Uncomfortable in the post "25 Wheel Challenge"

2019-02-13 22:30

Great work! You've hit all the major points I was looking for here - your cylindrical bases are extremely solid (and you're making excellent use of those ellipse guides, despite their limitations), and you're demonstration an excellent eye for detail and for the most part, the patience to carry it over into your drawing with specific, planned marks.

Admittedly, there were a few places where you may have gotten a little sloppy (like 15, where you put down some rather unplanned hatchy lines along tire), but for the most part you were more conscientious. One suggestion that I do have however is that when you've texture that is made up of bulkier forms - for example, 13 and 17's tread, rather than trying to construct each one (and therefore enclosing each one completely), I'd recommend leaning on silhouette and cast shadow.

That is to say, instead of enclosing each of these forms, try to imply their presence by drawing the shadows they cast on the surfaces around them. I talk about this a fair bit with the texture stuff from lesson 2. Where the forms punch past the silhouette, you definitely want to capture that, but as far as all the internal lines go, cast shadows tend to be much more versatile and a lot less stiffening to the overall drawing.

Also worth mentioning, 22 was definitely a pretty crazy experiment, but I did notice that your alignment for each of these protrusions was a little arbitrary. Minor axes can be applied there too, at least to give yourself some idea of how you want each one to relate to the surface of the wheel.

Aside from that, fantastic work. I'll go ahead and mark this challenge as complete, so feel free to get back to lesson 7. I believe I assigned five more drawings (3 non-cars and 2 cars), and I'm excited to see the material you've learned here being applied!

Uncomfortable in the post "Lesson 4: Drawing Insects and Arachnids"

2019-02-12 22:53

Looks like you timed your submission just right, falling exactly two weeks since your last one. Your work here is quite well done - you're demonstrating an understanding of the use of form and construction that steadily improves over the set, and a bold willingness to push your line weight and shadow shapes.

You've definitely got some timidity towards the beginning - I can see where you've drawn underlying constructional lines with a faint, more hidden stroke, obviously not quite willing to commit properly to the marks you put down on the page. You then follow up with a significantly darker stroke as a "clean-up" pass. In general, this is not how I want you to approach your drawings - we're not separating our construction lines from our final drawing. Each stroke plays a role, and line weight serves primarily to help organize and build a hierarchy. Whenever you find yourself wanting to add weight to the entirety of a line

This is an issue you demonstrate less and less as you push through, and your last drawing - the louse demo one - shows a much greater regard for every single mark you put down, which is great to see.

When it comes to your contour lines, you've got a balance of both excellent use of them in some places, and a slightly shakier grasp of those rounded forms - sometimes in the same stroke. Looking at this ant's abdomen, I'm really loving the way you're pushing your segments past the silhouette. Your use of contour lines here is also quite well done, except for how it meets the top edge. It doesn't quite hook around properly, and fails to really sell the illusion fully. It's almost there, but it falls just a little bit short. I think the waviness of the line may have made it a little more challenging at this point.

Your forms and construction as a whole are coming along great - I'm especially loving your scorpion for that reason. The segmentation of the body, the forms of the tail, and the claws feel very solid. The far claw (its left) is especially nice, as the way the form itself turns suggests a clear distinction between the top plane of the claw and its side. The legs were left a bit wanting though - they were drawn a bit stiffly, and perhaps didn't involve as much observation as they could have. For that reason they came out more simplistically than the rest of the body. Rather than the detail of the forms or anything like that, it was likely that the way they were posed and arranged felt off. We can compare them to the legs on your crab, for instance, where they're still quite simple, but the way they're arranged feels much more believable.

Anyway - you're doing great when it comes to your use of form and construction, and show a lot of progress over the set. I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete. There is definitely room for growth, but they're the sort of things you'll chisel away at through further practice - both on this subject matter, and the things you'll encounter as you move forwards.

Keep up the great work and feel free to move onto lesson 5.

Uncomfortable in the post "250 Box Challenge"

2019-02-11 18:33

Hahaha, I'm glad you're benefitting from looking at these reviews - there's a lot here to sift through, and a great deal of it will certainly apply to those still working through the challenge.

Uncomfortable in the post "Lesson 7: Drawing Vehicles"

2019-02-11 17:36

So right now I'm sorting out a few non-drawabox things before I get back onto the DaB train, but my next goal (alongside gradually fixing up and reuploading the videos) is to create two new lesson sets. One will focus on design, tackling topics like the use of shape/form language, proportion, how to derive elements from existing reference to incorporate into something fresh and new. Another will focus on illustration, looking at things like composition, storytelling, etc.

What I would recommend is getting used to doing photo studies, digitally. Because we've been so focused on drawing, there will be some transitional struggles as you move onto thinking more in terms of blocking in shapes and such, but your overall understanding of 3D space will help a great deal.

Focus on blocking things in with a large square chalky brush, dropping in all of the major components before gradually refining them. This is one of those areas where there will be much more attention to drawing something exactly as you see it (construction is still very relevant, but overall you want to try and nail the composition and positioning of elements), matching colours without colour picking, and figuring out how to tackle a variety of new challenges.

Many years ago, before I went through the course material I developed into Drawabox, I gave myself a 31 day challenge where I would do at least one photo study, for at least 3 hours, every day for 31 days. These were the results. Some came out fairly well, others much less so (though it's fair to say that I had been painting digitally for years at this point). More than anything, the focus was on getting used to laying down values and colours, and replicating what I saw to the best of my ability.

It was a very fruitful exercise, and really kicked my comfort level up by a great deal. If you want to embark on something like that, I'd recommend doing a variety of subject matter - stills from movies/tv shows, still lifes, vehicles, landscapes, interior environments, etc. Don't spend too much time picking a photo, give yourself a limit on that and once your time's up, grab something and go.

Uncomfortable in the post "Lesson 2: Organic Forms, Contour Lines, Dissections and Form Intersections"

2019-02-10 20:27

The first half of the cylinder challenge might not be a bad idea, but I'd definitely leave the second half (cylinders in boxes) for closer to when you attempt lesson 6. That said, your ellipses will improve so long as you continue to warm up with these kinds of exercises. Remember that at the beginning of each sitting, you should be doing 10-15 minutes of two or three randomly selected exercises from lessons 1 and 2.

Uncomfortable in the post "Lesson 2: Organic Forms, Contour Lines, Dissections and Form Intersections"

2019-02-10 19:43

Nice work with the arrows! They both flow nicely through space, and demonstrate a good understanding of how perspective not only causes the width of the arrow to shrink as it moves farther back, but that the space itself (and therefore the distances between the various lengths of ribbon) also compresses.

Your contour ellipses are coming along decently, though watch the stiffness of your ellipses. You're drawing them a little hesitantly, and when you slow down your line wobbles. Remember to apply the ghosting method to every mark you put down, so as to maintain control as well as confident pace.

Also, when drawing a sausage, remember that it's like two spheres connected by a tube of consistent width (like this). As such, keep the roundedness limited to either end and try not to stretch it out. Also, keep the ends the same width.

Your contour curves are generally hooking around the form well, though work on keeping them snugly pinched between the edges of the form. If they float inside, or break past the silhouette of the form, you'll lose the illusion that they're running along the surface of the form.

Fantastic work on your texture analyses and dissections - you're demonstrating a good deal of observation and careful study of your reference images, along with plenty of progress in how you're approaching using that textural information either to create density gradients or to apply them to rounded forms. Keep working on the idea that what you're drawing are the shadows being cast by these forms, and allow yourself to vary their widths from nothing to a larger shadow shape. That said, you're making great progress.

Your form intersections are looking quite good, and are demonstrating a solid grasp of how these forms exist in 3D space, and how they interact with each other within it. The forms feel consistent, as though they exist in the same scene, and your foreshortening doesn't throw off the sense of scale at all.

The organic intersections are a start, and you are generally demonstrating an understanding of how these forms exist together - pushing on one another in order to allow for all their volumes and masses to be respected. The top form towards the right side was definitely a last minute addition that could have received more planning and consideration (the wobbly line of its silhouette undermines its solidity) but the rest are fairly well done. Just remember to focus on keeping these forms as simple as possible. The exercise is about how they interact with one another, not the complexity of each individual.

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

Uncomfortable in the post "250 Box Challenge"

2019-02-10 19:29

I really commend your decision to tackle this challenge anyway - it was a fantastic idea, and it really demonstrates your dedication to improvement.

You started off a little shaky and uncertain, but still in a manner that reinforces why I gave you a pass (something I do less and less frequently as time goes on). Relatively quickly, however, you start solidifying your grasp on this material, and go on to construct consistently solid and cohesive boxes.

I'm very happy with the conscientiousness and thoroughness you've shown with all of your line extensions. You've clearly put a great deal of thought into what each set of extended lines told you, and learned from them as you moved through.

Your boxes by the end are phenomenal, and the issues by that point have shrunk to a minimal degree. Still, I will address the one issue I'm noticing, even if it is small and its nature suggests that you are probably aware of it.

In cases like 246 and 250's red lines, 240's blues, and so on, I do see a slight tendency to have the middle lines of a given set (those that are generally very close to each other) to either diverge, or to converge too rapidly. The reason for this is simple - because they're so close to one another, the margin for error is so small that any mistake is going to be very obvious.

What you really want to strive for in this case is to keep these lines as parallel to one another as possible. Since they inevitably going to have a negligible angle between them at the vanishing point itself, the lines will inevitably run parallel to one another by the time they reach the box (as demonstrated in these notes).

Now I do think you're aware of this, and you demonstrate this understanding in other cases, but I figured I'd mention it anyway to keep myself relevant to your growth :P

I'll go ahead and mark this challenge as complete. Feel free to move onto lesson 6.

Uncomfortable in the post "Lesson 3: Drawing Plants"

2019-02-10 19:12

Definitely an improvement, they're flowing more fluidly, but there is still room for improvement. Here's some redlining to highlight the issues. Your ellipses are still pretty small and cramped, and you should try and extend your segments halfway to the next ellipse, rather than just a little bit past the previous one.

Another little reminder - don't forget that you can, and should, rotate your page as you do this. Always find a comfortable angle of approach while applying the ghosting method to these strokes.

I am going to go ahead and mark this lesson as complete, but be sure to continue practicing this as part of your warmups.

Uncomfortable in the post "Lesson 5: Drawing Animals"

2019-02-10 19:04

It's definitely one of your better ones. I've done a redlining here to highlight some issues, but by and large it's well done.

I do want to mention one thing though - you mention "the contour lines I think you want". I just want the contour lines you put down to be ones that serve an important purpose. Don't think about the ones I want, rather think about them as tools you can use to achieve the goal of making a certain form look more three dimensional.

Overdoing contour lines can make things appear stiff and man-made, so there is a risk of that. But dropping them into key places - like the joints between forms where they intersect (like on the sausages) can convey a great deal of form and three dimensionality without needing all that many.

Uncomfortable in the post "Lesson 3: Drawing Plants"

2019-02-09 19:24

Your leaves are definitely showing a better grasp of how to apply construction in phases, gradually building up that detail. Your branches however suggest that you may have understood what I meant - I probably should have been clearer.

What I said in my critique was,

ne area where you may be making things more difficult for yourself is that you're drawing these branches to be quite small on the page. Try drawing them bigger, giving yourself more room to engage your shoulder and giving your brain more room to think through spatial problems.

When I talked about drawing them bigger, I meant wider rather than longer. Making the ellipses themselves larger on the page, more proportionally similar to what I've drawn in my various demonstrations.

I think it would be in your best interest to do one more page of branches. Try and mimic the one I've drawn on the page above, with four or five ellipses drawn confidently to be smooth and even, and spaced comfortably apart so as to give each edge segment the room to flow smoothly from one to the next. When those ellipses are so close together that each segment ends up being quite short, it ends up being rather easy to stiffen up.

Uncomfortable in the post "Lesson 7: Drawing Vehicles"

2019-02-09 19:14

Your improvement since the first submission when it comes to these cars is phenomenal. Your constructions have improved considerably, as has your eye for detail and your ability to capture that same detail in a manner that feels solid, tangible and believable. While it's true that there are some proportional issues (like the back half of the mustang's chassis as you pointed out yourself), the construction of its front half is really fantastic.

Your camaro is also pretty well done - I think it may be a little wide, but again the construction was handled very well. It actually stands out to me as more of a strength that you stick so closely to the earlier stages of construction, even if that initial enclosing box came out a little off, as it shows a deep respect and understanding for the process. Learning to judge proportions comes with time and experience, but this understanding of the constructional approach will serve you very well as you continue to move forwards.

I do have to admit - when I scrolled down to see the bike, it was so unexpected and so spot on that I actually exclaimed, "oh DAMN". Fantastic work here. Excellent use of your ellipse guides, really solid construction, and the handling of the more organic curves whilst retaining the overall firm solidity of the forms was very well done.

The last one - the lamborghini - probably is the weakest of the set, but again it's because of proportion more tha nanything else. I can still see you faithfully adhering to the enclosing box, demonstrating that you're not just thinking about the creating a pretty drawing at the end. You clearly have a great respect for this as an exercise, and the internal details and construction are still quite well done. The details don't feel like they're stickers pasted onto a simple form, they feel as though they've been carved into it wherever needed. Especially in this drawing, I see a lot of fine cuts, creating distinctions between various planes of the overall form - the kind of thing that you're as likely to find in a well sculpted face.

While you obviously had your struggles, and will continue to grow with practice, I am very confident in marking this lesson as complete. You've done a great job, and should be proud of yourself. Congratulations on defeating the drawabox boss battle, and on completing the constructional drawing curriculum. All that's left - should you choose to attempt it - is the treasure chest challenge, though it is more of a bonus round.

Uncomfortable in the post "Lesson 3: Drawing Plants"

2019-02-09 01:35

It comes down to the principle that once your pen touches the page, there is nothing you can do to avoid a mistake. All of that is handled beforehand, through planning, preparing and ghosting through the mark you intend to make. Your execution of the stroke should be confident and persistent, without hesitation.

In most cases, line weight is used to clarify very specific overlaps, and is only needed to be applied in limited areas, making it fairly easy to execute. In the few areas where you do need to add weight to a longer line, you can apply something similar to what was explored in lesson 3's branches exercise - getting individual segments to flow smoothly into one another. It is tricky though, and when done wrong, will look chicken-scratchy.

Uncomfortable in the post "250 Box Challenge"

2019-02-09 01:32

Aha! I was certain that paper looked familiar, but I couldn't remember which lesson 1 submission used it, so I wasn't sure if the submission would go to my TAs or to me.

Congratulations on completing the challenge. You're certainly demonstrating improvement with the confidence of your constructions and your linework overall, though there are a few issues that I'd like to point out.

It's really critical that you read the instructions carefully, especially when doing challenges like this one to ensure that you're putting your time to good use. From the looks of it, you had some definite trouble when it came time to extend your lines. From what I can see, you may not have been entirely certain as to what the purpose of this step was. As outlined in the instructions here, you need to be extending your lines back in space on all three axes to test how they come together, to see where you tend to have lines converging too early, or off in pairs, and so on.

There are a number of places where you've extended your lines in the wrong direction. You're also frequently extending them in both directions (which makes it visibly more confusing as to distinguishing the near and far sides of the box. You've also got a number of cases where you've added hatching lines (which usually serve as a visual cue to tell us which side is pointing towards us) to the farther side of the box, leading to many visually confusing situations. And lastly, most of the line extensions are minimal and superficial.

Since you weren't entirely sure of why these lines were being extended, there wasn't much consistent improvement as far as the actual convergences went. By extending the lines, seeing where your convergences go completely out of whack, and identifying the patterns and tendencies in your mistakes, you're able to move onto the next page with a sense of what you need to work on. Without that kind of analysis and reflection, you're left shooting in the dark, hoping that you'll improve through mileage alone.

It's absolutely true that even just drawing boxes - and drawing through them as fastidiously as you have been - will definitely help, and once upon a time that was what the challenge was limited to. Within the last couple years however, these line extensions have become a huge part of the challenge because of how incredibly helpful they can be.

Now I am going to mark this challenge as complete, because you did indeed draw all 250 boxes. I strongly recommend however that you go over your last page and extend the lines properly (as explained in the video and in the written instructions). You should also, for your own benefit, do 50 more boxes, extending the lines properly upon the completion of each page and thinking about what those extensions tell you.

I'll also offer you this piece of advice:

When going to draw a line as part of a box, some students will think about the other lines with which that one shares a corner, or the ones with which it shares a plane. Instead of doing this, always think instead about the lines with which it shares a vanishing point - all the other lines to which it is parallel, and ignore the rest. While doing this, think about the angles at which these lines leave the VP - that is, the angles between them. Those with very small angles separating them will end up running virtually parallel to one another once they reach the box, which makes for a very useful hint to keep in mind. I explain this further in these notes.

Uncomfortable in the post "Lesson 5: Drawing Animals"

2019-02-09 01:20

Your head constructions have improved considerably, and I very much like that goose. You're also demonstrating a much greater grasp of how each form is a solid object that cannot be ignored, once placed within the scene.

That said, there is still a great deal of room for improvement, and a lot of mileage that will be necessary, specifically in working on your observational skills. Things like judging proportions will continue to improve as you practice.

There is one thing from my previous critique that you didn't adhere to entirely which I do feel I should reiterate: There are quite a number of ellipses here that you didn't draw-through. This results in those ellipses coming out rather stiffly. You are drawing through some of them, and they tend to be the more confidently drawn ones - remember that when you focus so much on accuracy and keeping things clean, you do so at the expense of the smooth flow of your lines, and in turn, the solidity of the forms you draw. When you stiffen up (which is still an issue in a number of places, for example the elephant's legs) your forms appear to be flat, and register more as shapes on a page rather than as solid, three dimensional forms in a 3D world.

There are also a few additional points that I'd like to raise, I'm not sure if I mentioned these before:

• In that same elephant drawing, and in a few others, I notice where you construct the legs with sausage forms, but then go on to draw lines bridging the gap from one segment to another, as shown here (it's taken from the far right of the drawing). The additional lines, like a "sleeve" aren't grounded in any sort of form, it's a 2D shape you've added to the drawing. This kind of thing undermines the illusion we're trying to create, and flattens the drawing out. Stick only to what you can achieve by adding and manipulating the three dimensional forms present in your construction.

• When adding additional forms, it's integral that you understand how these forms interact with one another in space. Often times when you add the additional masses, you clearly show that you're trying to figure out how these forms interact with one another, but you're falling somewhat short. For example, when we look at this drawing, specifically at the mass you've added to its back, it doesn't actually convincingly wrap around the form of the torso. The curvature of the additional mass is too shallow, and as a result, it flattens things out. If you look at this, you'll see how the top mass visibly wraps around this underlying torso sausage. As you are struggling with this in a number of other places, I recommend that you incorporate the organic intersections exercise from lesson 2 more strongly into your warmup routine. If you aren't already, you should be doing 10-15 minutes of warmups before each sitting, picking two or three exercises from the many we've covered through the earlier lessons.

• A minor point, I'd recommend making the initial cranial balls of your animals a little smaller. As I mentioned before, your head constructions are actually quite good and demonstrate a great grasp of how the forms fit together in that context, but they tend to feel a little off due to their internal proportions.

Now while I believe you have plenty of room for improvement here, I am going to mark this lesson as complete. I believe getting into some of the less forgiving material from lesson 6 will help you continue to develop your understanding of space. Of course, before that, you will have to complete the cylinder challenge, so that'll be your next step.

Uncomfortable in the post "Lesson 4: Drawing Insects and Arachnids"

2019-02-08 22:42

Before I mark this as complete, I do want to point out that your last submission was about a week ago. There's been a number of changes to help manage the considerable amount of homework submissions (including teaching assistants being brought on and some tier changes) - one of them was a limit of 2 weeks between submissions (though this doesn't apply to cases where I ask for extra pages for a given lesson). I am still going to critique this, but from now on keep that in mind. This is actually my seventh critique of the day...

You've got a good mix of work here, and a good deal of it does demonstrate a well developing grasp of 3D space and construction. There are certainly issues, and I'll point them out, but you're generally doing pretty well.

I think what stands out most to me is that there is disjointedness in your use of line weight. If we look at this drawing for instance, which actually has some pretty good forms. If you look at the abdomen, where you've got some contour lines wrapping around the form, those contour lines are considerably heavier than the silhouette of that form. This case where the lines inside of the silhouette are much heavier than the outside causes the overall construction to feel weaker. The same concept is explained in these notes from the box challenge.

Line weight can be a tricky balance to nail, but there are a few fundamental rules to keep in mind:

• Line weight is relative - you don't need some lines to be a LOT thicker than those around them - a little bit of extra weight can go a long way. Really big jumps in weight can start to flatten things out and make them appear more 'graphic', especially when you have really thick lines along the silhouettes. (I'm not seeing too much of this in your work).

• As the lines on the inside of the silhouette (internal lines) start to get noticeably thicker than those defining the silhouette itself, the drawing will start to feel more like a loose collection of lines, than solid forms.

• Line weight should always be drawn with a confident stroke, using the ghosting method, so as to avoid situations where the line weight pass causes things to stiffen up (you've mostly done a good job of this here).

Basically, when you add line weight to one place, you do need to make sure that it stays balanced across the board.

For the abdomen on this drawing, you probably did jump into a more complex form too early, giving us a result that was flatter than it could have been. It'd be better to have dropped in a solid ball first, and then added more forms on top of it. Also, worth noting is that the legs on this drawing tend to pinch and taper through their midsection. Remember that sausage forms should maintain a consistent width through their length.

I'm quite fond of how you handled the segmentation on this wasp's abdomen. The silhouette line weight was still a bit light, but the layering of forms and use of contour lines was quite nice. I do want to mention though that you're definitely using the "under-drawing/clean-up-pass" approach here that I am strongly against. Don't draw your construction lines faintly and then go back over them to pick which lines you want to be part of your final drawing. Line weight builds a hierarchy of elements, but you don't have this kind of split dichotomy of "real lines" and ones you'd rather throw away. You'll notice that in all of my demos, I only add line weight to key places as needed, not to distinguish them from those that are not important - all the lines I put down are important and treated as such. Whenever I put a mark down, I think about whether or not it's going to contribute to this drawing or its construction in a meaningful way.

The core forms in this drawing were well done, but you definitely have a visible point where you go from paying a lot of attention to the solidity of your forms and construction, to just kind of rushing through the rest. I wonder if this is how you contend with points where you feel a drawing has gone wrong, and in order to follow my insistence that you finish you drawings, you rush through the rest. That's not really useful to anyone.

I think this drawing was my favourite of the set, in that it was quite solid and well constructed, and didn't suffer form the sort of underdrawing/clean up pass issue. Some of your leg segments were stretched ellipses rather than sausages but your main body was well put together.

When it comes to that whole thorax/abdomen thing, you're thinking about it a little backwards. It's not that the part of the body to which the legs connect is automatically the thorax - it's that the thorax exists as we've been drawing them (with beetles for instance, you've got those three major masses, the middle one is the thorax), and that is generally where the legs connect. There are a lot of cases where it's not clear how the back legs connect to the thorax (they seem to tuck into the abdomen instead) but there's more going on underneath the beetle than you're aware of. You may want to google "beetle upside down" but I warn you.. it's not pretty.

There are definitely cases where some beetles have a fused thorax/abdomen, but the drawing I linked last isn't such a case. It has a distinct thorax and abdomen, and the back legs do connect to the thorax, the last segment of that leg simply isn't visible from that angle.

Anyway, I've given a good bit for you to think about. You are generally doing pretty well, but there are a few little things with the silhouette line weight and the solidity of your sausage forms that lead me to ask for a few more drawings. I'd like you to do the following:

• One drawing following the wasp demo.

• One drawing following the louse demo.

• Two drawings of your own, demonstrating more solid, consistent sausage segments, better use of line weight and generally try not to let those non-core elements of your construction get sloppy. Try drawing bigger, engaging your shoulder more.

By and large you are doing a pretty good job but there still these issues that undermine a lot of your drawings' overall strengths.

Uncomfortable in the post "250 Box Challenge"

2019-02-08 21:51

Very nice work! You've really shown a great deal of growth over this set. You went from rather wobbly, uncertain and hesitant linework with lines that went off in all directions without much cohesion of intent, to developing your understanding of how these forms sit in 3D space and how the parallel lines behave in relation to one another. Your overall line quality improved considerably as well, and your line weight had a great impact on reinforcing the solidity of the overall forms.

I'm very pleased with the conscientiousness you displayed, patiently working through all of your line extensions and corrections. You're clearly demonstrating mindfulness towards your lines' convergences, and have a great balance between boxes with shallower and more dramatic foreshortening.

Based on your work, I think you already understand this, but this is something I offer to most people working through this challenge, so I figure I may as well here:

When going to draw a line as part of a box, some students will think about the other lines with which that one shares a corner, or the ones with which it shares a plane. Instead of doing this, always think instead about the lines with which it shares a vanishing point - all the other lines to which it is parallel, and ignore the rest. While doing this, think about the angles at which these lines leave the VP - that is, the angles between them. Those with very small angles separating them will end up running virtually parallel to one another once they reach the box, which makes for a very useful hint to keep in mind. I explain this further in these notes.

There's definitely room for growth and improvement, but you're barrelling in the right direction with considerable speed. Keep up the great work and consider this challenge complete.

Uncomfortable in the post "Lesson 2: Organic Forms, Contour Lines, Dissections and Form Intersections"

2019-02-08 21:48

Pretty nice work! I'll break my critique down by exercise:

• You're doing a good job of getting your arrows to flow smoothly across the page. One thing I am noticing however is that while you've got perspective shrinking the width of the arrow as it moves farther away from us, the actual distance between the various repeating lengths of the arrow itself does not get any smaller. Remember that perspective applies to all of space itself - as distances get farther from us, they are drawn as being smaller, so the gaps between those lengths of the arrow's ribbon will shrink as well. I explain this further in these notes.

• Your organic forms with contour lines are looking good - the only issue I noticed was that your contour curves did have a tendency to stiffen up a little. Make sure you're drawing these with the same kind of confidence you'd use with any kind of mark. If you feel you need control, rely more on the planning and preparation phases, rather than slowing your execution.

• Your texture work came out quite well - great observation and care went into studying your reference images, and you did a great job of organizing that information into the density gradients. You also applied them very nicely to the various rounded forms. One issue I did notice was that you were a little timid when it came time to push past the silhouette of your organic form. I can see a few places where you tried to play with it a little, but it wasn't nearly as bold as it could have been. Don't be afraid to push past that silhouette's edge - break it up as needed, and let those bumps push right out into space. Also worth mentioning, avoid those really long organic forms - stick to simple, short sausages, as these allow you to focus on making them solid and three dimensional rather than distracting yourself with further complexity.

• Your form intersections are fantastic - you're conveying a strong grasp of 3D space, solidity and form. Everything feels very consistent, as though they exist firmly in the same scene and space. The only issue I noticed was that your ellipses did have a tendency to stiffen up, so keep an eye on that.

• This page of your form intersections did a great job of demonstrating how these forms interact with one another, how they sag and slump against each other and account for each others' volumes as they settle in space. The other attempt was pretty good as well, but the extra complexity of these wobbly forms did take away from the main focus of the exercise.

I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete. Keep up the great work and feel free to move onto the next one. Do keep working on the confident, smooth execution of your marks as well, but by and large you're doing very well.

Uncomfortable in the post "250 Cylinder Challenge (Patreon Critique Thread)"

2019-02-08 21:37

Nice work! I can definitely see considerable improvement in your general understanding of 3D space, proportion and construction of these forms throughout the sets, and I'm very pleased with the conscientiousness with which you're applying the correction and analysis techniques. Your convergences steadily improve a fair bit, as does your ability to feel out what would be more square (and the occurrence of slightly squished ellipses decreases as you work through the set).

Now, I do strongly agree that your line quality has definitely taken a hit here. It's not particularly surprising, since this challenge - especially when you hit the cylinders-in-boxes - is difficult and requires a great deal of thought and focus. That said, while you say you are ghosting your lines, I suspect that you may still not be executing your marks with the kind of confident, persistent stroke that the ghosting method demands.

Always remember that - the ghosting method isn't just about the time you invest into the planning and preparation phases, but rather the whole process of taking the time one might invest in drawing, and separating it out into the planning/preparation steps. If you plan/prepare/ghost/whatever properly, but still execute your mark with a slow, laborious stroke, your marks will still wobble.

It's all about drawing with a confident pace (which causes our control to take a hit) and then ghosting in order to get that control back.

Anyway! You are doing a good job, but you definitely need to rein that wobbling in and invest your time in the right places. I'll go ahead and mark this challenge as complete, but be sure to incorporate more ghosting/planes and even super imposed lines exercises into your warmup routine to get back in the groove of drawing with confidence.

Uncomfortable in the post "Lesson 2: Organic Forms, Contour Lines, Dissections and Form Intersections"

2019-02-08 21:24

Nice work! By and large you've done a very good job, though there are a few points and instructions you may have missed, and a few areas to focus on as you continue to move forwards.

• Your arrows are looking pretty good, and are flowing nicely across the page. One thing I did notice though was that as we move back towards the farther end of your arrows, the space itself doesn't compress much. At times we do see perspective applied to the thickness of the arrow, but not to the space between the lengths of the arrow as they swoop further and further back. I explain this further here.

• Your organic forms with contour lines are looking good - I'm pleased to see that you're hooking those curves around convincingly along the edges, and that the contour lines fit snugly within the silhouette of the form. One area you are struggling with however is keeping the curves and ellipses aligned to the minor axis line - they do have a tendency to be a little lopsided.

• Your texture work is fantastic, both for the texture analysis and the dissections. You've demonstrated excellent observational skills, and a great use of these texture as tools, both when building your density gradients and wrapping them around these rounded forms. I'm also very pleased with the variety of textures you experimented with, and the particular attention you paid to each one, finding an approach that would work on a case by case basis.

• Your form intersections demonstrate a good understanding of 3D space. I did notice that you included a great many longer tubes - the instructions do mention that you should stay away from these kinds of forms and focus on those that are more equilateral, so as to keep overly complex foreshortening out of the equation. Always take care to read the instructions before attempting a lesson, even if you've already read through it before, as our memories are not the most reliable.

• Your organic intersections are a good start - there's definitely hints there that you're beginning to grasp how these forms would pile upon on one another, but some of them do have a tendency to get flattened, with the feeling that some of them have been pasted on top without fully understanding how they'd slump and sag against one another, taking into consideration each others' volumes as they try to settle in space. You are getting there, but this is an area you may want to focus your efforts as you move forwards.

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

Uncomfortable in the post "Lesson 3: Drawing Plants"

2019-02-08 21:06

Whew, looks like I have a lot of critiques to do today. Better get started!

You've got a good spread of work here, with some parts coming out quite well, and others showing a few areas that could use some work. There are also a few things that show a bit of a misunderstanding as to the concepts and approaches covered in the lesson, so I'll focus on those issues above all else.

There is a tendency here to jump into forms and shapes that are complicated without first putting down enough structure to support that level of complexity. To put it simply, you're doing too much, too quickly. Construction (as explained here) focuses on the idea that we build up our drawings gradually, starting from the most fundamental, simple shapes and forms, maintaining their solidity and the illusion that we're drawing something three dimensional (there's a good breakdown of this concept in the new lesson 2 material which you should read) rather than a series of lines on a flat page.

For example, some of your leaves across the top of this page, specifically the top left and the one to the right of it, show considerable deviation from the basic constructional process outlined here. We start out with these simple leaf shapes because they allow us to focus on how these elements flow through 3D space first, before worrying about any further detail like frayed or wavy edges. As shown here, we even approach leaves with many different 'arms' in this same fashion, constructing each arm independently before merging them together.

There are definitely drawings where you're approaching it a little more correctly, putting down a simpler form and then adding edge detail, but you do have a tendency to zigzag that detail and treat the previous phase of construction as more of a suggestion than a hard bound - something I address in these notes.

In your branches, you're moving in the right direction but are definitely still struggling to get your segments to flow smoothly into one another. Each segment has a pretty visible tail where it sticks out from the one that proceeds it - you want to make sure that this flows directly into the next one instead. One area where you may be making things more difficult for yourself is that you're drawing these branches to be quite small on the page. Try drawing them bigger, giving yourself more room to engage your shoulder and giving your brain more room to think through spatial problems.

As for your plants,

• In this one you're approaching things in a meaningfully constructional manner, aside from the leaves which I touched upon above.

• Definitely liking the solidity of your mushroom constructions. Watch how you're applying that line weight though - you tend to go over it with a slower, more careful stroke, rather than executing your marks with a confident, persistent pace as you ought to. This is causing your linework to stiffen up.

• I'm loving the flow of these leaves and the tenacity with which you approached drawing each and every little component. Nice work.

• In this one you definitely got caught up in detail over construction, and moved forward with forms that didn't feel particularly solid. The linework is quite chicken-scratchy and stiff, which suggests that you may have slipped off the ghosting train here.

• Just a couple points about this one. If you've got a box, draw through it so you can fully grasp how it sits in 3D space. Also, the pot itself has a little bit of thickness to it. Leaving the flower pots or vases paper-thin is a common mistake I see from students, and simply requires a slightly inset edge to be added to give the impression of thickness.

Before I mark this lesson as complete, I'd like you to do two pages of leaves and two pages of branches. Your overall plant constructions are quite well done, but I think hammering this out will be particularly useful. Make sure you go back and read the updated lesson content for lesson 2 as well, as the notes will be quite helpful as you move forwards.

Uncomfortable in the post "250 Box Challenge"

2019-02-07 23:27

I currently don't have you down as being eligible for private homework critiques. If you're a recent patreon supporter, be sure to check your email/patreon inbox as I'll have sent you a message to gather your reddit username. Alternatively, are you using the correct reddit account?

If neither of those are the case, you're welcome to submit your work directly to the subreddit or on the discord server to get the community to review your work.

Uncomfortable in the post "250 Box Challenge"

2019-02-07 04:58

/u/iovorobiev

One little thing I want to add to sluggy's critique is that I noticed a tendency as you pushed through the set to make the foreshortening more and more dramatic - that is, bringing the vanishing points closer and closer to your boxes. This probably came from you trying to focus a lot on your convergences, which is definitely a great thing to pay attention to. Just keep in mind that dramatic foreshortening tells the viewer that the object is either very large, or very close. So it is important to mix in some shallower foreshortening as well, which implies objects that are at a smaller, more relatable scale. I talk a little more about this here.

Uncomfortable in the post "25 Wheel Challenge"

2019-02-06 21:35

Very, very nice work! You've clearly struggled balancing your ellipse guide's limitations with what you were aiming to achieve, and I'm very pleased to see that you didn't reduce your expectations to the tools you had on hand, but rather found a way to fit your tools where they could help. It's critical across the board, in drawing, design, managing projects, and really life itself to learn to pick the right tools for the job, rather than letting the tools decide what it is we create.

I see a number of really successful constructions, with great, solid 3D forms - not just in the wheels and tires themselves, but even in those spokes. You really go to great lengths to be mindful of all the planes of each form, even when you struggled to deal with things like the odd-numbered spokes. Often when we get caught up in a particular challenge, we'll tend to put less effort in other areas, but you've been extremely conscientious across the board here.

One thing that I would recommend trying when it comes to leveraging your ellipse guide is to see if your ellipse guides can help you to construct the basic ends on either side of the wheel (the near ellipse and the far one), and then try to freehand the other ellipses in between them. Or if the ellipse guide's too small, try constructing a basic cylinder and then building right around it. This can help keep yourself mindful of the degrees on either end, giving yourself a framework to work within. You don't by any means have to force yourself to use the ellipse guide, or work without it entirely - there are various ways to find a middle ground where it can still help without limiting what you draw.

Throughout this challenge you've demonstrated an excellent eye for the character of the wheels, in their tire treads, their spokes and hub cap designs, and so on. I did catch a tendency to make the wheels a little wide (at least, that's my perception - I'm not sure if they were actually that wide or not), but proportion may be something to keep an eye on. Overall however you've done a great job of really analyzing what makes a wheel unique, and pinning that down. I expect this will carry over quite nicely to your vehicle drawings in lesson 7.

So, I'll go ahead and mark this challenge as complete (there's no reddit flair badge unfortunately but I will mark it down so when we incorporate those, or more likely when we create a separate community platform on the drawabox website, you will receive whatever achievement badges we create there). Feel free to move onto lesson 7.

One last thing to mention though - with the recent changes to Drawabox (I made some adjustments to the lower tiers, incorporated some teaching assistants for the early material), the only thing that will actually impact you is the limitation of one submission every 2 weeks (not including revision work). I've done this critique a little earlier (by just a few days), but basically this'll keep everyone in line with their pledges. So make sure you don't submit your next one until two weeks have passed. (And don't get me wrong - you're not overstepping any bounds or anything here, I'm just finally formalizing that new rule :D)

Uncomfortable in the post "Lesson 2: Organic Forms, Contour Lines, Dissections and Form Intersections"

2019-02-04 23:47

You've done a pretty good job overall!

• Your arrows flow pretty nicely across the page. I am still getting the sense that they're largely flowing across the two dimensions of space defined by the page itself, so that is something you'll want to work on, but they are quite fluid and natural. In the future, try applying perspective to them - that is, both compressing the width of the arrow as it moves farther away, as well as the space itself as explained here.

• You're applying the concepts of contour ellipses pretty well to the organic forms, and are hitting two major points: you're keeping them snug between the edges of the forms so as to maintain the illusion that these lines run along the surface of the form, and you're shifting the degree of the ellipses through the form's length. Where things are going somewhat awry however is that you're very clearly drawing those ellipses slowly and carefully. There's no confidence there to keep them smooth and evenly shaped, so they come out very stiff and uneven. In your first page, you totally neglected to draw through your ellipses (which you should be doing for each and every ellipse you draw for these lessons). You at least started doing it through the second page, but you still drew very slowly - remember that the ghosting method applies to every mark you put down, and that means investing your time in planning and preparing beforehand, then executing your mark with a confident, persistent pace and no hesitation whatsoever. Also, I noticed that you didn't actually do any contour curves here - I'd raise an issue about that, but you demonstrated a good use of them in your organic intersections so I'll let it slide. Be sure to mind the instructions more closely in the future though.

• You did a pretty good job with the texture analyses - you took great care in studying your reference images carefully, and you made great attempts at applying what you learned there to produce a gradient from dense to sparse. It's a good start, though I think the last one (the denim/jeans) was the most successful as far as the gradient goes, since the transition from dark to light was quite smooth and gradual (though could have been stretched out more across the whole rectangle). The other two were much less so, with the iguana scales being quite abrupt. Still, you did a good job of paying attention to cast shadows rather than outlining everything, so you're moving in the right direction.

• Pretty nice work on the dissections - not sure what you mean by them changing though, they're the same as they've always been. By and large you've done a pretty good job. Plenty of room for improvement, and that'll come with continued practice, but you're showing a lot of key features that I look for - you're minding cast shadows, you're breaking past the silhouette of your organic forms (for the little bumps from the wool and basket waves, etc) and you're definitely taking the time to observe your reference carefully, and transfer information bit by bit, rather than staring at the reference and working largely from memory. One suggestion with your grass - when you're breaking past the silhouette, I strongly recommend that you take more care in designing the tufts of grass that push past there. That kind of silhouette detail tends to have a big impact, so you want it to be as intentional as possible.

• Fantastic work on your form intersections - glad to see you kept all the forms equilateral, and you demonstrated a great grasp of 3D space. Everything feels consistently part of the same scene. Very well done.

• Same goes for your organic intersections - the forms overlap each other very convincingly, especially in how they sag and slump in response to each others' volumes, rather than being pasted on top of each other like stickers.

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

Uncomfortable in the post "Lesson 4: Drawing Insects and Arachnids"

2019-02-04 21:29

You've got a mixture of results here - there are some areas where your approach isn't quite following the way things have been instructed, as well as some areas that demonstrate really nice construction and a well developing grasp of the concepts.

The first thing that jumps out at me is that your organic forms with contour lines at the beginning are... okay. You've got simple sausage forms, and your contour curves are generally wrapping properly along the forms, but your linework is visibly stiff. You're drawing with a slow, steady stroke, which causes the lines to wobble a little. There's a lot of hesitation there, and not much confidence, so the strokes don't come out smoothly and consistently. I can also see that you're not drawing through your ellipses here, or throughout the lesson - that's something you should be doing for each and every ellipse through all of my lessons, in order to keep up that confident stroke and maintain the evenness of their shapes.

Also take greater care when adding that contour ellipse at the end of your forms here - the positioning and degree is important, and I think yours tend to be positioned a little off, in a way that suggests you may not be thinking enough about what you're trying to achieve when putting these marks down.

Through the earlier drawings in your set, I get the impression that you're definitely trying to build things up constructively, but what's missing is that you're building up flat, 2D shapes that exist on the page, rather than solid, three dimensional forms that exist in a 3D world. Remember that, as explained in the first page of lesson 2 (which has been updated since you completed it), we want to strive to get used to the idea that we're drawing a world to which the page itself is just a window.

With every component that you draw, you want to make sure that you're convinced that it's a solid, 3D form. This means adding contour lines as needed (just make sure you're thinking about what you're trying to achieve with each one, as it's easily overdone when students don't think about what they're actually doing). Then when you attach another form, make sure you define the intersection between them with yet another contour line right at the joint between them, as this really helps to reinforce the illusion of solidity for both. On top of that, the joint is also usually a more "realistic" place to put such contour lines, which always helps.

For the spider on this page, watch how you're drawing those legs. Rather than the recommended sausages (which you've used to varying degrees of success elsewhere), here you're drawing stretched ellipses. The difference is that through half of each segment, it's gradually getting wider and wider, and through the other half it gradually tapers. Sausages are two spheres connected by a tube of consistent width, so the tapering happens only right at the ends, which allows it to be much more flexible and carry a gestural rhythm that stretched ellipses simply can't due to their inherent stiffness.

As you push through, I start to see you incorporating more form than shape, and being more mindful of how they intersect with one another, and as a result, your constructions grow more solid and believable. By and large I feel the drawings on this page are by far your most successful - you're demonstrating excellent use of form, you're using the sausage technique to construct legs that carry a strong gestural flow, and the constructions generally feel believable and tangible - especially the prawn.

The pages that follow actually do fall back to some of the previous issues (being flat, using more shape, etc.) so I'm not sure if these were done earlier, or if it's a matter of simple inconsistency, which isn't that abnormal. Just keep in mind what I've said here in terms of your weaknesses and strengths.

There is only last issue that I want to point out - many of your less successful drawings tend to be drawn smaller on the page, not quite occupying the room you have access to. Drawing smaller - which is something students will often do when they feel less confident in what they're about to do - robs you of the space your brain needs to work through these kinds of spatial problems. As a result, drawings become more cramped and stiffen up. In general, avoid this, and try and give yourself more room rather than less, especially when you're not feeling confident.

Now I've raised a lot of issues here, but the progress (aside from those last two pages) is definitely significant, so I am going to mark this lesson as complete. You can continue practicing what I've mentioned here in the next lesson.

Uncomfortable in the post "Lesson 2: Organic Forms, Contour Lines, Dissections and Form Intersections"

2019-02-02 19:57

I think you might be referring to the pinterest board that used to be linked from lesson 2. You'll find that here, and I've added it back to the texture analysis and dissections pages.

So, onto your work. To start with, your arrows are flowing quite nicely across the page. One thing that does jump out at me however is that as your arrows flow back and forth, the distance between the reversing lengths of your arrows doesn't actually compress as we move further back in space. This makes us feel that the arrow is moving across the flat page, rather than through a three dimensional world with depth. I talk about this further in this step. Remember that perspective compresses everything we look further and further away - objects themselves, as well as the space between them.

Pretty nice work on your organic forms with contour lines. You're definitely doing a good job of hooking your contour curves around to give the impression that the lines are wrapping around the form. I can also see some lovely degree shift as your contour lines pass through the length of the form, though this can probably be exaggerated just a little bit more.

In a few places, I can see the alignment of your contour curves falling a bit awry, so keep an eye on that - and also work on those last few little curves that slip outside of the bounds of the form. Keeping them snugly pinched between the form's edges is key to ensuring that we create the illusion that this line runs along the form's surface.

Now admittedly your texture analyses fell a little short. This topic in particular is one that is a little drawabox adjacent, rather than at the core of the material, so there's no harm in taking more time with it. That said, I think you definitely do need to get used to studying reference images - not just looking at them more carefully, but getting in the habit of looking at them more frequently, rather than relying on what you can hold in your memory.

As explained in this section, you need to look at your reference image most of the time, looking only at your drawing for a moment to carry over one or two very specific marks, representing specific elements you saw in the reference. Once they're drawn, you go back to looking at your reference and repeat the process again. The result, at least for the left side of the texture analysis exercise, should be very visually overwhelming, and for that reason this exercise takes a lot of time to complete. Right now, we can see that your analysis portions were definitely left somewhat blank. Then without the appropriate amount of information there, it becomes very difficult to manage the second part of that exercise on the right side.

Now your dissections are somewhat better, with more attention being paid to a lot of the smaller details and their specifics. There is still room for improvement when it comes to your observational skills (this page was much better than this one, though there's still plenty of room to get better), but that will come with practice. In addition to this, when you're drawing these elements on your textures, rather than trying to enclose each little form in a line, focus instead on capturing the shadows they cast on their surroundings. Focusing instead on cast shadows allows us to control where we want our textures to be dense, and where we want them to be more sparse, and allows us to create gradients between them. If we're taking every little pomegranate seed, for instance, and enclosing them fully in a line, then there's no real opening to increase or decrease the density of seeds without explicitly saying "there are fewer seeds here" or "there are more seeds in this area". Using shadows allows us to imply the potential presence of more seeds even without necessarily drawing them.

Your form intersections are quite well done. There is some inconsistency when it comes to the different rates of foreshortening applied to your boxes, and as a whole continuing to do box exercises (like from the 250 box challenge) will further improve the convergences of your sets of parallel lines, but overall you're demonstrating a good grasp of the relationships between all of these forms. One thing you did neglect to follow however was that the instructions state that you should not be using forms that are particularly stretched, like longer cylinders. Stick to those that are more equilateral.

Lastly, your organic intersections are a good start. You're well on your way to conveying a good grasp of how these forms relate to one another, and how their volumes can rest on top of one another without appearing as though they've been pasted, one shape on top of the other on a flat page. There is still room for improvement here, in fully grasping how one's volume would be displaced by the form it is resting upon, but you're headed in the right direction.

I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete. I do feel that you've got a number of areas to work on, but that you're showing a good grasp of the material as a whole. I do want to point out however that there have been places where you didn't quite follow the instructions as they were written out, so do take some more time to read through the lesson more thoroughly. Generally it's a good idea to give the lesson a once over before starting any of the work, and then before you start working on a given exercise, reread its instructions fully (even if this means reading over the instructions several times across several days). There's a lot of information there and it can be very easy to miss important details.

Uncomfortable in the post "Lesson 3: Drawing Plants"

2019-02-02 01:49

To answer your questions:

1. Don't draw your line weight slowly, otherwise it will cause your drawing to appear stiff. Always draw it confidently, applying the ghosting method. Yes, this may result in you missing the mark at times, so generally we try and limit our line weight to small, key areas to clarify how specific forms overlap, but regardless, it's better to slip up on one line than to make everything stiff and hesitant.

2. Definitely use the ghosting method whenever and wherever you need to (which is generally everywhere), but usually you'd put your points where they'd get engulfed by the line you draw, ultimately making them less noticeable in the end. It's not a big deal right now if they do end up being visible, but I'm not sure why they'd be floating all over (unless you decided not to commit to a specific line, leaving its point floating there - in which case that's fine for now, though you should work towards reducing that).

3. Not a question! :P

4. Yeah, I can't really give an answer to this without the reference image.

5. Good on you!

You actually did a pretty good job overall. The quality of the results varied from drawing to drawing, but I could see you applying the principles of construction throughout.

Your first drawing was a good start, though I think it suffered from being drawn a little small. I'm glad that you drew each sprout/leaf individually, not trying to hide them where they were overlapped by a neighbour. The base of your flower pot definitely should have had a wider degree though, for the reasons explained here.

The sprouting leaves are a little stiff, but not bad by any measure.

Your second drawing demonstrated a pretty decent use of the branch technique. It's definitely tricky to work with ellipses that are quite so small, but you did pretty well. I agree that the leaves are a little stiff, but aside from that, they're still well constructed. The only thing that stands out as a mistake here is that you didn't give your flower pot a rim, so it appears to be paper-thin (which wouldn't be the case). Forms like this should always be given some thickness.

The leaves were very well done in your third drawing - they flow very fluidly and naturally. The flower pot was off, but I can see that you tried to construct it around your minor axis, and that things just went awry. One thing you may want to consider when handling these flower pots is that there are often more ellipses involved than you'd think. If we look at a pot like this one, you can see that this flower pot has two sections. It's got the top cylinder which establishes its rim, and then the bottom, tapering cylinder which starts near the rim and comes down to the base. Thinking about these as separate forms, you'd have two ellipses for the bottom section (one for the base, and one where it connects with the rim), and then another two ellipses for the top section. On top of that, you'd have one last ellipse on the inside of the top, to give the rim a bit of thickness. I demonstrate this here, where you can see the five distinct ellipses.

Jumping ahead to the last drawing, I think you're demonstrating better flower pot construction, along with excellent management of your branch forms, nice flow of your leaves and great use of line weight/blacks to separate out your forms.

Overall I think you do have room for improvement, but it's all of the sort that will come with further practice over time. You're doing pretty well as it stands, so I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete. Feel free to move onto the next lesson.

Also, it's worth mentioning - I understand that you struggle with a lack of confidence, but at the end of the day, you're not in any position to judge the quality of your own work. You will get better at that as you continue to work at this stuff, but right now you shouldn't be trusting yourself to assess whether something is "good enough to submit". Your only job is to complete the work to the best of your ability, to follow the instructions as closely as you can, and to submit what you've finished at the end of that. I will handle the rest.

Uncomfortable in the post "Lesson 3: Drawing Plants"

2019-02-02 01:26

To start with, your arrows are looking good, so that lays down a solid foundation being able to establish a sense of flow amongst your leaves.

This does carry over into your leaves, although we see it more significantly in the ones that have just a little more wiggle to them. It's clear that you're slowly breaking out of your shell here, pushing yourself to be a little more bold in how you lay them out, so that's good to see.

One recommendation I have is that as explained in the second half of this section, try to work additively whenever possible. We can see here that when you want to add edge detail to your leaves, you have a tendency to cut back from your edges (working subtractively). This isn't wrong by any means, but when we start getting into more complex objects and forms with more thickness and volume to them, it can become much more difficult. There are places even in these flat leaf shapes where adding to the original leaf shape rather than cutting into it would have yielded a stronger, more believable result.

The trick is that once you're doing this at a bigger scale of complexity, you have to be able to convey an understanding of how the form you're cutting into, as well as the piece you're cutting away, all exist in 3D space. We do this by actually defining these pieces, using contour lines (similarly to how we use them in the form intersections). Of course, none of this is necessary here because everything is a flat shape moving through 3D space, but they are deeply related concepts. Getting in the habit of thinking additively will serve you well in the future.

Your branches are starting okay, but they do need work. What stands out to me most is that you're not necessarily always thinking through the degrees of your ellipses before you draw them. There are some cases that look very well done (top right of your first page of branches), but you've got many others on that page that look rushed and inconsistent. Don't forget to apply the ghosting method here, and try to keep the width of your branches fairly consistent throughout.

Admittedly when you sent me that email asking about what I mean by filled pages, I thought you were asking about the plant drawings themselves (in which case devoting one page to a plant is totally fine). When it comes to these exercises, similarly to those in the previous lessons (which all have example pages which show how I fill in all the space I can), it generally is best to maximize the use of the space. There's a lot more room to squeeze branches in here. Sorry for not clarifying that previously.

I do think there's definitely lots of room for improvement here, so we'll want to delve into this exercise a little further.

Looking at your dandelion, your overall construction is actually quite well done. You've drawn each petal, you've been quite thorough in ensuring that every component is drawn individually on the page, and you've stuck to each stage of construction rather than contradicting yourself with new "answers" to the problems your construction has already solved.

I am noticing that your flow lines definitely do feel a little more hesitant and uncertain than they have previously, so your petals do end up coming out a little more stiffly. Always remember that as soon as your pen touches the page, you have to draw confidently and boldly. The ghosting method prior to that will ensure that you're in the best position to avoid mistakes, but the execution phase should involve no consideration to that end.

In your prickly pear, there are two things that stand out to me most:

• You're overdoing the contour lines a bit - a lot of these serve no real purpose. When adding contour lines, always think about what they're meant to achieve before actually putting them down. This goes for any mark you draw - you should think about what the purpose of that mark is going to be, whether it is the best mark for that job, and whether another job might do it better (or whether another mark is already accomplishing that task).

• You need to be bolder when it comes to letting these forms overlap initially - let them intersect, and then draw the actual contour lines that define their intersections. That is, the line that runs along the surface of both forms, establishing where they merge together into a single object. Right now those intersections are missing, which is unfortunate because they tend to be a much more effective use of contour lines to convey the illusion of volume and solidity.

Jumping ahead, your work on this page is technically moving in the right direction, but your linework is really hesitant again. If you look along the edges, we can even see where you're starting to chicken scratch a little - there's visible disjointedness between the strokes, and they're drawn slowly enough to result in some stiffness and wobbling.

You've approached the cylinder well, but your lack of confidence in drawing your ellipses is what causes it to fall a little more flat. Additionally, watch that bottom ellipse - its degree should be larger (as explained in these notes).

This mushroom you drew from the demo actually came out pretty well. The one point that I feel is missing is that the silhouette feels a little loose and unrefined, and would benefit from a touch of extra line weight here and there to sure up the solidity of the overall form. Right now because the internal details carry much more weight, the form as a whole doesn't feel quite as cohesive. Adding a bit of weight to certain sections of the silhouette (and doing so with a confident, smooth stroke driven with the ghosting method - don't draw these slowly and carefully, otherwise you'll stiffen it up) would do it some good.

Here's what I want you to do:

• 1 page of organic intersections from lesson 2.

• 2 pages of branches. Make sure you're making full use of the space on the page.

• 4 plant drawings, a mixture of those with more leaves, and those with larger masses (like mushrooms).

Above all else, focus on applying the ghosting method across the board - that means thinking and planning before you draw, considering the purpose of the mark you want to put down, and then executing it with smooth confidence. No hesitation.

Uncomfortable in the post "Lesson 2: Organic Forms, Contour Lines, Dissections and Form Intersections"

2019-02-01 21:57

Very nice work on the arrows - I'm especially loving the fact that while you've got the arrows to flow nicely through all three dimensions of space, you're not only compressing the size of the arrows themselves, but also the space itself as you move further back. Sometimes students will leave the same amount of 2D space between the various lengths of a ribbon that folds back over itself - you've done well to actually afford less room the further you delve into the depths of your world.

Your organic forms with contour lines are fairly well done, though I do want to stress the importance of ensuring that your sausages are essentially just two spheres connected by a tube of consistent width. At times you have a tendency to draw the more as a ball that has been stretched (with a more gradual tapering over its length).

In addition to this, you do need to work on getting your ellipses, and even more so, your contour curves, to fit more snugly between the edges of the form. We want to achieve the illusion that the line runs over the surface of the form, so if they fall out of the silhouette or float arbitrarily within it, we undermine this effect.

You are doing a good job of hooking your curves around so they continue along the other side however, and I can see a good grasp of the degree shift that occurs over the length of the form.

Your work for the texture analysis exercise is phenomenal. You've done an excellent job of observing your references, pulling out the visual information, and then organizing it to cover the gradient of density. Your dissections are fairly well done too, though I think more practice in applying what you learned from the analyses and applying that same gradient principle to a more rounded form will work wonders. That said, you do have several very successful textures, especially on that second page. There are only a couple (like the wrinkled cloth and the stone bricks) that feel like they could use some more work.

Your form intersections convey a well developing grasp of 3D space, and your box forms feel quite solid. Do watch out for the use of those longer cylinders however - remember that the exercise instructions specifically advise against the use of stretched forms. Stick to those that are more equilateral.

Finally, your organic intersections demonstrate an improvement over the issues I mentioned in regards to your organic forms with contour lines. They also show a strong grasp of how these forms interact with one another in 3D space, how they sag and slump against one another and reinforce each others' presence within the scene.

I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete. Keep up the great work and feel free to move onto the next lesson.

Uncomfortable in the post "Lesson 3: Drawing Plants"

2019-02-01 00:15

Oh no, you weren't wrong about that part. It was that prior to this recent update, lessons 3 and 4 were reserved for the $7 tier. Thanks for fixing it so quickly though!

Uncomfortable in the post "Lesson 4: Drawing Insects and Arachnids"

2019-01-31 23:17

This is a good start, but there are definitely some issues we'll have to address.

To start with, your organic forms with contour curves are a bit weak, for a few reasons:

• When drawing your sausage forms, think of them as two spheres connected by a tube of consistent width (as shown here). Keep the form fairly short (which you mostly have, aside from that long one on the first page), and mind the roundedness of the ends. You have a lot that have one end getting a little stretched.

• You are doing a good job of hooking your contour lines around properly, but at times the degree of the curve itself (imagining that it was a full ellipse that continued along to the other side) often comes off as inconsistent. Remember that such degrees shift over the length of the form, as explained here.

• Make sure you're keeping the contour curves snugly against the edges of the form, as explained here.

Your first spider isn't bad, though I do see you switching between the use of sausages and the use of stretched ellipses (again, explained here). I do also feel that you may not be drawing quite as large as you could - it feels rather cramped and small relative to the lines themselves.

Another major issue I want to mention is that you have a tendency to put down your construction lines, and then replace that linework with a darker, heavier stroke as a sort of "clean-up" pass. I've mentioned this previously (like in the form intersection video for lesson 2, as well as here though this was added as part of the overhaul) that you should not be applying line weight in such a way that you're trying to distinguish "real lines" from your "under drawing". ALL your lines contribute to the drawing, and you're to use line weight subtly to organize those lines, pulling some forward and pushing others back. Line weight should generally not be applied to the entirety of a line, and should instead be applied to limited sections of an existing line, usually to clarify overlapping forms or a silhouette.

One of the biggest risks with applying line weight as you have done is that it results in the whole drawing getting very stiff - because in trying to cover whole lines, you end up drawing slowly and carefully. Any line weight that is added must be drawn with the ghosting method, just as when you put down the original stroke.

Lastly, try to let your forms (like the abdomen and thorax) overlap more, so you can get the real sense that they're intersecting. As shown here you want to give yourself a spot to add a contour line to define the intersection itself, as this helps to give a sense of solidity to the construction.

Aside from the same line weight issues that are prevalent throughout this set, this beetle's forms are actually managed quite well. You may be overdoing the contour lines a bit, but the thorax feels very solid, and its relationship with the abdomen feels believable.

This one on the other hand suffers from an underdrawing that was drawn without a particularly clear belief that the forms you were drawing are actually three dimensional - and the clean-up pass exacerbated this issue. Looking at this drawing, I can tell that you're still thinking of all of this as though you're drawing lines on a flat page, rather than constructing real masses in a three dimensional world. It comes down to you not being convinced of the lie you're telling, and so your drawing tends to contradict itself (as we might contradict ourselves when telling a story that we do not truly believe). I talk about this more on the first page of lesson 2.

The last thing I wanted to point out was that in this ant, you seem to have avoided drawing those two bulbous masses of the thorax as being fully independent forms. You jumped into drawing two overly complex forms where you would have been far more successful had you simply drawn two solid balls, then figured out their intersections with a contour line.

I'd like you to do three pages of organic intersections from lesson 2, followed by four pages of insect drawings. Draw bigger, don't do clean-up passes, and draw your forms more confidently. Often times you stiffen up, causing your masses to have wobbly or stiff lines, which immediately makes them feel less solid.

Uncomfortable in the post "Lesson 3: Drawing Plants"

2019-01-31 22:57

I didn't realize that you were still pledged to the $5 tier (and therefore not eligible for the lesson 3 critique) until after I finished writing it out. Since it's written and all, I'm not going to go and delete it, so here it is - I hope you'll go and adjust your pledge to the correct amount (and I hope you're able to in the next few hours, since it's the last day of the month). That said, you've been a patron for quite some time so it's not a big deal either way.

I'm glad you liked the overhaul - it was a lot of work, but the response has been well worth it.

You've done a pretty great job with this lesson! I can clearly see through the first two exercises (the arrows and the leaves) that you're approaching the material with a strong sense of how these forms flow through 3D space, and a really solid grasp of how the constructional method involves working through problems one at a time, rather than trying to tackle many different challenges simultaneously.

One very tiny point I noticed in your leaves was that while you were doing a great job of keeping the edge detail very close to the simpler outline from the previous phase of construction, there are places where you opt for working subtractively (cutting the more complex detail back from the edge) rather than working additively (building onto the edge). I discuss this a little in these notes. Admittedly both are valid approaches, but I do generally recommend that one work subtractively only when doing so additively is no longer an option.

Also in some places on later pages (like the bottom right of this page) I see you zigzagging that edge detail with a continuous stroke. The same notes I linked before touch on that as well.

Your branches exercise is coming along fairly well. Your ellipses are a touch stiff at times, but you are doing a good job of working with separate segments and getting them to flow smoothly into one another.

I can see a few places where you've tried adding some variation to the width of your branches (like to add knots and such). When doing so, I strongly recommend building the branch with a consistent width, then adding additional forms afterwards as explained here.

Your plant construction drawings are generally done quite well. You're very mindful of how your leaves need to flow through space, and you pay a good deal of attention to the non-plant forms (flower pots and such), taking the time to construct them fully with inset ellipses, minor axes, etc. This is great to see.

I especially loved this drawing, as it captures everything about leaves in all the right ways. Each one flows independently, each one's been constructed separately from its neighbours (rather than trying to avoid the overlaps), the edge detail has been added right onto the previous phase of construction, helping to maintain its solidity and believability, and your use of line weight has helped to organize the drawing overall without being overbearing.

Admittedly, you did try your hand at some particularly complex, challenging subject matter (the winding branches of this one definitely got to be rather overwhelming, and I feel that in certain places it may have caused you to get tired, resulting in somewhat sloppier linework), but you've clearly demonstrated a solid grasp of the material throughout this set.

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

Uncomfortable in the post "250 Box Challenge"

2019-01-31 22:19

Nice work! I can definitely see considerable improvement when it comes to the estimation of your convergences over this set, and extending your lines has certainly contributed to an awareness that resulted in growth. I'm also pleased to see a variety of rates of foreshortening - you've got some boxes with very rapid, dramatic foreshortening (where vanishing points are closer, this implies that the object is quite large or close to the viewer), as well as boxes where the foreshortening is more shallow (farther vanishing points implying a smaller scale, or objects that are farther away). Often students will focus too much on one rather than the other - shallow foreshortening is particularly important because most of the objects we draw are going to be of a smaller, more relatable scale.

I did notice that your line weight was generally pretty uniform, so that's an area you may want to focus on as you move forwards to kick your boxes up to the next level.

Additionally, while your convergences have improved considerably, there are still mistakes towards the end and I believe I have some advice that should help. When you're drawing a line, don't think of the other lines with which it shares a corner, or those with which it shares a plane. Think about all the other lines with which it shares a vanishing point - that is, the lines with which it is parallel, including those that have not yet been drawn. From there, think about the angles at which they leave the vanishing point. Those with smaller angles between them are more likely to be running close to parallel to one another by the time they reach the box itself, so this can be a useful piece of information to keep in mind. You can often look at a similar such line and draw a next one as being parallel to it if they're close together and share the same VP. I expand on this in these notes.

Anyway, I'll go ahead and mark this challenge as complete. Keep up the good work and feel free to move onto the next lesson.

Uncomfortable in the post "Lesson 3: Drawing Plants"

2019-01-31 01:07

Nicely done! I had to go back and dig through the homework and feedback that called for this additional drawing, but I can definitely see vast improvement from then to now. Your leaves are considerably more fluid in how they move through 3D space, you've clearly put a great deal of patience and care into drawing each one individually rather than trying to rush through them, and the underlying trunk and branches feel solid and believable. This is looking vastly better than your previous attempt.

So, I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete! Feel free to move onto the next lesson, and keep up the great work.

Uncomfortable in the post "Lesson 4: Drawing Insects and Arachnids"

2019-01-31 01:02

You show considerable improvement over this set.

Admittedly the organic forms with contour curves you start out with are okay, if a bit sloppy. The contour lines wrap around the forms well, but they have a tendency to fall outside of the silhouette of the form, and the forms themselves aren't often drawn with the kind of conviction that suggests solidity and weight. You're applying the technique correctly, but the execution comes off as somewhat unconvinced of the illusion you're meant to be creating.

Your first scorpion is alright - you're clearly thinking in form and construction, though certain areas do feel a little flat (like the pincers. Also, I do see one major issue here that isn't quite as present in the rest of your drawings, but is important enough to point out anyway:

You started out with a box for the thorax/abdomen, and a large ball for the head. As you progressed through the drawing however, you went on to either ignore these forms, or use them as a sort of "suggestion". So what we end up with are forms, or shapes, that are present there in the world, but that the rest of the drawing fails to acknowledge.

I'm not sure if you've had the chance to read this page on thinking in 3D from the newly revised lesson 2 - if you haven't, you should. It talks about the act of drawing as though we are telling a lie, and explains how a lie will fall apart if our facts don't line up. Any contradictions, any parts of the story that fail to corroborate one another, will whittle away the audience's willingness to believe us.

That is ultimately what these orphan forms are doing - they exist there, but the rest of the drawing suggests that they are not present. Once you've put such forms down, it's important that you incorporate them into your drawing fully, sticking to the same story all the way through - even if it's not the same story you meant to tell from the beginning.

Now, as I said, you improve by leaps and bounds over this set, and this issue doesn't come up quite as egregiously elsewhere, but I figured it was still worth calling out. I can see it a little bit as the initial block-in of the thorax on the bottom of this page, but it's not as noticeable. In general, we want to work additively, putting down a form that feels solid and believable, and then adding more forms on top of it, building our way to greater levels of complexity. If you simply cannot achieve what you're after without cutting into a form you've put in, then it's important that you actually cut into it. This means using contour lines to define the piece being cut away, and demonstrating an understanding of how it exists in space. This will make the cut more believable - unlike before where you had a box, and then simply drew directly on top of it without regard for how it occupied space in that world.

As you push through the homework, I can see your use of layered segmentation, building up form, breaking up silhouettes, using sausages to construct segments of legs, and so on. You're demonstrating a growing understanding of how these forms all fit together.

I have just one more minor point to raise. On this spider (which is actually one of my favourite drawings from this set), the segments of the legs feel a little bit stiff. You are using sausages here (in that they're like balls connected by a tube of consistent width rather than a stretched ellipse), but they're almost all very rigid. In general, even if your reference does appear to be very straight and stiff, I strongly recommend that you work in some kind of subtle flow to them, a rhythm gently bending a segment one way, then the next the other, and so on. This will help you make your subject matter feel more alive.

Anyway, keep up the fantastic work. I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete, so feel free to move onto the next lesson.

Uncomfortable in the post "100 Treasure Chest Challenge"

2019-01-30 16:11

You needn't worry quite so much. That part of this exercise is more heavily leaning towards coming up with fresh designs, but this process still incorporates a great deal of reference imagery. Generally not to reproduce them in a one-to-one manner but to draw elements and to incorporate their language that is used within each one's design.

This is not something I have taught yet, though it is one of the next topics I want to approach for my lessons - how every design contains a specific language in its use of form and shape, and how an awareness of this can help you when developing your own fresh designs. Design also relies heavily upon your visual library - drawing objects directly from reference is what helps populate that visual library, so what you've done here is by no means wrong, nor a waste of time. You can look at it as a good first step.

If you want to explore design further, then I'd recommend giving this a shot:

Gather a bunch of reference images into a mood board. This can be the ones you used previously for your chest drawings, and can even include the chest drawings themselves. A great software for this is PureRef - it's free and lets you compile a bunch of images together on a board where you can scale/rotate/flip/arrange them, and save them all as a single file. Having all of these references open in front of you will give you a lot of places you can draw inspiration and ideas from. Because there are so many there, you can grab bits and pieces from several, and glue them together with your own ideas. Generally designing from your "imagination" will involve what is called the 80-20 rule. 80% of the design comes from real life, or from existing material, 20% from your own ideas.

With that open, try doing a handful of chest designs of your own.

Uncomfortable in the post "Lesson 4: Drawing Insects and Arachnids"

2019-01-30 00:29

Joke's on you! I haven't grown in more than a decade, I'll be five feet tall forever! ...until I start shrinking with old age, if I make it that far.

Anyway! You've shown considerable growth over this set, so congratulations on that. All the same, I'm going to point out a few of the issues I noticed, even though many of them were improved upon in later drawings. I figure this way you'll explicitly know what was wrong previously, just in case you weren't sure of the difference.

• On your scorpion, one thing that stood out was the fact that with the large claws, you blocked them in with a very large ellipse, and treated that ellipse as though it was just a mark on the flat page. That is to say, you drew on top of it without any concern for the fact that it represented a solid, three dimensional form within the space. It was ignored, and you used it simply to determine where you wanted to place that claw. The reason I generally advise against this is because, as I explain in the new first page of lesson 2, our drawings are elaborate stories that we are telling. They're lies. And every little mark we put down is a statement we're making about this story. All of these statements must line up, everything must be consistent in this description of form and 3D space - if we start contradicting ourselves, the lie we're telling becomes harder and harder to believe. A little slip up here or there is not a big deal (which is why this drawing was still fairly successful), but as they accumulate, the story starts to fall apart. In this case, those initial ellipses tell us of a much larger claw, whereas the later lines tell us of claws of a slightly different form and size. In order to keep your story straight, make sure that you stick to the forms you lay down, even if they're not exactly what you intended to draw. Keep moving forward and keep building on top of every form you add to your world. Don't replace them or ignore them, and if you MUST cut into one or carve it in some fashion, make sure you do so in a way that clearly defines an understanding of how both that form and the piece you've cut away from it exist in 3D space. This means using contour lines that respect its 3D nature to cut slices away as needed.

• Also in the scorpion, and to a degree in the spider that follows it, your legs are constructed with stretched ellipses. These stretched ellipses tend to feel quite stiff, because of how through half of their length they're growing wider and wider, and through the other half they're growing narrower and narrower. This doesn't lend itself very well to bending or flowing in a gestural manner, and limbs benefit greatly from this sense of gesture. As explained here, make sure you use sausages instead, which are essentially two spheres connected with a tube of consistent width, which is more prone to being flexible.

• The legs on the common wasp were somewhat more sausage like, but they weren't entirely consistent in their widths. Sometimes they'd swell considerably towards one end, and others got a little narrow through their midsection. It's absolutely true that these are qualities that you'll see in the segments of legs you're drawing, but remember that in construction, we're breaking these elements down into steps. First put down a simple, consistent, flowing, solid sausage, and then add additional forms to it to flesh out those volumes as needed.

• Not a mistake, just an observation - I really liked this guy's head. It felt over solid, and while the little protrusion on the front was off-center, you clearly demonstrated a good grasp of how these forms connected with each other.

• Your fly demonstrated far better grasp of this sausage business, though remember that you should define the intersection between two sausages with a single contour line right at the joint. This will help reinforce those forms.

• Fantastic work on the carpenter wasp demo, you're demonstrating vastly better use of the sausage method here, both in maintaining simple sausages, reinforcing the joints and adding additional forms to flesh masses out. One last thing though - when adding those additional forms, remember that they too are intersecting with the sausages, so an additional contour line to denote that specific intersection will help as well.

• Your later drawings are all demonstrating both exceptionally strong construction and form, but also very smooth, confident linework. You're much more willing to play with line weight, and to draw through all of your forms. All in all, you're demonstrating a much stronger understanding of 3D space.

• I did want to mention that on the hercules beetle at the end, you've got some scribbly lines just under its shell along the front of its thorax.. or possibly along one of its legs. I just wanted to mention that while the drawing is quite nice, those kinds of scribbly, erratic lines definitely detract from it.

So! I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete. Feel free to move onto the next lesson!

Uncomfortable in the post "25 Wheel Challenge"

2019-01-30 00:12

You've got a lot of good stuff here! There are a couple things I want to call out though that should help as you continue to move forwards:

*One thing that stands out is that at times, your cylinder construction isn't entirely correct. For example, if we look at #6 and #14, you can see that for these, the farther end of the cylinder actually has a narrower degree than the closer end. As explained here, the farther end of the cylinder is always going to have a slightly wider degree, due to the difference in the angle at which we see it.

Now you've got a lot of tire treads here that I really like - 5, 12, 13, 15 and so on, but there is a trend especially with those that have very large, discrete protruding forms (like 21, 14) where the approach at that surface texture starts to feel very clunky. The reason for this is that you're attempting to enclose and define each protrusion with total specificity. This is great when it comes to regular construction, but when applied to a texture where these forms are multitudinous (i mainly felt like that should be a word and decided to use it to see if it'd highlight it as a spelling mistake, turns out it was a word!) this very quickly becomes overbearing and cluttered.

The solution is instead what is discussed on the new texture section of lesson 2. Basically, instead of drawing each and every form that exists on the surface of an object that gives it that sense of texture, we draw the impact those little forms have on their surroundings. Specifically, we draw the shadows they cast. That's essentially what lines are, but the difference is that these shadows can grow larger the further they are from the object that casts them, and they can meld together with other shadows to create large swathes of black where the information they contain within them are implied only by the way the large shadow shape's edge is carved. There's also more information on this in the texture analysis exercise.

So, long story short, when it comes to these little forms, don't try to draw each one and enclose it completely. Think instead about the shadows they cast upon their surrounding surfaces and draw those instead.

Anyway, I'll go ahead and mark this challenge as complete. There's no actual badge for it, but I'm going to note it down anyway so when the day comes that we leave reddit in our drawabox space ship (and start using a dedicated community platform on the website itself), you'll have all your well earned badges and achievements.

You may feel free to move onto lesson 7.

Uncomfortable in the post "Lesson 3: Drawing Plants"

2019-01-30 00:01

Pretty nice work! You're generally doing a good job, and show a considerable amount of improvement over the set. There are a couple things I'm going to point out, but by and large this submission is quite well done.

Your arrows are looking quite nice, and I can see their sense of flow carrying over into your leaves. I'm also pleased to see how you've applied the leaf construction method quite well - that is to say, the layers of complexity are built one on top of the other, and at no point do you tackle more than one challenge at a time. First you establish the flow, then you build out the basic shape as it moves through space, and finally you add additional spatial information. Keep this in mind, because I'm going to point out later in your lesson where you don't quite adhere to this quite as closely.

Your branches are equally well done - you're developing the ability to construct longer, more complex lines with a series of segments that flow smoothly into one another. There still are visible points where those segments connect if you look for them, but at a glance they're hard to pick up. This will continue to improve with practice, but as it stands they're done very well. I'm also pleased with the spacing of your ellipses - there's not so many that things feel cramped and stiff, but not so few that your individual segments are too ambitious.

Your first few plant drawings are definitely somewhat weaker as you're getting used to the techniques as applied to more complex objects - we can see where the stems, for instance, don't show nearly the same level of control as you demonstrated in the previous exercise. Your leaf constructions are also somewhat stiffer, and you seem to be jumping in a little too complex on your first one.

As you continue to move through these drawings however, you quickly start to get more comfortable and demonstrate your underlying grasp of 3D space and form. The constructions with more tangible forms (like the cherries, the pepper, the mushrooms) show a good sense of volume (though the linework is just a little stiff so try and loosen up, always draw from the shoulder and make sure you're drawing these marks with a confident, persistent pace).

One thing I am noticing however is that you have a bit of a tendency to use line weight a little too liberally. It's getting to the point that there's a visible difference between the underlying construction and the lines of your "final" drawing. Get used to the idea that all of these lines are an equally valid part of the resulting drawing, and that when you add line weight, it is to build a smooth hierarchy, pushing some lines back and some forward, but only to clarify overlaps between forms and strengthen silhouettes. This line weight should always be drawn with the same confidence of the original strokes, so as to avoid stiffening those lines up by drawing too slowly and carefully.

Another point, on the hibiscus (plant 8), I can see you adding some waviness to some of the petals using a continuous line that zigzags back and forth. As explained here, this should be avoided in favour of separate segments that come back to the original, simpler shape's edge.

The last point I want to raise is something I see in a few places, but most prominently in number 9. Notice how your leaves have somewhat wavy edges to them, but don't follow any underlying, previous phase of construction? Here you've jumped ahead too quickly, and have attempted to solve two spatial problems (the overall movement of the leaf through space, and the more local movement of the edges themselves) at the same time. When we tackle multiple problems together, we tend to afford each one less of our focus, and the result tends to feel less believable. Always break things down into individual problems, and solve them separately. First establish how the leaf as a whole flows through space, then add some wavy deviation to those simpler edges.

Anyway! As I said, you're doing quite well. I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete, so feel free to move onto the next lesson.

Uncomfortable in the post "100 Treasure Chest Challenge"

2019-01-29 23:44

Fantastic work! I can see considerable improvement over the set on a number of fronts:

• The integrity of your boxes improves. They're generally pretty good throughout, but early on they're somewhat less consistent in their convergences towards their shared vanishing points, especially in the basic construction part of the challenge.

• Your spatial understanding of how the rotations of the lid gets better throughout

• Your designs get more and more inventive as you push through - you're clearly fighting against the monotony of producing the same chest designs over and over, and once you get the basic stuff out of the way, you really push into some thrillingly different approaches.

I really love a lot of your designs, especially later on in the set. One quality you always seem to carry through is the idea of every form being solid and substantial - they're rarely ever left as paper-thin slivers of material, you've got some excellent chunky masses in there that really give a strong sense of volume and weight. I'm also very pleased to see that you experimented with different themes - from fantasy with classic piratey chests to scifi where some of them looked almost like fax machines. I'm not at all sure what 57 is (it's probably a stretch from a chest) but whatever it is, the construction is phenomenally solid and believable.

There are a couple areas where that stand out to me as having room for improvement:

• I mentioned above that your estimation of convergences of sets of parallel lines towards their intended vanishing points improves, especially in the more basic versions of the exercise. There is still room for growth here however, primarily in the more complex designs themselves. Now the fact that some of these designs have slightly lopsided perspective isn't actually a problem. It is something you'll need to work on as you continue to move forwards, but fundamentally while you're designing, your mind should be focusing on design - and it absolutely was. So I'm not saying this as though it is a failure of any sort - your priorities were in order, but as you continue to develop your awareness of 3D space will become so attuned that you won't have to really waste much conscious thought on it, and will be able to nail it without distracting yourself from the design process. Some areas where the perspective issues stood out were, for example, on 84 where that wonderfully chunky base gets smaller at a much faster rate than the rest of the chest. It's one of those situations where your internal subdivisions of the enclosing box requires more attention.

• I think that for the most part, your more successful designs were those that didn't rely on quite so much texture (like wood grain) and focused more on the complexity of the forms and construction. This is because your textures tended to be a little rushed and a little scribbly - they simply didn't get as much time or attention as the rest of the drawing, and so they stood out as a weak link. While I think giving yourself more time on this area would work wonders, you can also look at exercises like the texture analysis exercise, a new addition to lesson 2 (actually it's just the texture challenge incorporated in a more bite-sized fashion).

Anyway, you've really done a fantastic job here. I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete (there's unfortunately no flair for it, but I will mark down your completion so when drawabox eventually gets its own dedicated community platform on the drawabox website itself, you will be showered with well earned achievements and badges. Keep up the fantastic work!

Uncomfortable in the post "Lesson 1: Lines, Ellipses and Boxes"

2019-01-28 23:56

Fantastic work through the lines section. Your lines are smooth and confidently drawn, and as such they maintain consistent trajectories throughout with no signs of hesitation or wobbling. At the same time, you're demonstrating considerable control and precision, and excellent use of the ghosting method.

Now your ellipses take a bit of a turn. In the table of ellipses exercise, you seem to be more hesitant, and as a result you draw more slowly. This causes your ellipses to come out a little stiff and uneven, as they lack the smoothness of the lines that preceded them. It's really important that you draw every mark with a confident, persistent pace - accuracy is important, but it's not terribly useful if your marks wobble.

Now you do improve on this quite a bit when you hit the ellipses in planes. Here your ellipses are again smooth and evenly shaped, which is actually rather interesting. This is where most students start to stiffen up, due to the challenge of getting their ellipses to fit. So at least it does show that you're learning from those mistakes.

Jumping ahead to your rough perspective boxes, there are a couple problems here:

• You don't seem to be applying the ghosting method anymore, so your lines are visibly wobblier and less certain. The ghosting method is not just an exercise - it's a technique you should be applying to every single mark you put down without exception, be they lines, ellipses, or anything else.

• Remember that your horizontal lines must be parallel to your horizon, and your verticals must run perpendicular to it, since our boxes for this exercise are all aligned to the ground plane. Your lines tend to slant a little arbitrarily.

In your rotated boxes, you put forward a pretty solid attempt, but there are a couple issues:

• Towards the center you're doing a good job of keeping the gaps between your boxes narrow and consistent, so as to avoid any unnecessary guesswork, but they start to get farther apart as you go towards the outside of the set. This results in you losing that sense of structure, and ultimately guessing a lot more than you need to.

• Your boxes aren't actually rotating very much relative to one another. As demonstrated here, they're actually aligned towards fairly similar vanishing points.

Again, you're not applying the ghosting method to your organic perspective boxes - at times this results in lines that are sketchy or wobbly, though towards the second page they are at least much smoother.

Aside from that, you've got a solid attempt at the exercise here. There is room for improvement, especially in getting your sets of parallel lines to converge more consistently towards their shared vanishing points, but that's expected and is something we'll continue to work on.

Now I am going to mark this lesson as complete. I'd like you to move onto the 250 box challenge next. This will give you the opportunity to work more on your freely rotated boxes, while also further practicing your use of the ghosting method.

Uncomfortable in the post "Lesson 1: Lines, Ellipses and Boxes"

2019-01-28 23:41

On one hand, your work demonstrates a great deal of confidence behind each and every stroke - there's no hesitation, and as a result no wobbling. Just smooth marks.

On the other hand, throughout your work I see a strong tendency to rush - there isn't a whole lot of planning behind most of your marks, and as a result you don't seem to have a great deal of control over where they fall. This is an issue that is thankfully fairly easily fixed, and it would have been a bigger concern had your lines been all stiff and shaky. It does however mean that you need to slow down and put a great deal more thought and consideration into each mark before you actually move to execute the stroke.

Looking at your ghosted lines exercise, two things stand out to me:

• For most of these, you've laid down your start and end points, and then made no effort to actually start your line at one of those points. It's entirely normal to have students struggle to stop their stroke at the end point, and to overshoot it, but you must at least start at your intended location.

• Your strokes are very erratic, and not always particularly straight. There's a good deal of arcing to these lines that you need to consciously work to diminish.

Jumping ahead to your ellipses, you're not doing too badly here, but there is a definite sense of looseness to them at times. Your execution isn't bad, but they could use tightening and it's very clear to me that the only reason your work here isn't vastly better is that you're not taking the time to ghost through the motion before executing your mark. Keep in mind that the ghosting method can and should be applied to every mark you put down, and that the very concepts it embodies are central to how we're approaching drawing in this course.

We're not looking to sketch erratically and quickly - we plan our marks before we put them down, and we take the time beforehand to give ourselves the best chances of putting down exactly the mark we mean to make, before executing it with a confident stroke.

Jumping down to your rough perspective boxes, the behaviour of your lines seems to frequently be arbitrary, and your use of the ghosting method is again lacking, or at least not well prepared. When approaching this exercise, our horizontals must remain parallel to the horizon, and our verticals must remain perpendicular to it, as explained here. You need to put more effort into considering the nature of the line you want to draw before putting it on the page.

Your rotated boxes were actually done fairly well. There's some greater control to your linework there, and towards the center you're demonstrating quite a bit of effort to keep the gaps between your boxes narrow and consistent, so as to avoid any unnecessary guesswork. Things do tend to fall apart somewhat however as you move out towards the corners, where the gaps get bigger and you start to lose that sense of structure.

Additionally, towards the extremities, your boxes tend to run more parallel to one another, converging towards the same vanishing points as explained here.

Lastly, your organic perspective boxes are actually a pretty good start. There's definitely room for improvement in getting your sets of parallel lines to converge consistently towards their shared vanishing points, but your line quality here is vastly better and those kinds of mistakes are entirely expected. We'll continue working on this as our next step.

Before that however, I want you to do one more page of the ellipses in planes exercise, followed by one more page of rough perspective. Apply the ghosting method everywhere. Once you're done that, submit it here and I'll mark the lesson as complete.

At that point, you'll be able to move onto the 250 box challenge.

Uncomfortable in the post "Lesson 1: Lines, Ellipses and Boxes"

2019-01-28 23:28

Nice work! Your lines speak of considerable confidence behind each stroke, which helps you to achieve smooth, straight lines with consistent trajectories. I don't see any signs of hesitation or wobbling there, which is great. You carry this on into your ellipses, where they're achieving smooth, even shapes. I am noticing however that you are struggling a bit to get your ellipses to fit snugly within the space that is allotted to them - there are many that float a little more arbitrarily (especially in the table of ellipses exercise), so that's something you'll want to work on. It's largely going to be a matter of continuing to practice the use of the ghosting method on ellipses, as this can take a bit of practice to get used to. The evenness of the shape is still your highest priority though, and you're managing that quite well.

Jumping forward to the rough perspective boxes, you're doing pretty well, but watch your horizontals and verticals - always remember that your horizontals must run parallel to the horizon, and your verticals must run perpendicular to it. You're close, but I can see a bit of slanting in many of your lines.

Excellent work on the rotated boxes - you've kept them well structured, with narrow, consistent gaps between them so as to avoid any unnecessary guesswork. You've also done a pretty decent job of covering the 180 degree arc of rotation on both of the major axes. Your corners were handled better towards the upper right and lower left, though your upper left flattened out a little quickly.

Lastly, your organic perspective boxes are a good start, though there is plenty of room for improvement. We'll continue to work on getting your sets of parallel lines to converge more consistently towards their shared vanishing points as we move forwards.

I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete. I'd like you to move onto the 250 box challenge next.

Uncomfortable in the post "Lesson 1: Lines, Ellipses and Boxes"

2019-01-27 21:44

You've done pretty well! Your lines section is composed of smooth, confident strokes with no visible hesitation or wobbling. Your control will improve as you continue to practice and as you get more comfortable with the use of the ghosting method, but your work is coming along quite well here.

The same carries on for your ellipses, where that confidence results in smooth, evenly shaped ellipses. Both of these - that is, the even ellipses and the confident, straight lines, serve as the bedrock of solid construction.

Jumping ahead to your rough perspective boxes, you've put a good deal of work into keeping all of your horizontals parallel to the horizon, and all of your verticals perpendicular to it. I'm also pleased that you've applied the line extensions to better identify where your estimation of perspective tends to drift.

Now at this point, I should mention that the next two exercises are intentionally challenging. Unlike those above, these are specifically focused on merely exposing students to a different kind of spatial problem that they may not have otherwise considered. That's why they're so difficult - they're meant to be, and I have no expectation for students to be able to nail them just yet.

With the rotated boxes, I look for two main things:

• For the boxes to be well structured, with narrow, consistent gaps between them. You've passed this with flying colours, and as such have eliminated any unnecessary guesswork.

• For the boxes to have clear rotation between them. You've got this for the vertical central axis, but your horizontal central axis actually has boxes (aside from the center one) sitting more or less parallel to each other, as shown here. Keep an eye on that.

Your organic perspective boxes are a great start. There's certainly still room for improvement, and we'll continue to work on getting your sets of parallel lines to converge consistently towards their shared vanishing points, but all in all you're marking a great start.

I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete. I'd like you to move onto the 250 box challenge.

Uncomfortable in the post "Lesson 2: Organic Forms, Contour Lines, Dissections and Form Intersections"

2019-01-27 20:08

Very nice work! I caught a couple things that I'd like to point out, but by and large you've demonstrated a solid grasp of the concepts covered in this lesson.

• Your arrows flow very nicely through all three dimensions of space, and are not being limited to the two dimensions of the page you're drawing on. This suggests that you're pushing into that illusion that you're working within a fully three dimensional world, which is great to see.

• One point to keep in mind with this exercise however is that all space compresses as it moves further away from the viewer - the width of your arrow's ribbon did shrink which is correct, but as shown here the space between the various turning lengths should have also grown smaller.

• Your organic forms with contour lines are looking great. Admittedly it's a little hard to distinguish them as contour ellipses vs. contour curves but I'll let it slide here as you have a smattering of both throughout and you demonstrate a solid grasp of how the ellipses should be aligned to the minor axis line, and how their degrees should shift over the course of the length of the form. I'm also pleased to see that most of your forms were kept quite simple.

• Your texture analyses and dissections both conveyed observational skills that are developing well, and the ability to organize the information you gleaned from your reference to suit your own specific needs (be it the transposition of the texture onto a rounded form, or to achieve a shift from dense/dark to sparse/light). There were a couple textures where the roundedness of the dissections didn't come through entirely - for example, the stuff on the outside of the form chunk that has salami on it (the texture looks like pebbles or gravel), and the knitted texture. These are attempting to get that roundedness but don't quite compress along the sides enough. Same goes for the rose petals on the following page. Additionally, your attempt at the "leaf" one wasn't really correct in that you drew a leaf within that space, rather than taking its surface texture and applying it to a different form.

• Your form intersections are generally well done, but there are a couple things I want to stress. You're a little inconsistent when it comes to drawing through your boxes, as well as with the use of the minor axis when drawing cylinders. Make sure you're applying these principles all over when doing the drawabox lessons. If you've got a box, draw through it. If you've got something cylindrical, construct it around a minor axis.

• Also, the instructions did state that you should stay away from more stretched forms that weren't equilateral (equal in all dimensions), and I can see quite a few that ignore this, especially with your cylinders.

• Your organic intersections are okay - they're starting to show the believable relationships between these different forms as they're piled upon one another, but there is room for improvement here. Try to stick to shorter sausages (more like the one you started off with), and think of it as though you're piling filled water balloons on top of one another. Think about how each one sags and slumps against the ones around it as it tries to find support for its mass and volume.

Anyway, by and large you've done a good job. Just a few things here and there to keep an eye on. I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete, so feel free to move onto the next lesson.

Uncomfortable in the post "Lesson 1: Lines, Ellipses and Boxes"

2019-01-27 19:50

Well done! You're demonstrating a great deal of confidence through the lines section, without any visible hesitation or wobbling to your strokes. At the same time, you are clearly achieving a considerable degree of control with your use of the ghosting method, all the while maintaining that same confidence.

This carries through to the ellipses section, where it helps you to maintain smooth, even shapes without any deformation or stiffness to them. I can see in places that you struggle at times to keep your ellipses snug within the spaces afforded to them, but I can clearly see that you're aware of this and that you're doing what you can to achieve this degree of accuracy. That is really all I'm looking for - that you understand the goal of the exercise and that you work towards it.

One point about your funnels - it seems that here you've effectively stopped drawing through your ellipses. Remember that as outlined here you should be drawing through each of your ellipses 2 to 3 times (2 is ideal). This applies to every single ellipse you draw for these lessons.

Your plotted perspective is very well done, just be a little more careful with your hatching lines. Keep them parallel and consistent, and make sure they stretch all the way across the plane from edge to edge, rather than floating arbitrarily in the middle of a plane.

Great work on the rough perspective - you've clearly made a concerted effort to keep your horizontals parallel to the horizon and your verticals perpendicular to it. I'm also pleased to see that you applied the extension method correctly to identify where your estimation of perspective tends to drift.

You did a good job in your rotated boxes of keeping the boxes well structured, with narrow, consistent gaps between them so as to eliminate any unnecessary guesswork. I did notice a tendency towards the outer edges however to stretch your boxes as you rotated them - the farthest edge of your farthest boxes should be tucked in a little more, especially along the horizontal and vertical axes.

Lastly, your work on the organic perspective exercise is a solid start, but we'll continue to work on your ability to estimate the convergences of your lines, so as to keep the convergence of your sets of parallel lines more consistent towards their shared vanishing points.

I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete. I'd like you to move onto the 250 box challenge next.

Uncomfortable in the post "Lesson 6: Drawing Everyday Objects"

2019-01-27 19:42

Oh my, it seems my comment before about submitting too often may have instilled a bit of fear in you! You don't need to worry so much - I'll let you know when you push it too far, you needn't present a case for each submission.

You've done some really phenomenal work here. Your form intersections are coming along great (admittedly some of your boxes still have minor issues in terms of keeping your vanishing points consistent, but that's not entirely abnormal and just means they need more targeted practice). Your cylinders are also looking quite remarkably solid, as are your spheres. You've clearly mustered pretty phenomenal control of your ellipses at this point, even those that are of a wider degree.

Your everyday object constructions are exceptionally solid and very thorough. You've taken the time at every turn to build out your boxes, subdivide fastidiously and define every tiny aspect of your construction. I don't see you skipping any steps. This is all exemplary.

I did catch a couple places where your anxiety/worry did cause you to draw some of your freehand lines with a little less confidence, resulting in some wavering/wobbling lines, so that is worth pointing out. For example, along the top face of the charger contraption in the middle (not actually sure what it is, but damn if it doesn't look solid), as well as the top ellipse of the larger cylinder of the component off to the right.

Also, your later drawings' linework is pretty uniform, once we pass the computer mouse - I think we're seeing only two real levels of weight. One where you're laying down your construction lines, and another where you're creating your "final pass". That sort of approach is generally one I want you to avoid during these lessons - that is, distinguishing the "real" lines from the under drawing. Treat the entirety of the drawing as being gradually built up, with line weight added to sections of existing lines, usually to clarify overlapping forms or silhouettes.

This results in a more gradually built-up drawing, rather than one that looks like it was knocked out in just a couple distinct passes, and it ends up giving it a greater dynamism.

One last thing - since you completed the cylinder challenge many months ago, it'd be worth giving the notes/video for it another look, as they were thoroughly overhauled over christmas. You don't by any means have to do it over, your cylinders are mostly pretty good, but there are just some conceptual things, like how one can construct a perfect cube to scale, that will come in handy.

Anyway, I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete. Keep up the great work and feel free to move onto the next step, which should be the 25 wheel challenge.

Uncomfortable in the post "250 Box Challenge"

2019-01-26 23:43

Your warning there had me worried, but it looks like the issue was minimal. Even if the line weight was completely wrong, then it still wouldn't have impacted the spatial portion of this exercise, but still - your line weights weren't that far off, and by the end you demonstrate a solid use of it.

All in all you've demonstrated a great deal of improvement over this set. By the end your boxes feel solid, and your convergences are looking vastly more consistent. There are a couple places where one of the middle lines of a given set goes off at an odd angle, but that's fairly normal. Just remember that when you're drawing these lines, you always want to think about the lines with which it is parallel (including those that haven't yet been drawn), instead of those with which it shares a corner or a plane. From there, think about how they leave the vanishing point, considering the fact that those with smaller angles between them will be running virtually parallel to one another by the time they reach the box. I explain this further in these notes.

I'll go ahead and mark this challenge as complete. Keep up the good work and feel free to move onto lesson 2.

Uncomfortable in the post "Lesson 1: Lines, Ellipses and Boxes"

2019-01-26 23:37

You start out great - your super imposed lines are looking smooth and confident for the most part, with minimal hesitation or uncertainty. Things do get a little stiff and wobbly when you hit those curves and waves, but that's pretty normal. Always remember that no matter what, your mark should be made with a confident stroke so as to allow it to flow well.

Your ghosted lines are coming along well, though I can see a touch of hesitation here and there, which causes the little bumps and wavering we see on occasion. For the most part however you are showing your ability to plan and prepare beforehand, and then push through with a confident stroke, it's merely a matter of practice to iron out the rest of those kinks. You also improve on this a fair bit as you work through the ghosted planes.

The same principles apply to the ellipses - your narrower ones are actually drawn with a great deal of confidence, and as such they maintain even shapes. The wider, more circular ones, however, tend to lose some of the integrity of their shapes. This can happen simply due to hesitation, but not drawing from your shoulder can also be a cause, so keep an eye on this.

The issues I'm highlighting here aren't particularly egregious, just things to keep in mind.

You've done a pretty fantastic job of keeping your ellipses in planes even and smooth, while also getting them to touch all four sides of the ellipses. As you move forwards, try and rein in just how many rounds of the ellipses you're making. I can see a few that have four or more passes - generally stick to 2 or 3, with 2 being ideal.

Jumping ahead to your rough perspective boxes, you're doing pretty well but there's one thing to keep in mind - actually I think you're already aware of this, as I can see it improving as you move through. Horizontals must run parallel to the horizon, and the verticals must run perpendicular to it. You adhere to this for the most part, but there are places where your verticals in particular slant a little.

Your rotated boxes are coming along well enough - there's room for improvement, but by and large you've made a solid attempt here, especially considering that this exercise, along with the one after it, is more about exposing students to a different kind of spatial problem that they may not have otherwise considered.

You're doing a decent job of keeping your boxes well structured, with narrow, consistent gaps between them, though there is room for improvement here. I can see a few places here and there where the gaps get bigger, and others where the gaps aren't consistent (one edge starts slanting away from the other). You're also doing a pretty good job of covering the full 180 degree range of rotation on each axis, though this certainly can be pushed further. In addition to this, your corners tend to rotate less than your main vertical/horizontal axes, so that's another thing to watch out for.

Lastly, your organic perspective boxes are a good start, but as expected there's plenty of room for improvement. Specifically we're going to look at working on getting your sets of parallel lines to converge more consistently towards their shared vanishing points.

I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete. I'd like you to move onto the 250 box challenge next.

Uncomfortable in the post "250 Box Challenge"

2019-01-26 17:40

Much better, though you definitely do need to work on your convergences. You've got a couple there where the convergences are way off.

When you're drawing a given line, always think about the lines with which it shares a vanishing point, and don't think about those with which it shares a corner or a plane. This includes lines within the set that haven't yet been drawn. Consider how they leave the vanishing point, and the angles present between them. Those with smaller angles will end up running close to parallel with one another once they reach the box, as shown here.

Anyway, I'll go ahead and mark this challenge as complete. You do need more work, but you're ready to move onto the next lesson. Just be sure to continue integrating them into your warmup routines.