can design and group those tufts together in effective ways and reduce the number of individual lines being used. That sort of line economy is pretty important when it comes to tackling complex, noisy textures - specifically in figuring out how to convey the illusion that there's a lot there, but without unintentionally creating focal points.

I have just one suggestion that comes to mind for now - when drawing the feet of your animals, try and think about how the form you're drawing (which right now is just a basic rounded organic mass) can be divided up into different planes - the top, the side, the front, etc. You can put down an organic mass like that, but as you do, try and think of it more in terms of being a little boxier. Often times organic masses have certain advantages in construction over boxes, where in other cases boxes have qualities that are preferable - and if we can walk the line of drawing one but understanding it in terms of the other, we can benefit from the strengths of both.

Anyway, I am proud to go ahead and mark this lesson as complete. Feel free to move onto the cylinder challenge, which is a prerequisite for lesson 6.

Uncomfortable in the post "Lesson 3: Applying Construction to Plants (Patreon Critique Thread)"

2019-05-11 19:30

You definitely show a fair bit of improvement especially when it comes to conveying the solidity and tangibility of your forms as you work through this set. There are however a number of things I want to point out that should help you improve on certain areas of weakness.

To start with, your arrows are very well done and flow nicely through all three dimensions of space, demonstrating a solid understanding of how perspective applies in this situation. Your leaves are similarly fairly well done, although when you add further detail (like ripples or waves to the edge) you do struggle to have them blend seamlessly into the previous phase of construction. There's always a visible shift from a lighter line weight to a darker one, that suggests to me that you're either switching pens, or more likely, pressing a little harder as you draw. It's important that you try to leverage the natural tapering that comes as your pen touches down onto the page - if you draw too slowly or press too hard, this tapering gets somewhat obliterated.

When tackling your branches, it seems that you may have mised an important part of the exercise - the focus here is on building up complex edges with shorter segments that are seamlessly joined together to create the impression of a single flowing line. While you certainly attempted to build up multiple segments, you seem to have missed the steps involved in getting them to flow seamlessly one from one to the next.

If you take a look at the steps in the lesson, specifically step 3 (both in the diagram and the text), you'll see that you're supposed to extend your first segment past the second ellipse, then draw your second line starting at the second ellipse. This means the two segments should have a healthy overlap between them, allowing you to use part of the first segment as a "runway" for the second. This will allow you to match the trajectory of that first stroke and blend it more seamlessly as it takes off on its own. This is critical in ensuring that the branch feels smooth and consistent, as though it was made with a single complex edge on each side.

Looking at your first page of mushrooms, a few things jump out:

• Your central minor axis line is quite wavy - this line should be pretty straight, or at least following a slight but consistent curve. There's no reason for this line to wobble back and forth in this manner, and in doing so it doesn't serve very effectively at its purpose. It's worth noting that your use of minor axes later on in the lesson set does improve.

• The minor axis line should also extend all the way up through the cap of the mushroom. Keep in mind that the minor axis basically helps us to align several ellipses to one another - it doesn't matter if these belong to different forms, as long as those ellipses need to hold that sort of a relationship to each other.

• Strive to keep your cylindrical forms more consistent in their widths - here we can see that the cylinders get pinched and tapered in certain areas, which severely underlines the illusion of solidity, making them look somewhat flat.

I quite liked this cactus. It feels fairly solid and well drawn, though there are a couple more minor issues I'd like to address:

• You'll notice that in my demonstrations, despite working digitally I always work with a very unforgiving brush that allows no faint strokes. As such, I don't want you to attempt to rely on any pens that put down faint marks (like those that are mostly dried out) in order to hide your underlying construction. One important reason for this is that doing so will force you to then go back over that line in order to "commit" it with a darker replacement. If you remember back in lesson 2's form intersection video, I specifically state that this is not something I want students to get in the habit of doing for these lessons, as it has a tendency to cause us to stiffen up as we draw, focusing overmuch on following the line underneath. Any application of line weight should be limited to small local areas, specifically to clarify overlaps between forms, and should be drawn with the same kind of confident stroke (using the ghosting method) as the original line would have been drawn.

• With the little nodes that exist along the surface, think back to the texture exercises in lesson 2 - specifically how they talk about tackling texture like this in terms of the shadows they cast, effectively drawing around them in order to imply their presence. Give these notes on cast shadows a read, as well as these notes on not outlining textural forms. Same principles apply to the little bits of dirt on the ground.

Looking at this sunflower, I'm not entirely sure about it. The way the petals are laid out doesn't seem entirely believable to me - I'm not sure if the reference was actually that chaotic, but in my experience petals aren't quite so random and erratic in their layout, which suggests to me that you may have worked more from memory/your own guesswork and intuition than actual strict observation. This daisy did appear to be a little more strictly observed - notice how your petals tend to follow more of a logical rhythm, where they're not all the same, but the layout doesn't seem to be quite as erratic.

One last thing I wanted to mention was that your drawings have a tendency of appearing a little loose, in a manner that suggests to me that you're still somewhat thinking as though what we're doing here is sketching. What we're doing here isn't by any means rough or experimental - we think before every single mark we put down, because each mark serves as a statement or assertion that we are communicating to the viewer. We have to ensure that our statements are all clear, and that they do not contradict each other. As such, you may want to slow yourself down a little and put a little more time into the planning and preparation before each mark you put down on the page. Thinking about the purpose of each mark and what exactly you're trying to communicate through it is really critical in creating a drawing that feels cohesive and believable.

Before I mark this lesson as complete, I'd like you to do the following:

• 2 more pages of branches

• 3 more pages of plant drawings. One focused on mushrooms, one on flowers with petals, and one on another plant of your choosing.

In addition to this, when drawing your individual petals, remember that the flow lines extend all the way to the tip of the leaf or petal. So, when enclosing the shape around it, don't aim for the tip to sit a ways ahead of the end of the flow line, but rather at its end.

Uncomfortable in the post "Lesson 3: Applying Construction to Plants (Patreon Critique Thread)"

2019-05-11 18:50

Yes, that's more or less why I decided to let it slide. I checked how much you've paid to date, compared it to the 18 critiques prior to this one that I've got listed in my records, and decided I'd give the critique anyway.

Uncomfortable in the post "Lesson 3: Applying Construction to Plants (Patreon Critique Thread)"

2019-05-11 18:23

Technically this lesson is reserved for the $10 tier (you're at $5 currently) but I'm going to go ahead and do the critique anyway.

You're demonstrating a pretty solid grasp of the material, with just a couple points I want to mention.

To start with, your arrows flow quite nicely along the page - the edges are fluid and smooth, and their movement feels quite natural. That said, I can see that they're still remaining fairly close to the "surface" of the page (rather than pushing into the depth of the scene. I can see some variation in the width from one end to the other (suggesting perspective distortion, which is good, though you may want to exaggerate this). One issue however is that the space between the zigzagging lengths of your arrows remains fairly consistent. Basic perspective should result in all of space compressing as you look farther and farther, as shown here.

Your leaves are generally constructed quite well, and I'm getting a decent sense of how they move through 3D space. My only concern here is how you're handling detail. Detail isn't necessary in this exercise, but as always should you choose to add it, it's important that you do so with proper focus as opposed to being half-hearted in your attempt.

Many of these leaves have lines that run along the surface (simulating the veins of the leaf). Now, there is an option, as shown in one of my demos, to use these as an excuse to put down simple contour lines to help flesh out how that leaf surface flows through space. In this case, you'd be more focused on drawing the lines from the center line all the way to the edge, as you've done in a couple of occasions.

There are other occasions however where the lines you drew in this manner were much sloppier and much more stiff, suggesting that they were more of an afterthought. This tells me that you weren't really thinking about what you were trying to achieve with those marks. A mark without a clear sense of purpose is a wasted line that will only serve to make your drawing look sloppy.

In general, when actually dealing in texture, remember that texture consists of marks that represent shadows cast by the forms that run along the surface of your object. When dealing in texture, we try not to think in terms of "lines", as lines do not actually exist in the world. Lines are a construct that help us define the outline or silhouette of objects to help establish where they sit in space, and have no real place in the actual faithful reproduction of the textures we see. Instead, we need to think in terms of shapes, specifically the shapes of the shadows that are cast by these surface forms. You're never actually drawing those veins - instead you're drawing around them to imply their presence, as shown here.

Moving onto your branches, I can definitely see that you're struggling with getting your edge segments to flow seamlessly into one another, though this is a pretty frequent problem for students, and I can see some improvement. Basically you want to work towards getting rid of those visible "tails". There are two components to achieving this:

• First, as your first stroke goes from the first ellipse and past the second ellipse, you have to strive harder to get it to aim towards the third ellipse. Right now they're frequently veering off on their own path.

• Second, when starting your second stroke, you need to commit to following along the "runway" left by the first stroke, sticking to the path it created and overlapping it in order to create a seamless connection.

In addition to this, as you work on your branches, do be mindful of keeping the branches relatively consistent in their width. I'm seeing areas where the branches taper or swell, which serves to undermine the solidity of the resulting form.

Your plant constructions are generally fairly decent, though there are a number of more minor points I feel I need to mention:

• Do not zigzag your lines, in this case when adding detail to your leaf edges. Doing so causes you to think in terms of how the mark you're drawing flows across the flat page, rather than how the edge moves through 3D space. As explained here, you should be adhering to the edge from the previous phase of construction, coming off it and returning to it with individual marks for each little wave or bump.

• Starting out a flower with an ellipse to define the bounds of where your leaves should extend is a good idea, but the constructional drawing method requires you to adhere to the previous phases of construction. Each mark you put down is an assertion, or an answer to a question - in this case, you're answering how far your leaves should extend, so in order to respect that previous phase of construction, you should not extend your leaves past that radius. While it's not terribly harmful here, getting in the habit of ignoring/replacing those decisions made earlier on through a construction will result in there being lots of conflicting, contradictory information being communicated by your drawing to the viewer.

• In your rhodotus palmotus mushroom, I noticed that when adding the bumps along the silhouette of the cap, you were focused more on how the silhouette existed as a flat shape. Instead, I want you to consider each individual bump as it exists as a form attached to the overall object. Don't try and capture many bumps in a single stroke, but instead focus on how each one sits in 3D space. This will yield a more successful, believable silhouette that will read as three dimensional even if it were completely filled in with solid black. Here's a quick demo I did for another student that conveys this same concept. Notice how I've drawn each one independently, focusing on how it attaches to the base form?

• On your purple daisy, you added quite a few lines along the tips of each petal to try and capture the texture along there. I did notice however that this resulted in a lot of very dense areas of high contrast (lots of little bits of white mixed in with little bits of black), which draws the viewer's attention in a way you may not have intended. In this case, it's a good idea to remember that all texture is, again, a series of shadows being cast, and that these shadows can merge together to create large swathes of black. I can see that you weren't afraid to plunge things into solid black in other aspects of the same drawings, so don't be afraid to do it there either.

• Don't forget to draw through your ellipses in order to keep them confident and evenly shaped. Also, when drawing simple cylindrical forms (like flower pots), don't forget to construct around a central minor axis line.

I've mentioned a lot of things, and while they are important in their own fashion and you should strive to absorb and apply them, as a whole you still have demonstrated a well developing grasp of the core concepts of construction. So, I'm going to go ahead and mark this lesson as complete. Feel free to move onto lesson 4.

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

2019-05-10 21:24

To start with, your organic intersections at the top are coming along, but there is an issue I'd like to address. If you look at the top form in your first page, I noticed there that it seems to ignore the arrangement of forms beneath it, in a way that makes it look like it was cut and pasted on top of the pile, rather than actually integrated into it. Take a look at these notes, where I show how the form should have behaved in relation to those beneath it. This kind of thinking is critical to how we use and manipulate our forms while drawing constructively, as it depends heavily on our belief in the illusion we're creating. That the forms themselves are three dimensional, solid, and real.

Next, moving onto the first two pages of birds, there are a few critical issues I can see, which I explain on this page of notes.

• You're treating your initial construction as more of a loose suggestion, which you then go on to ignore somewhat as you add further lines. For example, how I pointed out the initial ball for the head, which is then drawn on top of with a later line. Construction consists of a series of answers to questions, gradually building out a sense of what this object is. Every line you put down is a statement or an assertion, and if you go on then to put down a line that contradicts a previous assertion, you undermine the illusion you're creating. The viewer now has two conflicting assertions present, and are left less certain as to which to follow. As such, when you answer a question the first time, you adhere to it through the rest of your drawing even if it is not entirely in line with the reference you're drawing from. We're not here to reproduce our reference - we're here to communicate what we see in it through visual means.

• You definitely have a strong tendency here to fall back on using a lot of contour lines to make up for the fact that a form doesn't necessarily feel very solid. Unfortunately, this strategy doesn't really work. Contour lines have a diminishing return - the first one can do a lot of good (especially on a form that doesn't have other qualities that make it feel flat). A second will provide fewer benefits, and a third, an fourth, etc. will eventually do nothing at all, aside from making the drawing feel stiff and robotic. As I show in the notes, your beak there was doomed from the beginning, because it wasn't drawn with consideration for how it existed as a three dimensional form, and how it related to the cranial ball it was connecting to. The intersection/connection of that form to the cranial ball was just a basic curve. This makes the beak feel flat because it doesn't imply a division of top/side/etc. planes of a three dimensional form. If you look at my version, you can see that the intersection has individual lines - one showing the intersection along the top, one showing how the side plane connects, and so on.

• To this point, make sure you're taking the time to define just how the major forms connect to one another, ESPECIALLY early on in your construction. I noticed that you don't actually have any established form for the neck of your bird here. This is something I'm seeing a fair bit through many of your later drawings as well.

Moving on, as I look at your later birds and into the capybaras, I'm seeing a weird tendency to draw your eyesockets with dashed, broken lines. I'm not really sure why you're doing this, but there's two problems here:

• First off, broken/dashed lines do nothing for us. Most often they're used when someone's trying to show that a line is not really "there", which is irrelevant to us because we're not in any way attempting to make a pretty drawing. These drawings are exercises in spatial problem solving and construction, and therefore if we were to be concerned with the end result as a pretty polished drawing, we'd be taking away from that core goal.

• Secondly, the eye sockets are being drawn as smooth ellipses (a point I specifically warn against here). Ellipses take no consideration for the surface of the form you're adding them to - they do not flow along that surface, they assume a specific trajectory, and if the object you're working with doesn't flow in that matter, too bad. Instead, we construct our contour curves by thinking about how the surface of the skull will actually behave, as though we're cutting into it with a scalpel. Similarly, we construct our eyelids around the eyeball form by wrapping these new forms around the ball. Your eyelids tend to ignore the curvature of the eyeball and cut across it instead. This is definitely at least in part due to how small those parts of your drawings end up being (it's considerably more difficult to think through spatial problems as a beginner in small areas), though I see the same kind of problems even when you do more focused drawings of heads alone. Also looking at those drawings, I believe you're making your eyeballs way too small. As you can see in my demonstrations, I draw the eyeballs considerably larger than the portion of them that is going to be visible.

I demonstrate these points in these notes.

I also mention an issue with how you handled the bumps along its body - you constructed your sausage form for the torso, and then cut into it to create the various bumps you'd perceived in your reference. Working subtractively in this manner is considerably more difficult than working additively (as explained here). The way you cut back into those forms didn't really show much definition for how the pieces that were cut away and those that were left sat in 3D space and how they related to one another in 3D space. Instead, you treated it more like a flat shape on the page, and as a result, the torso was flattened. Some contour curves added a degree of volume back, but it was definitely not a great way of approaching that problem.

I've put a fair bit of time into this critique thus far, so I'm going to hit the last few points briefly:

• It doesn't look like you're following the sausage method much when drawing your limbs. Look at this diagram from lesson 4 once again and take a look at this part of the wolf demo as well as the donkey demo to better understand how this method should be approached. Keep in mind that there are several parts to it - drawing a simple sausage for each segment of the leg, ensuring that they overlap enough, and then defining the intersection between them to establish how those forms relate to one another in 3D space. When done correctly, you will not need any more contour curves along the lengths of these sausages.

*You definitely have a tendency at times to get a little vague, faint or loose with your linework. It's not to such a considerable degree, and generally your linework is fairly confident (and your individual major forms are drawn to be fairly solid), but looking at drawings like this one, specifically how the lines have a tendency to fade in and out, only half-existing on the page, it suggests to me that you may be planning your linework out a little less conscientiously than you ought to. Don't forget to ghost, to consider the mark you want to put down, etc. before executing the mark.

• In general, your attempts at texture don't work out too well. From what I can see, you attempt to draw texture from memory rather than direct observation. That doesn't mean that you're not studying your reference frequently, but rather it means that when you look at your reference image, you identify specific elements "there's a bunch of bumps here, there's some feathers here, there's scales here", and then draw those named objects. That is, you draw scales rather than the specific shadows cast by the specific scales that were present in that part of the reference. You're relying on representative symbols of what was there, rather than actually drawing those specific textures. You also tend to approach texture purely with line, rather than capturing the shadow shapes cast by all of the little forms that exist along the surface of the object. Lines do not exist - they are a construct we use to define the bounds of objects in construction, but they serve little purpose when it comes to attempting to capture something as specific and detailed as the kinds of textures that exist in our drawings.

• Lastly, generally whenever you tackle hands, you jump straight into a complex shape with no or little underlying construction. No simple forms, no consideration for how those 3D elements intersect with one another, etc. Just complex, flat shapes. This isn't an uncommon problem to see, and I believe it comes from an uncertainty as to where the border lies between construction and detail.

So, to start, I want you to do 4 pages of animal drawings, construction only. Take the construction as far as you possibly can, but add no detail or texture whatsoever. If you're uncertain of how far that means, you can take a look at the donkey demo. Step 12 is where my 'construction' phase ends.

Before tackling the extra pages, I want you to go back over the lesson once again, reading it carefully. I think there are a lot of areas here where you've neglected to follow along with the processes outlined in the lesson, and have gone about things in your own interpretive fashion. Again, it's a common thing to see, especially when students don't go back to the notes to refresh their memory. You can even follow along with the demos - you can include those if you do them with your submission, but they won't count towards your 4 pages.

Uncomfortable in the post "Lesson 4: Applying Construction to Insects and Arachnids (Patreon Critique Thread)"

2019-05-10 16:12

While there are situations where you need to work subtractively and where working additively isn't really an option, what you're describing is different, based on the work you submitted before.

The issue is that what you're starting off with are not forms - they're larger shapes that you're using to put down the footprint of the overall drawing. That is an entirely viable approach, but not one that you are allowed to use as part of these lessons, purely because we're focusing on getting your brain to think of every mark you put down as it exists in 3D space. As such, every single thing you put down on the page must be understood as a solid, three dimensional form that then has to be dealt with somehow. Getting used to thinking additively and building your forms on top of each other will help with that.

Uncomfortable in the post "Lesson 2: Contour Lines, Texture and Construction (Patreon Critique Thread)"

2019-05-09 20:52

It may have been a challenge, but you did a pretty solid job of it. Most students struggle with this, and often will get some of the intersections wrong, but from what I saw yours seemed to generally be correct. Keep up the good work, and don't be afraid to tackle the difficult stuff in the future, even if it means messing up once in a while.

I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete, so feel free to move onto lesson 3.

Uncomfortable in the post "Check out this review of Drawabox that was just released by a former student, Rebecca Rand!"

2019-05-09 13:07

Looks like you might be a bit mistaken - I'm the one sharing the video here on the subreddit. If you've got questions for Rebecca, I'd recommend asking them as a comment directly on the video.

As for the point about having zero fun/personal project drawings, then you're doing Drawabox wrong.

Uncomfortable in the post "Lesson 3: Applying Construction to Plants (Patreon Critique Thread)"

2019-05-08 22:22

I just doodled this to communicate the idea a little better. I'm not sure which reference you were working from, so I just made stuff up based on your drawing.

Basically you deal with each protrusion as though it's an individual object. You're not dealing with the outline of the overall cactus, but rather building each bump, spike, whatever as a separate form that you're adding one by one. Now because I don't want to necessarily construct every little thing (this is riding the line between texture and more construction), I'm going to lean a little harder on the shadows those forms are casting in order to imply the space they occupy. With each one, I am focusing on how these forms exist in space and how they relate to the main form I'm appending them to.

Uncomfortable in the post "Lesson 2: Contour Lines, Texture and Construction (Patreon Critique Thread)"

2019-05-08 20:12

Pretty good work overall! To start with, your arrows flow very nicely through space, conveying a grasp of all three dimensions and pushing into the very depth of the scene rather than remaining along the surface of the page.

Your organic forms with contour ellipses and contour curves both are executed quite well. You're doing a good job of keeping your lines smooth and your ellipses evenly shaped, of hooking your curves back near the edges to continue along the opposite side, and are generally mindful of both the alignment and degree shift of your curves/ellipses (though there is room for improvement on that end).

Your texture analyses are really quite nicely done, though I do have some thoughts. Overall I think you're very much heading in the right direction, but there are two main points that I want to raise:

• On the first one, you definitely had some trouble getting from those deep darks to the lighter tones - not so much in terms of the overall gradient (you managed the density fairly well), but rather in terms of the actual marks themselves. The challenge is however very similar, just on a different scale. You fell back into hatching/crosshatching lines because it's a common technique here, but it is also one you should generally avoid as a rule - purely because it has a tendency to block out any other options. In this case, what I would have leveraged is the fact that the surface was likely to have all kinds of little pits and cracks that would create little shadow shapes you could leverage to create your transitions from dark to light. Hatching is really just a generic catch-all that does nothing to convey information about what is actually present - so instead, look deeper into your texture, and find something to use in place of that hatching.

• I noticed that as you moved from left to right on your density gradient, you tended to make things bigger in order to make the texture more sparse. That is certainly an option, but it does certainly force you into changing the texture itself in a particular way. But what if the object was covered in, say, scales that were all uniform? The trick there is not to make the elements themselves larger, but rather to imply their presence without necessarily drawing each and every one. That's where the fact that we're dealing in little cast shadows (rather than outlining each and every little form) comes into play. Shadows are subject to the lighting scenario we choose to apply. We can make things very dark by removing most of the light. Alternatively, we can overexpose the image, blasting all of the detail away with light, resulting in only a few little shadows along the corners or edges of an object, with a lot of lost-and-found elements. This results in far less linework present, but without changing what we're saying is actually present.

Your dissections are looking pretty good as well, though there are a couple minor points I want to mention in terms of the specific textures you chose - or more specifically, which aspect of them you determined to be the texture.

• A maple leaf is not a texture, it is an object. It has a texture, however - so the exercise should not have involved drawing a maple leaf, but rather taking the surface of that maple leaf and wrapping it around the section of the basic sausage form.

• A zebra's stripes is not a texture either, but for a different reason. This is instead a pattern - it has nothing to do with light and shadow, but rather is a matter of local coloration. If instead the stripes were of red and blue instead of black and white, you may have not considered them to be appropriate for this exercise - at the end of the day, local colour isn't something we deal with at all. Instead, you might have considered the short hair of a zebra, and attempted to capture that without the distraction of the stripes themselves.

Moving onto your form intersections, I primarily focus on whether or not you're able to draw these forms together in the same space in a manner that feels cohesive and consistent. In this regard, you did a good job - the forms don't feel as if they've been cut out of other drawings and pasted together - they feel like they belong within the same scene. You also made a good effort on the intersections themselves, though these do have plenty of room for improvement. This is entirely normal and expected - you will continue to develop your understanding of how these forms relate to one another as you keep moving through the lessons.

Lastly, your organic intersections do a good job of conveying how these forms slump and sag against one another, attempting to find a state of equilibrium without actually pushing through each others' volumes. That's one key factor here - I look to see if students can actually convey a believable sense that these forms are resting against one another, rather than simply occupying space on an individual level. I am quite pleased with how you've been able to create this illusion that the forms are all aware of each other and respecting each others' physical presence.

I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete. Feel free to move onto lesson 3.

Uncomfortable in the post "Lesson 3: Applying Construction to Plants (Patreon Critique Thread)"

2019-05-08 19:51

I'll answer your questions first.

• Leaving texture/detail out and focusing totally on construction is totally fine. Being lazy and adding sloppy, vague marks is not.

• I mean pens of the same thickness/weight. All of these drawings should be done with a ~0.5mm pen. Sometimes students will try to put their construction lines down with a thinner pen and then go back over it with a thicker one to "commit" to their lines. I don't want students to do this here, specifically because of what I mentioned before about replacing linework. Now, drawing your construction with a pen that is dying is STILL going to require you to go back over your lines again to replace them, so I don't want you to do that either.

• Yes - draw each simple form in its entirety, then build up on top of that. Also clearly define how any forms that interpenetrate connect to one another by clearly defining the intersection between them with a contour line. as we discussed in the form intersections exercise in lesson 2.

So, your new drawings are considerably better. There are some issues I want to point out but I am going to mark this lesson as complete.

In your cacti, you did a much better job of drawing through each form. You did however flatten the forms out when you went back over those lines to add the bumps/spines/spikes. The reason is that when you went back over it as you did, you treated it like it was a flat shape on the page, rather than actually treating it as though you were adding individual bumps to it. You changed the resulting silhouette shape (which is by nature flat), but didn't really give any impression that you were adding any solid, 3D forms onto the construction.

People draw differently based on whether they're actually thinking about how little 3D forms would stick onto a larger object, or when they're focusing on just making a flat shape bumpier. It comes back to the concepts in lesson 2 about believing in the lie you're creating.

Additionally, I noticed that you didn't establish the intersections between the various forms of the cactus. This is actually something that goes a long way to help reinforce the illusion of form - by creating the intersection lines (again, like lesson 2's form intersections), you are telling the viewer how those 3D forms relate to one another in a very clear, specific manner. The intersection line is one that runs along the surface of both forms simultaneously, and therefore very clearly tells us of the relationship between the two forms.

Your mushrooms were definitely a much clearer effort to observe your reference carefully and transfer information over. There is still lots of work to be done on texture, but you're heading in the right direction here. One thing that I do want to mention is that you are still working a fair bit in line. The mushrooms have those gills, and that kind of texture results in a lot of thin dark areas running up and down the mushroom's surface, so you're inclined to just draw lines running up and down.

Remember that all the marks that make up the textures we see are not lines - lines don't actually exist. Instead, they are shadows, and they manifest as solid shadow shapes. So instead of thinking in terms of drawing your details as lines, think of them as shapes - even if they're incredibly thin. Shapes can get thicker and wider and are always internally solid. Lines have considerably less dynamism in this manner.

Additionally, I noticed on the left mushroom you started applying what looked a bit like hatching - I want you to stay away from that for the drawabox lessons. By hatching, I mean a repeated action on auto-pilot, rather than studying the individual marks and where they should fall. Often students will use hatching to try and render/shade a drawing, which as explained here in lesson 2 is not what we're doing in these lessons. While we do care about the shadows forms cast, we aren't capturing any shading or rendering. The only cases where we use hatching is on very basic tasks like where you've got a simple geometric box you've drawn through and want to communicate which side is facing the viewer. That's not a situation you'd find in one of these constructional drawings, for the most part.

Anyway, keep those points in mind. I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete, so feel free to move onto lesson 4.

Uncomfortable in the post "Check out this review of Drawabox that was just released by a former student, Rebecca Rand!"

2019-05-08 17:09

I certainly wouldn't disagree that there's going to be a learning curve for whatever medium you decide to move onto. Some aspects of the motor skills certainly do transfer, but there's no getting around the fact that using a regular tablet will always require you to get accustomed to the disconnect between the drawing surface and the screen. That said, it doesn't really relate to why I push the use of ink as the medium that should be used while working through the drawabox lessons.

The purpose of Drawabox as a whole is to rewire your brain in a number of ways. To instil patience, to develop a habit of forethought and planning before execution, to change how you see the world around you and to build up your ability to think in three dimensions, to manipulate three dimensional forms and to combine them to build up complex objects from the most simple of components. Every single one of those things sticks with you regardless of which medium you try to use.

I'm not here to teach you how to draw in pen. Being a purely digital artist myself, I wouldn't really claim to know how to leverage a lot of the nuance that comes with ink as a medium. I know how to put marks down, to control how much pressure I apply (which carries over to my use of a stylus), but that's about it.

I specifically push against people doing these lessons digitally because of two factors: my own experiences learning as a digital artist, and what I've seen from students over the years. When I first started sharing the lessons back in 2014 when this subreddit started, I didn't have any restrictions. People could do the homework in whatever tool they saw fit, and I'd critique it. I imposed these limitations because of the tendencies I saw fairly consistently from students who jumped right into digital. This is what caused me to reflect upon my own experiences doing the same thing. Of course there's still no shortage of students posting digital work either to the subreddit or on the discord, and the same issues still arise.

There is one last reason that bears mentioning - the limitation has served to make the process of critiquing students' homework (something I did for free until 2016) vastly more feasible, because it cut out a lot of problems that I'd otherwise had have to address directly. It's not to say that those working with ink didn't sometimes rush or exhibit impatience, but they did so far less frequently.

Now, no one's going to break into your house to tar-and-feather you for doing the exercises digitally. In fact, it's a great idea to work through the couple lessons digitally once you've got a solid grasp of the material with the recommended tools to help develop your dexterity and control within that chosen medium. All I can do is give you the recommendations that in my experience have helped students achieve the specific goals of the Drawabox lessons with greater rates of success.

Uncomfortable in the post "Lesson 3: Applying Construction to Plants (Patreon Critique Thread)"

2019-05-07 20:23

There are a couple points I want to raise in regards to your new drawings where you don't quite apply what I explained in my previous critique:

• Your first page is fine. I can see you making a greater effort to extend those flow lines to the bounds of the outer ellipse.

• On both of your cacti, you neglect to draw through the entirety of your forms. You're treating them like flat shapes, and attempt to add contour lines to give them form after the fact, but they're somewhat lost causes already by then. What I'm talking about is the fact that you leave these forms open-ended. You don't close them off, drawing them in their entirety. Nor do you define how the different forms actually intersect with one another (this tends to help a great deal in reinforcing the illusion of form). To give you a specific example, looking at A where the cactus hits the rim of the flower pot, you entirely stop those lines. Instead, you should be drawing the entirety of the form, extending downwards to complete it. On B, the same thing happens when the arms of the cactus meet its main trunk - you stop those lines, when instead you should be continuing them on to build out this entire form as though it existed in isolation. Then you define where it intersects with the trunk, adding a contour line there as you would with the form intersections from lesson 2.

• On your mushrooms, along the underside of the caps, you've added some vague lines to symbolize the "gills" there - but the specific marks you put down do not reflect anything specific that was actually present in your reference image. Instead, you drew symbols to represent the details you identified. That's not how we are to capture details - instead, as covered back in lesson 2, we identify the little forms that exist along the surface of our object and draw the specific shadows they cast along their surroundings. Don't draw what you remember, because human memory is faulty and prone to oversimplification. Draw exactly what is there. This means having to look at your reference almost constantly, identifying specific marks that you need to transfer little bits at a time, taking only a moment to put a mark down before looking back at your reference and refreshing that memory.

I'd like to see one page of cacti, focusing purely on construction, and one page of mushrooms, first solidly constructed and then fully detailed. You may want to reread the section on texture in lesson 2 before doing so.

Uncomfortable in the post "Lesson 2: Contour Lines, Texture and Construction (Patreon Critique Thread)"

2019-05-07 20:12

Very well done! Overall your work here is pretty stellar. To start with, your arrows flow very nicely through 3D space, demonstrating a strong grasp of how it gets compressed the further away we look, resulting in the arrows getting narrower as well as the space between their zigzagging lengths shrinking. You've done a good job of conveying how these arrows plunge into the depth of the scene, rather than remaining along the surface of the page.

Your organic forms with contour ellipses and contour curves are pretty solid. There's still a little work to be done on getting the ellipses and curves to fit more snugly between the edges of the silhouette (to promote the illusion that the contour lines run along the surface of the form), but this is pretty normal, and you're getting fairly close. I'm also seeing attention being paid to the alignment of your ellipses to the central minor axis line, as well as signs that you're shifting the degree of your ellipses along the length of the forms.

You've done pretty well with your texture analyses, especially the density gradients towards the right side. I do have a couple pieces of advice to offer however:

• on your first texture, I do feel that you were a little more tightly bound to the idea of working with individual lines, rather than seeing the marks you put down as the shadows being cast by small forms resting along the surface of your object. You definitely leaned harder into this in the latter two studies, which is great, but it's definitely something to always keep in mind - lines never truly exist. We're either making them up to describe and enclose the space an object occupies (which we do quite often), or what we think of as lines are actually very narrow shapes. Thinking of them as shapes instead frees us to be much more flexible in how we use them.

• Along the left side of the page, the focus is more on observing our reference as closely as possible, carrying over the detail and information there without really processing it. I'm seeing you doing a fair bit of processing (thinking in terms of shadow, trying to organize your details, etc.). Instead, for this section, focus on just replicating all of the density that you see without trying to group it together. That organization and processing is reserved for the right side of the exercise.

You really demonstrate a solid grasp of the use of texture and detail throughout your dissections, and tackle a number of different textures without resorting to any sort of one-size fits all solution to the marks you make. You're avoiding any sort of generic hatching, in favour of specifically studying your reference and finding the kinds of shadows and forms that are present there.

One thing you'll want to keep an eye on is pushing the idea that these textures are wrapping around a form - so the surface itself turns away from the viewer along the sides, resulting in the texture getting more compressed. You are certainly showing signs of grasping this, but need to push it a little farther.

Your form intersections demonstrate the primary thing I'm looking for - you're able to draw many of these forms together within the same space in a manner that feels consistent and cohesive. I did however only notice you attempt the actual intersections between the forms a couple times. I can understand not wanting to push those attempts further due to being worried that you'd "ruin" your drawing, but that's not really the mindset you need to be pushing here. Whether or not you get them right isn't really an issue here - it's more that you make the attempt and try to get your head around these forms cut into one another and how they relate to each other that's important.

Finally, your organic intersections are looking good - you're demonstrating a developing grasp of how these forms rest atop one another, how they push and sag and slump as they find a state of equilibrium between them. I do feel that the forms get a little stiff, but by and large these are quite well done.

Before I mark this lesson as complete, I'd like you to submit one page of form intersections with the actual intersections drawn in.

Uncomfortable in the post "Lesson 3: Applying Construction to Plants (Patreon Critique Thread)"

2019-05-06 20:39

All in all you're doing a pretty good job, though there are a few things that stand out that I'd like to point out to keep you on the right track, and to reiterate important concepts so they're understood correctly.

To start with your leaves flow fairly well through all three dimensions of space rather than being restricted to the space defined by the flat, two dimensional page. They're folding over themselves, twisting, and generally demonstrating the full freedom of movement, and handling this quite well. One thing that does jump out at me however is the lines that you add along the surface of the forms. There's nothing wrong with adding a few contour lines, but it's important that every mark you put down serves a purpose, and that is executed with a mind to that goal. A lot of the additional marks you've put on your leaves have been loose and sloppy, as if they were drawn just for the hell of it. As a result, they definitely diminish the resulting work.

Your branches are looking pretty decent, though I'm noticing that you've only attempted to employ the use of segments to build up your edges in a few cases, and when you did, you had a tendency to only overlap them slightly. This results in more visible breaks. When you apply this technique, try to extend the first segment much farther, giving yourself more of a "runway" for the second segment to follow. Remember that the goal is to get the two lines to merge together seamlessly, with no visible breaks.

Throughout your plant constructions I'm seeing good use of the leaf construction technique on your leaves and petals, so they're flowing quite nicely through space. There are a few things that are worth pointing out however that will help as you continue to move forwards.

• First off, draw bigger. You don't need to cram three or four drawings to a page - spatial problems like construction are going to benefit a great deal from being given more room to think through problems.

• Looking at the mushrooms labelled C on this page, specifically the one on the left side of the cluster of 3. You initially put down a relatively simple tube/cylinder form as your basic construction, which is great to see. You then cut back into that tube (on the left edge, near the cap). Now, while cutting back into forms is not in itself a problem, the issue is how you went about it. You treated the tube like a flat, two dimensional shape that you could cut back into (as if with scissors). The way you did so didn't regard the form as being three dimensional, and so the result was that this act flattened your drawing somewhat. It's important that whenever you cut back into a three dimensional form, that you do so along the surface of that form, defining how both the remaining piece and the piece that was cut away exist in 3D space, and how they relate to one another. In general, this is avoided in favour of working additively (adding bumps rather than taking chunks away).

• I also noticed a tendency to draw your underlying construction a little more faintly, then adding new lines on top to replace them that are richer and darker. This is a process I tell students to avoid back in lesson 2. I want you to treat every single mark you put down as being part of the final drawing, drawing them with the same pen, with full confidence. We can add line weight near the end, but this line weight should only be added to specific areas rather than covering and replacing entire lines, and should specifically be used to clarify overlaps between forms.

• On this page you're establishing the outermost range of your petals with ellipses early on. This practice is fine, but it's important that you adhere to those bounds, rather than treating them like a loose approximation or suggestion. Constructional drawing is all about building up little by little, and adhering firmly to the decisions made in previous stages. It's a process that focuses on answering questions, bit by bit, and never contradicting an answer you've already given (for example, to say that the petals will go out this far, and then ignoring that in favour of having your petals go out to some other distance). So in this case, you want to draw those flow lines all the way to the edge of the ellipse you placed (to the best of your ability).

• On this page, when drawing the smaller chunks of the cactus along the right side of the page, you did not draw these in their entirety. I can see that the underlying, lighter construction did, but the replacement lines you dropped in didn't really demonstrate any grasp of how that form would independently exist in 3D space, nor how it would relate to the other forms around it. Drawing each form in its entirety in this manner, and not relying on replacing linework (as discussed above) is critical to this. Do not focus on drawing a pretty picture - focus on these drawings as exercises in spatial reasoning.

• Also, when drawing flower pots (which are essentially cylindrical constructions), you'll want to take advantage of the fact that all the ellipses would align to the same minor axis. You can put a vertical line down the center and construct your ellipses around it, taking care to use it for that alignment. Draw each of these ellipses in their entirety, including the one for the base which you seem to have neglected in favour of only approximating the curvature.

Before I mark this lesson as complete, I'd like you to do three more pages of plant drawings, demonstrating what I've mentioned here. Focus on using the same pen, with confident strokes for every mark you put down, and building up your construction steadily rather than attempting to replace the entirety of your linework with "cleanup passes".

You're definitely close, but I think demonstrating your ability to apply this particular aspect of construction and to focus on the drawings as spatial exercises rather than being quite as focused on the end result being clean, is important before I let you move onto the next lesson.

Uncomfortable in the post "Did a demonstration of constructional drawing as applied to a donkey for a student today, figured you guys would benefit from it as well"

2019-05-05 19:15

Hahaha, awesome.