Uncomfortable in the post "Lesson 3: Drawing Plants"

2019-01-04 03:58

Hey, don't forget that at your current patreon tier, you're only eligible for critiques of lesson 1 and 2, as well as the box and cylinder challenges. Lessons 3 and 4 require the $7 tier or higher.

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

2019-01-03 19:21

Really, really phenomenal work here. You've really nailed the major points I was looking for.

Throughout your lines section, you're demonstrating considerable confidence behind each stroke, which helps keep them smooth and consistent. You're not showing any signs of hesitation or wobbling, which is fantastic.

This carries over to your ellipses, where that same confident pace is helping to maintain even shapes. You're also clearly applying the ghosting method to great effect, demonstrating considerable control and keeping the ellipses relatively tight, despite not slowing down to do so.

Smooth, confident lines and evenly shaped ellipses really are the bedrock of solid construction, so this will all serve you very well as you move forwards.

Jumping ahead to your boxes, you're doing equally well here, there's just a couple little things I want to bring to your attention:

• You applied the double checking method nicely to your first attempt at the rough perspective boxes, but it is important that you apply it to all of them - reflecting on your mistakes after the fact is the most efficient way to learn from them, and this helps us to identify where our estimation of perspective tends to drift.

• Your rotated boxes are far and above better than what I'd expect from students at this stage - you're demonstrating a great coverage of the full 180 degree arc on each axis, and are keeping your boxes neatly structured together with narrow, consistent gaps between them so as to minimize any guesswork. The only issue I noticed was that the boxes furthest out towards the sides have a tendency to stretch a little as they rotate, causing them to both turn and get longer as they push back into space. Try to push yourself to tuck these far edges in a little bit more, so we see less of their 'front' planes.

• It is worth mentioning that both the rotated boxes and organic perspective boxes exercises are included here only to expose students to a different kind of spatial problem that they may not have otherwise considered. As such, I expect most students to struggle a great deal with both of these. Your work on the rotated boxes were better than I'd expect, while your organic perspective boxes are about where they should be - perhaps a little beyond that as well. That is to say, you're doing a great job, are demonstrating excellent linework and are working towards constructing solid, arbitrarily rotated boxes. There is more room for improvement however, especially in keeping your sets of parallel lines converging consistently towards their shared vanishing points. We will be working on this next.

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 4: Drawing Insects and Arachnids"

2019-01-02 19:56

Nice work overall, but there are a couple things I want to address:

• The studies you did in relation to your bonsais are quite intriguing - I do want to mention though that you should not be deciding on your own what to do in lieu of assigned exercises - if something is assigned, it's there for a reason, and should be done as instructed. That said, it was a recent addition and I do leave a bit of time for students to transition to the newly assigned work. I would not have counted it against you had you not done the additional organic form work and stuck to the previous assignment, but still - as a rule, don't intentionally stray from my instructions.

• Initially your constructions tend to be somewhat loose - more focused on the object as a whole and sketching it out as shapes rather than on constructing individual components as solid, three dimensional forms and considering how they relate to one another. This definitely improves a great deal over the set, but if we look at your initial scorpion lay-in, we can see this looseness, and a general focus on 2D shapes over solid forms. That said, the result still comes out well, though if you look closely at its abdomen/thorax, you'll notice that it's been oversimplified quite a bit to the point that there's little distinction between them. I talk more about this in these notes.

• The wasp that follows it is considerably better - there's clearer focus on ensuring that every form you draw is complete and enclosed, rather than simply a collection of loosely associated lines.

• With your weta, you start drifting back to flat shapes, vague lines, over solid, enclosed forms, though you've got a mix of them. One thing that stands out is that your leg segment's shapes are complex right off the bat - you've got swelling to one end, and tapering to the other. Instead, it's better to construct them as simple sausages (as explained here) and then add on additional forms to add further volume where appropriate.

• With this beetle you're definitely delving hard into loose shapes and vague lines once again, much moreso than with the weta. You need to make sure you draw each and every form in its entirety - I'm noticing that you have a tendency to let your legs stop where they'd be overlapped by some other form, and this really serves to flatten them and robs us of a clear opportunity to demonstrate a fuller understanding of how they relate to one another in 3D space.

• For that same beetle, in regards to your question about heavy blacks, the issue is that you're too closely bound to what you're seeing in your photograph. Your personal goal there is obviously to reproduce what you see as closely as you can - this is why you focus on loose shapes to capture what you see in two dimensions, not what you understand in 3D. When you lean so hard to reproducing what you see, you move away from the greater goal of communicating what you understand. That's what we're doing here - through construction, we're communicating the idea of this beetle, not simply setting out to copy the photograph with perfect accuracy. With that freedom, you're able to apply those heavy blacks where it suits this goal of communication best - to convey the surface quality of its chitin, to capture the little bumps and irregularities and to convey its general smoothness. Because you're focusing on reproducing what you see, you're not making any real attempts to convey what it is that the photograph makes you understand. Your choice (or rather, my choice) of media impedes us in what we can convey, and more importantly how we can convey it. You don't have all the colours and gradients of that photograph to work with - you're working in pure blank ink, and as such, need to approach this communication with a different strategy. When it comes to texture and building gradients, the texture challenge goes into this in greater detail.

• The following beetle, the one you almost didn't include, is one of your best drawings here. You've drawn through most of your forms here, and have shown a much more confident approach in establishing each form independently, while also exploring how they relate to one another. This trend continues moreso through the remainder of the drawings, though there are several other places where you're not letting your forms overlap properly.

By and large you've clearly had a bit of a struggle when it comes to dealing with the specific methodologies covered in this lesson. Your end results are all very nice, but my focus is more on how you tackle them. Approaching those drawings with a loose sketch, focusing on 2D shape and all that is perfectly fine, but only outside of the context of these lessons. Here there are specific approaches I want you to employ because the goal here is not to produce a pretty drawing at the end. Each constructional drawing is an exercise in building your grasp of 3D space. You've clearly shown yourself capable of doing this on multiple occasions, but all the same despite the quality of your results I'm not quite comfortable in marking this lesson as complete just yet.

I'd like you to do 3 more insect drawings, following the methodologies covered in the lesson. Focus on form, not shape, on understanding every component you're adding to the drawing as it sits in three dimensions. Don't seek to reproduce what you're looking at, but rather focus on finding the best way to communicate what you understand with the tools you're limited to.

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

2019-01-02 19:16

Overall you've done a really great job of first taking the concepts, applying them alongside the demonstrations, and then finally applying them to other reference images of your own. You're demonstrating a good grasp of 3D space and construction as a whole, and as a result your insects come out feeling solid and three dimensional.

There are just a couple things I want to address:

• When doing the organic forms with contour lines exercise at the beginning there, make sure you focus on simple sausage forms that maintain a consistent width through their length. This will allow you to focus on the core of the exercise without having to worry about any tapering or swelling in the middle (which would generally be additional information added through successive phases of construction, rather than tackled all at the same time).

• In your locust drawing, I noticed a clear shift in your approach - you started drawing the underlying construction lines much more faintly and timidly, and seem to have focused a great deal more on the end result rather than on the construction along the way. Your construction was still alright, but not quite as strong as the other drawings. Remember that the goal here is not to produce a pretty drawing - these are just exercises to build your understanding of 3D space. You're welcome to do drawings like this outside of these lessons to apply what you're learning, but really focus on ensuring that your construction is confident through these lessons (as you have for all the other drawings in this set).

Aside from that, you're doing a great job. I'm especially pleased with how you're handling contour lines in the segmentation of the insects' carapaces. You're doing a good job of wrapping them around underlying forms and breaking the silhouette where appropriate to convey the illusion of layering.

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

Uncomfortable in the post "Lesson 7: Drawing Vehicles"

2019-01-01 04:57

You've done a lot of really fantastic work here, so you should be proud of yourself on that front. I also really like that exercise you did with the page full of perpendicular square planes on your second sheet, that's pretty clever.

As for your drawings, by and large you've got a lot of excellent constructions, with a few little points that I'd like to offer in suggestion.

• I'm really pleased with just how boxy you tend to build things - it results in a lot of really strong spatial relationships between the various components of your constructions.

• Don't forget to draw through your ellipses - yours are getting there, but they're still not even and smooth enough for you to be able to rely on them when they're drawn in just one pass.

• Early on you have a lot of ellipses that float a bit arbitrarily - I'm not against what you've done here, because these drawings are clearly focused more on identifying the various components rather than fussing too much over their proportions, but whenever you do deal with anything that needs to be measured or scaled correctly, make sure you're establishing where you want to draw an ellipse with a plane first.

• On your AT-AT page, one thing that definitely comes to mind is that establishing the ground plane early on, specifically giving yourself some kind of visual cue as to where it would fall beneath each vehicle, would help a great deal. Right now you don't have much to work with in terms of estimating how far down each leg should go, and as a result it does feel like some of these legs may be too long (and likely punching through the ground).

• You've got some great wheel work throughout the set, though I do think that many of them are a bit off in terms of whether or not the ellipses represent actual circles relative to the implied perspective of the rest of the components - I'd assume this relates to what you said about doing this over quite a great deal of time, before the wheel challenge, so it's understandable. Definitely an area that can see continued development however.

• I really love how this one came together - we can see your gradual understanding of proportions and structure, and it shows a lot of fantastic planning and consideration.

• The cartoonier ones at the end really show your growth as a whole, and how you've developed your understanding of 3D space and construction to be able to apply it in a more general sense, with or without all of the additional construction lines.

All in all, you've done a fantastic job and I will absolutely be marking this lesson as complete. Congratulations on completing the constructional drawing curriculum. I do hope you'll move onto the wheels next, but no matter what you decide to tackle next I am confident that you are demonstrating a fantastic grasp of the major elements drawabox focuses on.

Keep up the great work.

Uncomfortable in the post "Drawabox 2.0 has been released - a full website rebuild, revisions of lessons up to 7 and 19 new videos"

2018-12-31 18:43

Thanks for the feedback! The simplification bit is definitely something I'm continually trying to work on - I'm definitely still very long winded in my explanations (both in text and on video) and want to try and refine those as I move forwards. Baby steps!

Uncomfortable in the post "Lesson 7: Drawing Vehicles"

2018-12-31 08:21

Yup, this is where you post it - you likely got confused because it'd been 8 months since your last submission, but the patreon/private critiques go in these threads, not directly to the subreddit. I'm just replying now to let you know that your submission has been seen - it's 4AM and I'm getting to bed, so you'll be getting your critique tomorrow most likely.

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

2018-12-30 20:48

Wow, it really has been a while! It's good to see that you haven't gotten rusty during that time though - your line quality is still generally quite smooth and confident.

Jumping into the exercises, your arrows are looking great. They flow smoothly through 3D space, and explore all three dimensions - including that of depth - rather than being restricted by the two dimensions defined by the page itself.

Your organic forms with contour lines are coming along fairly well, though I do want to comment on the kinds of organic forms you're producing here. In general, when it comes to forms like this, try and focus on 'sausage' shapes. Obviously you have attempted to do so, so I'll be a little more specific. A sausage is essentially two spheres connected by a single tube of consistent width. They maintain that width through the entirety of their lengths, before getting nicely rounded out at the ends. This kind of form is really great for practicing these kinds of contour lines, and establishing the illusion of volume and form in something that can be flexible and flowing at the same time. You've done perfectly fine here, but this is something that will continue to help as you move forwards. They also come into play a great deal in later lessons.

I'm glad to see that you incorporated the texture analysis exercise, despite it being new - I would have let it slide had you left it out, due to the recentness of its addition, but all the same this is largely better for you and I think you did a pretty great job. You explored each texture to a great degree and clearly gave good thought to how they're made up of cast shadows rather than lines that enclose the entirety of these little surface forms, and put that to great use in organizing that detail in the gradients. My one recommendation here is to invest in a brush pen, or something that will allow you to fill in some of the blacks a little more completely. In your gradients you did a somewhat better job of this, but there are still areas with a lot of little bits of white peeking out where it seems unintentional, like you tried to fill them in but weren't able to completely with the tool you were using. That's really the crux of things - whether you mean to do something or not, having it look intentional and purposeful is what controls what the viewer thinks when seeing your work.

Despite your intimidation, I think you did a pretty great job with the dissection exercises as well. The same bit about really letting your darkest darks be more fully filled in still stands here, but you demonstrated excellent observation and care, and organized your details quite well. This is especially true with your pangolin scales and beehive, the latter of which is both a very interesting choice, and a well executed one.

Your form intersections are coming along well, though there's one major pit fall - you didn't quite heed the directions to avoid stretched forms (something that was mentioned in the old instructions, but has been somewhat more emphasized in the newer revisions, here). We prefer sticking to more equilateral forms because it allows us to avoid the additional complexities of more significant foreshortening.

Lastly, your organic intersections are coming along pretty well - the linework is a bit... not scratchy, but there's something a little rough about it, or perhaps somewhat less than properly planned, and some of your contour lines break the silhouette of your organic forms, but you are conveying a strong grasp of how these forms relate to one another in space, and how they sag against each other. That is the core of the exercise, so I'd say you're doing a pretty good job there. Just put a little more time into planning out each individual form and each contour line, and also make sure you're drawing from the shoulder so as to get as smooth a mark as you can when drawing your sausage forms.

All in all you're doing quite well. I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete, so be sure to keep these points in mind as you move forward onto the next lesson.

Uncomfortable in the post "250 Box Challenge"

2018-12-30 20:22

I can definitely see vast improvement on both the solidity and consistency of your constructions, as well as your linework over all. The first 100 or so were a bit shaky and rough, but as you pushed through, it seemed to come together in a big way. I can also see signs that you've experimented with line weight, and by the end your use of it is much more subtle and nuanced, suggesting a considerable amount of development on that front.

Even your convergences have improved a great deal, though I am going to offer you some advice that, while not overtly addressing issues that are really common in your work, should help you think through the spatial problems.

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.

Anyway, 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"

2018-12-30 02:42

Definitely better! Glad to see them well structured with narrow gaps between them, and your line quality is looking solid. You are exhibiting this issue, but that's not entirely unexpected.

I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete, so go ahead and move onto the 250 box challenge.

Uncomfortable in the post "Lesson 3: Drawing Plants"

2018-12-30 02:38

You're making some good headway, but there are a number of things I want to address.

• In your leaves exercises, I can see some definitely attempts to adhere to the simpler leaf shape from the previous phase of construction, when adding additional edge detail like waves or whatever else. There are some places however (like this leaf) where you're still showing some zigzagging (as described here). From the looks of it, you were making an attempt to be aware of it, but still had some zigzaggy tendencies. Also, when you've got those lines coming off the simpler construction line, try and have it come up a little more smoothly and naturally. In many places I can see where the line turns a pretty sharp corner as it rises off that simpler line, making it feel more sudden and less fluid.

• Also, I'm seeing a lot of these arbitrary little contour/detail lines that seem to be accomplishing the task of neither in a lot of your leaf exercise drawings. If you want to put down detail, then take the time to observe your reference carefully and ensure that the marks you put down reflect the visual information present there. If you're trying to use them as contour lines, then focus on accomplishing the task they're meant for, and try and assess whether or not you need to add additional contour lines, or whether what you've got serves the purpose just fine. I noticed in your later plant constructions, you definitely went overboard with contour lines. Thinking about whether or not you really need to add another is important - consider what you want your mark to accomplish, whether it is the best mark for the job, or if another one might do it better (or if another mark is present that is already doing the job).

• For your branches, one thing I noticed was that you weren't really maintaining consistent widths through those branches - that's pretty important.

• In terms of getting the branches' edge segments to flow into one another, you've got a bit of a mixed bag. A lot of people struggle with this, but I can see places where you're actually getting them to flow together pretty nicely, so you're definitely making strides forward there.

• Last thing about the branches - watch your ellipses' degrees. As explained in this video, the degree you choose to use implies the orientation of that cross-section relative to the viewer. If you've got a lot of huge degree shifts through the length of the branch, it's going to start breaking the illusion you're trying to produce.

• Jumping into plant constructions, I did find that when you have a lot of petals around a flower, you tend to focus much less on how those petals flow through space (like this one). Try and think more about how those petals are going to flow through space, rather than just letting yourself draw shallow arcs over the 2D page. This demonstration goes over this.

• I do very much like the fact that you build your flower pots as solid, compound cylinders, with clear minor axes to which to align the ellipses.

• These constructions were definitely showing a well developing grasp of 3D space as a whole, and the surfaces conveyed a strong sense of how they were flowing through space.

Admittedly I think the last several pages of your homework came out looking quite a bit stronger than the first half, and conveyed much greater solidity and awareness of flow. As such, while that first half is kind of weak, I'm still going to mark this lesson as complete. Feel free to move onto the next lesson.

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

2018-12-30 02:05

Overall you're doing a pretty good job here, though there are a few little hitches and things that I want to address. In your initial ghosted lines exercise, there is some wavering here and there - it's not necessarily the kind of wobbling and stiffness we see from being too careful, but I do think it shows some degree of hesitation. You clearly do seem to be aware of it though, and I can see it improving through the rest of your work.

There is however some visible stiffness to your ellipses though. It looks to me like you might be drawing them more from the wrist than your shoulder, which results in little hitches here and there, and a general inconsistency to your control. When drawing your shoulder, the motion itself is simpler and involves fewer pivots actively rotating/moving. When you do it from your wrist, you've got more going on and as a result, the repetition of the action (when drawing through the ellipse) becomes harder to reproduce, resulting in stiffer lines and more separation between the separate times around the elliptical shape. Some are definitely much better than others, but overall this is something to keep in mind.

Your work on the plotted and rough perspective boxes is pretty solid. Most of your line quality is definitely improving, though keep working on getting those ghosted lines to be smooth, smooth, smooth and eliminate that wavering. The things you noticed when doing the double checking are totally normal - our eyes are pretty shitty at this at first, and require a lot more planning, preparation, and ghosting towards the vanishing point.

In your rotated boxes, your line quality is actually really good here, and I'm pleased with how you've kept the boxes structured and have kept your gaps narrow and consistent in order to avoid as much guesswork as possible. That said, you are demonstrating this issue to a degree, where boxes aside from the center one aren't quite rotated relative to their neighbours, and are more or less running parallel to one another towards the same vanishing points.

Lastly, your organic perspective boxes are coming along well, though they have plenty of room for improvement, especially in keeping your sets of parallel lines consistently converging towards their shared vanishing points. This is entirely normal, as both this and the rotated boxes exercises don't come with the expectation of students being able to demonstrate a strong grasp of either. It's more about exposing students to a different kind of spatial problem they may not have otherwise considered.

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

Uncomfortable in the post "Drawabox 2.0 has been released - a full website rebuild, revisions of lessons up to 7 and 19 new videos"

2018-12-29 04:27

I'll have to go back over them and give them a listen to get a better sense of what you're referring to, but for now all I can say is that I'm sorry you got that impression, as far as the condescension and disinterest goes. I'll have to be more mindful of how much of my exhaustion seeps through. Admittedly I've never had anyone describe by videos as condescending but I don't doubt that my demeanor could be taken that way.

As for doing it on paper though, that's not really a matter of whether or not I "care enough" about my business. It's about what allows me to convey the concepts I'm discussing and produce the videos in the time that I have. Demonstrating all of this work traditionally is not going to convey the information any better, but it is going to take me vastly more time and therefore result in fewer videos being produced, and less content being available for my students. It also isn't likely to increase my bottom line, for the same reason that causes me to put set the production value at a much lower priority.

I have the benefit of not really having my work held to any particular standard beyond the effectiveness of the instruction, given that all the content is free - it'd be an entirely different story if people had to pay for access to the lessons and videos. It means that while there is certainly plenty of room for improvement on many fronts, as long as I deliver the best that I can in regards to the core elements of what Drawabox is, the community appreciates every bit of effort. In that, I am very spoiled.

So I certainly am going to be working on improving the content in the various media it is presented (as much as I dislike producing videos, I'm probably going to invest in having a third party do all my audio/video editing for me, and will gradually reproduce all of the content). As a whole however, I don't really feel the community pressuring me to invest very much in that area - though in general I'm lucky enough to have a community that isn't by any means demanding.

Uncomfortable in the post "Drawabox 2.0 has been released - a full website rebuild, revisions of lessons up to 7 and 19 new videos"

2018-12-29 03:56

You're overthinking this a bit. I literally just mean drawing for fun. Personal design projects, doodling, sketching random things. Whatever the reason you want to learn drawing is, do that. Some people want to learn to draw so they can draw interesting characters, crazy environments or cool vehicles - and most of them don't because they feel like they're not "ready".

The point is about not waiting for yourself to be ready - jump in, and learn to enjoy drawing as an act, not focusing on the end result or growing your skills from it.

Uncomfortable in the post "Drawabox 2.0 has been released - a full website rebuild, revisions of lessons up to 7 and 19 new videos"

2018-12-28 23:20

Gone for now, but they'll be returning as part of more properly developed curricula, one focusing on design and another on illustration, as part of the next phase of updates I want to push out.

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

2018-12-28 22:18

Thanks for letting me know. I'll update both the phrasing in the homework section as well as the 'get critiqued' info box.

Uncomfortable in the post "Lesson 3: Drawing Plants"

2018-12-28 19:07

In most cases, when a student goes this heavy on detail, my critique is usually going to involve telling them to take a step back and focus more on construction. For the most part, that's not really the case here. You're doing a pretty solid job on your construction, and clearly seem to be focusing on getting it down before pushing on into detail - this is great to see. As a result, your constructions both include a very pleasing smattering of balanced texture (it's not ever overwhelming or distracting), as well as solid forms that feel believable and tangible.

On the flipside, this is not the kind of work I'd ever show other students as examples - not because it's not well done, but rather because it would drive them to try too much, too soon.

I do have a few thoughts to offer though:

• Your construction on this leaf is a little off - notice how the top edge is considerably longer than the bottom one? Due to the physical qualities of leaves, you're likely to ever find one that stretches on one side. This suggests to me that you may be fighting against a more natural fold for your leaf, as explained here.

• When tackling leaves with multiple 'arms' (there's one such leaf near the bottom left of your leaves exercise), you can construct each arm as an independent leaf construction of its own, before merging them together, as described here. I also have another demonstration of this process here.

• Your branches exercises definitely show a number of issues that don't seem to be present when applying the technique in your later drawings, which suggests to me that you've identified and learned from those mistakes. This includes getting your segments to flow more smoothly into one another (as explained here), keeping the width of your branch consistent through their length (if you want to add knots, try using this technique instead), and generally working on both the confident execution and control of your ellipses.

• When adding wavy edges to your leaves like on the bottom right of this page and the leaves on this page, try and hold more solidly to the original, simpler leaf edge from the previous phase of construction. Don't zigzag over it, but have your lines rise up from it and return to it. Also, whenever possible, try to work additively - rather than cutting into that simpler leaf shape, try and envision that you're building onto it, or manipulating its edge to rise and fall. Cutting into things requires a lot more spatial awareness of both what is being cut away, and what it is being cut from, and is much easier to mess up. I explain both of these points further in these notes.

So! By and large you're doing a great job, but do have a few things to keep in mind as you move forwards. 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"

2018-12-28 18:46

Your linework is looking great! Your strokes are extremely confident and smooth, and you're demonstrating an excellent balance between focusing on flow and control in your ghosted lines. You're clearly investing your time during the preparation and planning phases, and then executing the marks without hesitation, resulting in smooth, even strokes.

Do note though that you should not be submitting your work for a lesson until all that lesson's work has been completed. Your next submission for lesson 1 must contain all three sections - lines, ellipses and boxes.

Uncomfortable in the post "250 Cylinder Challenge"

2018-12-28 18:43

Congratulations on completing the challenge! You've definitely put a great deal of effort into this challenge, and I can certainly admit that it's not an easy one.

Here are a few things to keep in mind as you move forwards:

• I noticed that when it comes to drawing the edges of your cylinders, your lines tend not to be entirely straight, and I noticed that the lines you use when constructing most of your boxes tend to come out much straighter. Often we can be impacted psychologically by the particular kind of object or form we're drawing, depending on whether it's familiar or not, or whether we're simply not confident in that area - try and focus on the individual mark you're making, rather than what it belongs to. Applying all three stages of the ghosting method helps bring you out of the complexity of what you're trying to construct and lets you focus more on the individual stroke.

• I noticed that later in the set, when applying the corrections/checking to your cylinders in boxes, your red lines on the boxes themselves corresponded more to where you felt those lines should have been, rather than where they were. Instead, I want you to simply extend these lines - this process isn't about finding out what would have been correct, but rather identifying where things went wrong, and identifying the nature of the convergences you've drawn. Focusing these corrections on what the box should have been breaks the relationship between the ellipse and its container.

• Based on the fact that you do appear to have followed the newer instructions of 150 cylinders around arbitrary minor axes and 100 in boxes, but didn't catch a lot of the more specific notes about how to apply correction methods or how to approach constructing the cylinders in boxes, I'm going to guess that you probably took advantage of the early sneak peek for patrons in the discord, but didn't get the more recent information since I didn't update that til closer to the end. I definitely recommend that you go over the notes and video that are there now, as they go into detail as to how you should be testing each box/cylinder pairing to best identify whether your ellipses are circular and your planes are square.

Anyway, congratulations again on completing this challenge. I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete, so feel free to move onto lesson 6.

Uncomfortable in the post "Lesson 7: Drawing Vehicles"

2018-12-28 18:30

I would definitely agree that your vanishing points are too far apart. This is why I linked you to these notes. Basically while we are free to place our vanishing points wherever we like, the distance between perpendicular vanishing points (those that govern sets of lines that are perpendicular to each other) determines the field of view with which we're looking at the whole scene.

If the vanishing points end up being really really far apart, you end up with a smaller field of view (expanding a small section of what's in front of the viewer to the whole picture plane), but if you place them very close together, you get a very wide field of view (trying to cram way too much into the picture plane).

The natural human FOV is about 60 degrees. If the space between the vanishing points is equal to the width of your picture plane, then you're working with an FOV of 90 degrees - so logically, you want the width of your picture plane to be about 2/3 (60/90) of the distance between your vanishing points.

Alternatively, you can think of it as though the space between your vanishing points should be equal to 1.5x the width of the picture plane. You don't have to be perfectly exact, but aim to estimate around there.

Uncomfortable in the post "Drawabox 2.0 has been released - a full website rebuild, revisions of lessons up to 7 and 19 new videos"

2018-12-28 07:26

I'm glad I could help!

Uncomfortable in the post "Lesson 7: Drawing Vehicles"

2018-12-27 22:40

There have been updates, but I generally leave a good deal of leeway for submissions made soon after the changes.

You definitely show a good deal of progress over the set in a number of areas, and I'm overall pretty pleased with the kinds of vehicles you attempted in each study. You started from pretty boxy looking jeeps, which allowed you to focus on some of the core challenges of construction, dealing with cylinders, etc. and steadily made your way up to vehicles with much more nuanced character to them.

While you have improved through this lesson, there are some issues that I'd like to address. The first one that jumps out to me is that your cars, especially this one and this one have a tendency to misalign from the enclosing box. We can see this towards the front of the car, where on both we can see a pretty significant slant from the right side of the vehicle to the left. This comes about because the major lines you've used to establish these cuts do not line up towards the same vanishing point as that side of the enclosing box.

Similarly, looking at the top edge of the right side plane of these constructions' enclosing boxes, you have a tendency to make it run pretty flat and horizontal. Usually you're only going to see a line run parallel to the horizon when it's at the horizon. Alternatively, if the vanishing point were so far away towards infinity that the convergence was negligible, we could see a virtually horizontal line up there, but the bottom edge of that right side plane shows clear convergence towards the horizon line, leading to a significant inconsistency in the construction.

The last point I wanted to raise was in regards to the proportions of your vehicles - they definitely need a lot of work. This is pretty normal, and will improve with practice, but make sure you're doing proportional studies (as shown in the camaro demo). There's a lot going on in cars, they're composed of all kinds of three dimensional curves and getting them right can be very challenging. Doing a proper analysis of the car you want to draw from the front and side is very valuable in pinning down your overall construction.

As to your question, moving onto Proko sounds like a solid plan as a next step. That said, I'm not quite marking this lesson as complete just yet, as I do feel that there are areas that we should work on first.

Here's what I want you to do:

• First, read the notes on placing vanishing points from the new part of lesson 1. You may also want to read the new box material, as it's been completely updated and while you probably understand most of what's written there, it may help clarify some points and wouldn't hurt.

• Then, take a look at the advanced box exercises - they focus on subdivision and drawing lines on the face of a box that converge towards the same vanishing point as that plane.

Once you've reviewed that material and done some of that subdivision exercise, I want you to tackle the 25 wheel challenge. Prior to formalizing it as a proper challenge, I've had a few students go through it, especially when they struggled with some of the specific characteristics of individual vehicles (their various specific curves and proportions), as wheels serve as a sort of microcosm of that same kind of challenge. Those students did appear to benefit from it.

Once you're done that, submit it, and we'll look over it together. Once you're back on Lesson 7:

• I didn't see much application of the technique demonstrated in the constructing to scale video, so I'm not sure if you watched it. It's worth a look, followed by the new mustang demo which applies that technique in much greater detail.

• Do 5 more vehicle drawings - three non-cars and two cars.

Uncomfortable in the post "25 Wheel Challenge"

2018-12-27 22:28

Honestly the only tool I use in it is the ellipse guide preset. You hold down CTRL and get little handles on the visible guide, which allows you to turn the orientation about, adjust the degree, etc. At least that part is pretty straightforward to use.

Uncomfortable in the post "25 Wheel Challenge"

2018-12-27 22:13

Yup. Lazy Nezumi is a life saver.

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

2018-12-27 22:09

Your work is looking pretty good so far. Your super imposed lines are a little too careful (which is pretty normal), but once you get into the ghosted lines exercise you push through each stroke with a lot more confidence, which helps keep them smooth. The ellipses you've added to those planes are also fairly smooth, though I'd recommend trying to make your planes a little larger - refer to the example image included in the updated lesson content for this exercise, and focus especially on how the majority of the page is being used.

Also, make sure you read the instructions more carefully when it comes to the submission requirements. You should only be submitting your work when the whole lesson is complete (in this case, lines, ellipses and boxes).

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

2018-12-27 21:46

Most students do finish up the 250 boxes first. If you absolutely do want to, you can get into lesson 2 but you should only start the form intersections once your box challenge is complete.

Uncomfortable in the post "25 Wheel Challenge"

2018-12-27 21:45

I think the drive shaft stuff is going to be largely dependent on constructing two boxes that are running parallel to one another (sharing the same vanishing points), and then constructing the cylinders inside of them (as explained in the updated cylinder challenge notes). It may be a good fit for that challenge, though I don't necessarily want it to distract from the basic form construction and character elements of that challenge. I'll have to give it some more thought.

Uncomfortable in the post "25 Wheel Challenge"

2018-12-27 00:16

Nothing planned for the foreseeable future. There is definitely a lot of demand for it, but it would ultimately require a great deal of time for me to go back and study the ins and outs of figure drawing to properly determine how I should go about teaching it. This would take me away from the many other responsibilities I currently have, between my full time job, homework critiques and my web comic.

I do have time set aside towards new lessons, but I want to focus on material I am already more confident with, and that also happens to be somewhat lacking when it comes to free and widely available resources. There are plenty of people out there teaching figure drawing. What I hope to cover are topics relating to general design (as applied to props, vehicles, architecture, environment and characters) as well as illustration (composition, storytelling, etc).

While the demand certainly is there, I still firmly believe this is a much better road to go down, both for myself and for the community as a whole.

Uncomfortable in the post "Drawabox 2.0 has been released - a full website rebuild, revisions of lessons up to 7 and 19 new videos"

2018-12-26 17:30

Not at all - the homework for lesson 1 hasn't changed. You should probably go over the lecture notes again though (just so when you incorporate those exercises into the warm-up routine, you're doing so based on the most up-to-date information). Lesson 2's homework has changed slightly - only in the addition of an extra texture exercise, but since you've just started that shouldn't be a problem.

Uncomfortable in the post "Drawabox 2.0 has been released - a full website rebuild, revisions of lessons up to 7 and 19 new videos"

2018-12-26 06:48

I'm glad to hear it! That's definitely one of the core principles I've been aiming to teach.

Uncomfortable in the post "Drawabox 2.0 has been released - a full website rebuild, revisions of lessons up to 7 and 19 new videos"

2018-12-26 06:47

That's honestly a point that's always irked me. I've tried to convey it as part of the beginning of lesson 1 (in a big section titled "read this if you haven't yet" or something to that effect), but people always seemed to miss it. Hopefully presenting it in a separate lesson altogether will force them to see and understand it.

Uncomfortable in the post "Drawabox 2.0 has been released - a full website rebuild, revisions of lessons up to 7 and 19 new videos"

2018-12-26 05:20

Hahaha, I'm glad I could help.

Uncomfortable in the post "Drawabox 2.0 has been released - a full website rebuild, revisions of lessons up to 7 and 19 new videos"

2018-12-26 05:19

The response from the community has definitely made the hard work well worth it!

Uncomfortable in the post "Drawabox 2.0 has been released - a full website rebuild, revisions of lessons up to 7 and 19 new videos"

2018-12-26 05:18

Hahaha, aiming just before the new years resolution rush was definitely the plan. Best of luck!

Uncomfortable in the post "Lesson 5: Drawing Animals"

2018-12-26 03:45

These are definitely looking much, MUCH better! I'm not sure what was happening before, but it seems to be over now. There are still some minor issues in terms of identifying your proportions, but that's not entirely abnormal and will lessen as you continue to practice drawing from observation.

The only other thing I wanted to mention was that your use of the sausage method for legs, while definitely much further along than before, needs a bit of tweaking.

Your sausages tend to end off a little shallower than they should, they don't quite have the full bump that they ought to. You can think of a sausage as being the combination of two spheres connected by a tube. By this analogy, your spheres seem a bit flatter. Because of this you're not getting the full overlap between the segments. This is especially prominent later in the set, like in the hyena.

Also worth mentioning, I think your camel came out really well. The hump can still use a little work in terms of getting it to feel like a separate 3D mass that is being added to this construction (like the organic intersections, as described here) but it's coming along nicely.

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

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

2018-12-26 03:40

In your super imposed lines exercise, you're definitely visibly worried about diverging from the guideline, and as a result you draw more slowly. This in turn causes your hand to course-correct its trajectory as you draw, making little wobbles in the line. It's a pretty normal issue, but as is explained in the ghosting method exercise, what we really want is to produce lines that are executed with confidence - enough so that the brain does not interfere and the motion is driven purely from muscle memory. You can read more about this common issue here.

Now, you do this very well in your ghosted lines. They're smooth, consistent and maintain a singular trajectory without much wobbling or stiffness to them. You're also maintaining pretty good control, and while sometimes you're a little off the mark here and there, it's still very well done. At the end of the day, a confident, smooth line that's a little off is still entirely usable, we just need to adjust things a little to work with it. A wobbly line would instead undermine the solidity of the forms we use it to construct.

Once you get into your planes however, you start to fall back into drawing too carefully, and perhaps not putting as much time into the preparation stages. That's where all your time should go - not in drawing the marks slow-and-steady, but in planning your angle of approach and ghosting through the motion repeatedly.

Moving into the ellipses section, you definitely held to drawing more slowly, and as a result they tended to come out uneven and stiff, not quite rounded as ellipses should be. Once again, you should be applying the ghosting method here (as you should be for every mark you put down), and that means doing all the preparation you feel is needed, but ultimately drawing your ellipses with a confident, persistent pace. I do see that you're mostly drawing through your ellipses (except near the beginning there), but this isn't nearly as useful without the confident pace to keep them smooth.

In your plotted perspective boxes, I noticed that your first page was drawn freehand. I'm glad that you moved onto using a ruler in the following page, but in general make sure you're following the instructions to the letter. Each exercise serves a specific, stated purpose, and adding additional challenges for yourself is only going to distract you from them.

In terms of the spatial challenges of the exercise, your rough perspective boxes are fine, though your line quality is a far cry from section 1. Your lines are wobbling all over, and there's no sign of the confidence and smoothness you demonstrated near the beginning. Also, I'm glad to see that you applied the line extension method to your first page, but be sure to apply that after every completed page to ensure that you're identifying and learning from your mistakes. This exercise is all about estimating, and then identifying where your estimations tend to drift. Also, watch your hatching lines there - try and keep them parallel, consistent and stretched all the way across the plane from edge to edge. They're not a requirement for this exercise, so if you don't want to draw them you don't have to - but anything you decide to put on the page must be drawn conscientiously.

Your rotated boxes were off to a decent start, but doesn't appear to have been completed. The demonstration shows a set with five rows and five columns of boxes. This is a difficult exercise, and it's meant to be - I don't expect it to be done well, as it's more about exposing students to a different kind of spatial problem that they may not have otherwise considered, and simply trying it out carries a lot of value. As such you need only attempt the exercise once, even if it comes out poorly - but make sure you take it all the way to completion.

Lastly, your organic perspective boxes do start to improve on the linework front relative to the rough perspective, though they're not as smooth as I know you are capable of. Aside from that, you're moving in the right direction - it's another one of those purposely difficult exercises that are more about getting you to tackle something a little different to get your gears moving. You definitely do need to work on getting your sets of parallel lines to converge more consistently towards their shared vanishing point, but we'll be working on that.

Before I mark this lesson as complete, I want to see one full attempt at the rotated boxes. Perhaps make a point of rereading the instructions for that exercise before you start. Once that's done, you can submit it and I'll mark the lesson as complete.

At that point I'll want you to move onto the 250 box challenge. Be sure to read the notes carefully as they cover additional techniques that'll help you make the most of the exercise.

Uncomfortable in the post "Drawabox 2.0 has been released - a full website rebuild, revisions of lessons up to 7 and 19 new videos"

2018-12-26 03:17

My pleasure.

Uncomfortable in the post "Drawabox 2.0 has been released - a full website rebuild, revisions of lessons up to 7 and 19 new videos"

2018-12-26 03:16

It's called Orc and Gnome's Mild Adventures.

Uncomfortable in the post "Drawabox 2.0 has been released - a full website rebuild, revisions of lessons up to 7 and 19 new videos"

2018-12-26 00:33

My pleasure.

Uncomfortable in the post "25 Wheel Challenge"

2018-12-26 00:33

I won't be getting into figure drawing, but I will be adding more lessons as part of the next phase of updates. I'll be focusing on two new curricula - design, focusing on concept-art related topics, and illustration (more composition, storytelling, etc.)

Still have to decide how I want to approach those, and it'll be a little bit before I get started as I need to take a break and spend some time on my other projects.

Uncomfortable in the post "Drawabox 2.0 has been released - a full website rebuild, revisions of lessons up to 7 and 19 new videos"

2018-12-26 00:32

Hahaha, I played it a bit close but I was pretty adamant to get it out now because of just that reason. Christmas and New Years tends to be the time people want to give it another stab.

Uncomfortable in the post "Drawabox 2.0 has been released - a full website rebuild, revisions of lessons up to 7 and 19 new videos"

2018-12-25 23:23

<_<

Uncomfortable in the post "Drawabox 2.0 has been released - a full website rebuild, revisions of lessons up to 7 and 19 new videos"

2018-12-25 23:23

Oh damn, those forms look fantastic! It's great to see the hard work paying off.

Uncomfortable in the post "Drawabox 2.0 has been released - a full website rebuild, revisions of lessons up to 7 and 19 new videos"

2018-12-25 23:22

Thanks! Best of luck with the lessons.

Uncomfortable in the post "Drawabox 2.0 has been released - a full website rebuild, revisions of lessons up to 7 and 19 new videos"

2018-12-25 23:22

Hahaha, don't be too hard on yourself. While I encourage you to take advantage of the critiques and to remember that you're not submitting your work to impress me, but rather to make sure you're heading in the right direction, there are plenty of people who've done the same as you. Drawabox has made it pretty far on a number of different groups - those who offer their money and get their worked critiqued, those who offer more money than they need to for the critiques they request, those who intend to eventually submit for critiques and use the pledge to motivate themselves to do so, and those who simply want to support the resources and their continual maintenance. All of these groups of people are what have made this a feasible project, and have kept the pledge tiers low for everyone, and the content entirely free.

Uncomfortable in the post "Drawabox 2.0 has been released - a full website rebuild, revisions of lessons up to 7 and 19 new videos"

2018-12-25 21:52

Honestly, GDPR is wholly overkill and I loathe it. But it does require any website that uses cookies that can land on the computer of a citizen of the european union (I use google analytics and adsense which use cookies) to report their use and preemptively ask permission before actually employing them. Everywhere I've seen, passive permission is not enough.

I cannot express how much it irritates me that a foreign body can muck around in my business and loom with the threat of fines and fees (whether or not they're ever going to act on them).

Uncomfortable in the post "Drawabox 2.0 has been released - a full website rebuild, revisions of lessons up to 7 and 19 new videos"

2018-12-25 20:42

I certainly do, and because I want the general quality of what I'm offering to be decent, I'll be putting some of that money towards it instead of trying to do it all myself.

That said, I am keenly aware of investment vs. returns - and based on the way drawabox works, increasing production value isn't likely to actually yield significant returns, because it's inherently not the same kind of semi-entertainment you find on other parts of youtube. Because of this, I've put more of my time and effort into developing the content on the website and generally ensuring that the resources themselves are as helpful as I can manage, rather than investing in the video quality.

Funnily enough, I don't actually get much traffic from youtube going to my site - it's mostly the other way around.

Uncomfortable in the post "Drawabox 2.0 has been released - a full website rebuild, revisions of lessons up to 7 and 19 new videos"

2018-12-25 20:08

Hahaha, yes - I'm very tired. I hope it was worth it!

Uncomfortable in the post "Drawabox 2.0 has been released - a full website rebuild, revisions of lessons up to 7 and 19 new videos"

2018-12-25 20:08

I felt much the same when I was trying to learn, to the point that I initially thought drawing simply wouldn't be a skill I'd be able to develop to any sort of a professional level. That's more or less why I wanted to push drawabox out, even long before I was remotely equipped to convey this information. It just wasn't really as available as it should have been, and far too many people were being discouraged.

Uncomfortable in the post "Drawabox 2.0 has been released - a full website rebuild, revisions of lessons up to 7 and 19 new videos"

2018-12-25 19:24

Merry Christmas to you too!