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

2018-12-21 18:45

Doesn't look I currently have you listed as being eligible for private homework critiques. That is reserved for those who support drawabox through patreon - if you are a recent patron, then check your inbox as I'll have sent a message to gather your information.

Otherwise, you're welcome to submit your work directly to the subreddit for a critique from the community, or on the discord server. Both of those are entirely free.

Uncomfortable in the post "250 Box Challenge"

2018-12-19 04:59

Apply the line extension method to each box. The clutter doesn't matter much presentation-wise, and while it'll get a little bit tough by the end to identify what's going on with your boxes, it should still be possible with a bit of focus and attention.

As for your other question, you can overshoot your ghosting motion, but not the line itself. Try not to end up with a box that has a bunch of lines sticking out from it (before actually applying the extension method). And yes, as you continue to practice and develop your understanding of space and the nature of convergence of parallel lines when drawn in 2D, the inaccuracies do decrease in intensity. One would imagine they disappear too, though mastery is a far, far off goal for all of us.

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

2018-12-18 22:15

Very nice work! By and large you're doing a pretty good job, but there are a couple little hiccups here and there that I will draw to your attention.

Your lines section is particularly well done - you're executing your strokes with a great deal of confidence, which helps keep your marks smooth and consistent, rather than getting caught up in hesitation and uncertainty, which tends to manifest as wobbling or stiff lines. This is something that mostly carries over into your ellipses, but really only where you draw through those ellipses. You have many attempts where you've tried to nail ellipses in one go (rather than drawing through them two full times before lifting your pen), and as a result you slow down and stiffen up. This is why drawing through your ellipses is so important. You may feel that it becomes something of a crutch, where you have to do that to achieve a smooth ellipse, but that's not the case. As you continue to practice it, you'll get better at keeping those ellipses tight without losing that confidence, and will continually train your muscle memory as you go, ultimately improving your ability to draw ellipses in one go as well.

Moving onto your boxes, your plotted perspective work is good. From the looks of it though, when doing your rough perspective you did not follow the instructions as closely as you should have:

• You used two point perspective instead of one, which split your attention from the challenge of simply lining up your marks with a vanishing point, ultimately diluting the effectiveness of the exercise.

• You didn't go over the work as described here to help identify where your estimation of perspective tends to drift.

You still did a good job, but following the instructions exactly as they're written really is critical because each one has a specific goal, and modifying it may impact how effectively it works towards that goal.

Your rotated boxes are very well done. The rotation could stand to be exaggerated a little further along the outside boxes, but by and large you've done an excellent job of keeping them all structured with narrow gaps between them so as to limit the amount of guesswork required. By and large this exercise is really just meant to expose students to a different kind of spatial problem they may not have considered otherwise, and really isn't something you're expected to be able to nail. That said, you've done a great job.

The organic perspective boxes exercise is very much the same, in that it's more about exposing students to a different kind of challenge and breaking them away from 1/2/3 point perspective systems. Your work here is coming along well, though there is, as expected, more room to be done in getting your sets of parallel lines to converge consistently towards their shared vanishing points.

There is one major issue though - you need to fight back against the urge to immediately reinforce lines upon drawing them. It's something students frequently do early on our of a lack of confidence, but it's a bad habit. Drawing from reflex in this manner breaks away from the principles of the ghosting method, where every mark you put down is planned and prepared beforehand. Keep that in mind as you continue to move forwards.

I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete. I'd like you to move onto the 250 box challenge next. Be sure to read through the notes on the page there and watch the video as well, as they go over a number of techniques that'll help you make the most of the exercise.

Uncomfortable in the post "250 Box Challenge"

2018-12-18 22:03

Oh damn, it certainly was! Overall you've done a pretty great job with the boxes, and you have demonstrated considerable improvement over the set. It is a little unfortunate that you didn't apply that line extension method across the board (I thought that maybe you'd started so long ago that I hadn't talked about the technique but you did use it in a couple of instances). This technique allows you to check how far off your convergences were, and what the nature of your mistakes were, and can be very helpful in getting the most out of the exercise.

I'd recommend going back over your last page, just for your own sake, and extending those lines to see where your boxes can continue to use improvement.

Also worth mentioning, though it's more difficult to relate this to specific boxes without the extensions, but when drawing a line, don't think about the lines with which they share a corner, or the lines with which they share a plane. Instead, think only about the other lines with which the one you're drawing are parallel.

When you do so, think about the angles at which they leave the vanishing point, specifically the angles between them. Those with small angles between them will run roughly parallel to each other by the time they reach the box, which is a very useful thing to keep in mind. I explain this further in these notes: https://i.imgur.com/8PqQLE0.png

Anyway, I'll go ahead and mark this challenge as complete. Feel free to move onto lesson 2, though I would recommend waiting a week til after December 25th. That's when a large rebuild/revision of the website will finally launch, including significant updates to the website content and how it's delivered and organized.

Uncomfortable in the post "250 Box Challenge"

2018-12-18 21:54

Very nice work! Overall you're demonstrating a significant improvement in your constructions. Your convergences gradually become more and more consistent as well, and you're demonstrating the ability to think ahead to lines that haven't yet been drawn.

One thing that will help as you continue to push forward is, as you draw a line and consider all the lines that run parallel to it, think about how they all leave the vanishing point and the angles that sit between them. As mentioned here, when the angles are small when leaving the vanishing point, two given lines will run virtually parallel to one another as they reach the box. This makes for a pretty useful thing to keep in mind while actually drawing those lines.

One other thing to focus on as you continue to move forwards is your use of the ghosting method. It's coming along well, but I am noticing - especially when compared to the red extension lines - that your lines do waver a little. Not in the sort of wobbling we see from hesitation, but just from needing to prepare a little more beforehand.

Anyway, keep up the good work. I'll go ahead and mark this challenge as complete so feel free to move onto lesson 2. I do recommend though that if you can, wait until December 25th before you start - that's when the rebuild/revision of drawabox (a massive update) is going to be released, and the content should improve considerably.

Uncomfortable in the post "250 Box Challenge"

2018-12-18 03:21

If you can, I would recommend waiting a week. There is an extra exercise attached to lesson 2, but in general the lesson material is (hopefully) much more thorough.

Uncomfortable in the post "Lesson 3: Drawing Plants"

2018-12-18 00:08

You're doing a pretty good job overall, with reasonably solid forms and a good application of constructional techniques in most areas. There are a few things I want to address however.

Leaves:

• Your leaves are pretty well done, and demonstrate a fair bit of attention being paid to how these leaves flow through space. The initial flow lines could be drawn with a little more confidence and energy (they do after all represent all the forces being applied to this flat, flowing form) but you're on the right track.

• When constructing leaves with more complex edges, make sure that you adhere to the previous phase of construction (the simple edges that enclose your basic leaf shape). That means that the additional edge detail you're adding should come off that edge and return to it. Currently you have a tendency to zigzag back and forth over that line, which results in you losing the structure you'd set out originally. This explains this concept further.

• Additionally, avoid working subtractively - that is, don't cut back into your forms and shapes if you can help it. Work additively, attaching new forms to your existing one to build up greater complexity.

• When you have a leaf with multiple arms, don't blindly apply the leaf construction method without thinking about why this technique works in certain scenarios. Think about it and consider how it can be applied to each case. When you've got a leaf with a bunch of little arms, you've basically got a leaf made up of a bunch of smaller leaves - so apply the technique to each one and then merge them together, as shown here.

Branches

• Honestly, you're doing pretty well. You've got a few hiccups here and there where your lines split apart, leaving these little tails sticking out where the edges failed to flow smoothly together, but that's normal and should go away with targeted practice of this skill.

I generally found your constructions to be pretty good, and your use of leaf shapes had a much better sense of confident flow here than they did in the leaves exercise. I did find that this thing felt a little flat, mostly because the forms felt a little loose. I am however mainly point it out because I have a little demo I'd done in the past about what I assume is the same kind of object, which you can see here: https://i.imgur.com/IfSg0wm.png

Your mushrooms were quite well done, though I think the contour curves along the stem of the bottom one were a case of quantity over quality. You drew quite a few, but also didn't spend a whole lot of time on each one, resulting in a lot of sub-par contour lines that didn't entirely do their job. One or two very well crafted ones are going to be vastly more effective. Same goes for the cap, where along the top you've loosely implied what ended up looking something like a grid. Don't go throwing these contour lines willy-nilly. Think about how they're being used and consider if it's actually of any value. Remember that we're not sketching here - we're drawing every single mark with planning and purpose behind it.

For the most part, you do a good job of drawing through your forms, though I did feel it necessary to call out the fact that in this page, you didn't. That is to say, where the leaf overlaps the base of your pitcher plant, you allow the form to stop suddenly. These drawings are all exercises to help us understand how these forms exist in space and how they relate to one another. By cutting that form off in this manner, you severely reduce the drawing's effectiveness as a spatial exercise.

Lastly, probably the biggest and only particularly significant issue is the fact that you have a lot of extraneous lines that serve no purpose. I understand that you've drawn them as a vague attempt at texture or detail, but they very clearly correspond to nothing concrete in your actual reference image, and are a sloppy attempt at implying something you've not studied closely. Don't do this. If you want to put texture on your drawing, take the time to study your reference carefully, identify the visual elements that are present and transfer them in an intentional manner, a couple marks at a time, constantly looking back at your reference so as to avoid working from memory.

Otherwise, just don't add them. Focus on construction and form, and put all your effort towards ensuring your constructions are solid and that you have done everything you need to in order to fully believe that the forms you are constructing are more than just drawings on a flat page - that they are real, solid forms that exist in this world you're creating. This is where your time and effort should be invested, not in making half-assed scratches to imply detail. Even if you were to put the additional time into properly conveying the texture of your plants and leaves, this would only come after construction has been given its due.

Anyway, while that last point was harsh, you've still done a fairly good job overall. I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete, so feel free to move onto the next one.

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

2018-12-17 23:41

You really needn't worry about how long this stuff takes, and you should try and stifle any concerns about your satisfaction with that speed. It will only serve to encourage you to rush, instead of continuing to take as much time as you need to perform each task to the best of your ability.

Speed comes with practice and experience, and from having the patience to learn which areas require your focus.

As for other exercises, stick to the ones we've covered - including those you've now completed from lesson 2.

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

2018-12-17 22:01

Nope, not too early. Once you're pledged, you're welcome to submit your work, under the assumption that you won't cancel your pledge before you actually get charged at the beginning of next month.

Anyway, your work is actually quite well done. Through the first two sections, you're demonstrated exceptional confidence behind your linework, without much hesitation at all. This keeps your lines smooth and straight, and helps you maintain even shapes for your ellipses. You're also demonstrating a good deal of control, which comes from exceptional use of the ghosting method. You're clearly taking your time to plan and prepare before each mark.

Now, this is something that visibly diminishes when you get into the boxes exercises. Not by too much, but I can clearly see some hesitation when you draw lines that exist as part of something larger. There are a couple reasons this could be happening, both being pretty normal:

• You may be feeling intimidated by the fact that these lines are no longer quite as arbitrary, causing you to lose confidence.

• You may be speeding up and investing less time into preparing before each mark. Sometimes students will see each section's work as being assigned consistent amounts of time. For example, in the first section, they may see one line as taking one unit of time. In the ellipses, each ellipse may take one unit of time. And when they reach the boxes, they may be trying to complete each box within one unit of time as well - despite it consisting of several different lines, each of which that should be planned and plotted using the ghosting method. This results in sloppier work, because each line is not given the time it requries.

That said, your boxes exercises were still quite well done. One thing you did forget is to go over your completed rough perspective work as described here to help identify where your estimation of perspective tends to drift.

Your rotated boxes are fairly well done. Despite this intentionally being challenging (both the rotated boxes and organic perspective boxes exercises were assigned to expose students to a different kind of spatial problem they may not have otherwise considered) with no expectation of students succeeding here, you've done a great job of keeping your boxes structured, keeping your gaps narrow and consistent and avoiding any unnecessary guesswork.

I am noticing though that while the boxes around the central one are rotated relative to it, those further out to the sides aren't actually rotated much relative to their neighbours. Instead, they more or less share similar vanishing points. As shown here, those vanishing points should be sliding along the horizon line as the boxes rotate. Instead, your boxes look more like this.

Lastly, your organic perspective boxes are about where I'd expect them to be. You're making good progress in thinking through these kinds of spatial problems, though there is still plenty of room for improvement, especially when it comes to getting your sets of parallel lines to converge towards a shared vanishing point.

Also, this is where I see your linework getting the most hesitant. That makes sense, considering that this exercise is generally the most difficult.

Anyway, I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete. I'd like you to move onto the 250 box challenge next. Be sure to read through the notes there and watch the video before starting the work as they go over a couple techniques that'll help you make the most of the exercise.

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

2018-12-17 21:44

Pretty well done overall! I do have a few gripes with some of the deviations you made from the instructions (in terms of incorporating markers and such), but that's fairly minor. Still, stick to the instructions so you don't risk getting distracted from the core focus of each and every exercise.

So, looking at your work, your arrows push through all three dimensions of space quite nicely. Your organic forms with contour ellipses are demonstrating a solid attempt to keep your ellipses snugly between both edges, they're aligned pretty well and I can see an awareness of the shift in degree that occurs through the length of a given form.

One point I do want to raise is that you should try to stick to really, really simple sausage forms that maintain a consistent width through their lengths. No swelling through the middle, no tapering or pinching, etc. Yours are pretty simple, but they're still a touch more complicated than they could be.

Your contour curves are a bit mixed, with some only hooking around correctly along one side, but I can see enough successful attempts that suggest an awareness of this issue, and that you're working at it.

Great work on the dissections - you're clearly experimenting with a great many different textures, and you're not applying any one-size-fits-all techniques. You're observing your reference images carefully and identifying the specific visual elements that are present, and applying techniques that fit each case.

You're doing a good job with your form intersections, keeping the forms fairly consistent within the shared space. I did notice that you're not drawing through all your ellipses though - you need to be doing that for each and every ellipse you draw for these lessons in order to keep them smooth and evenly shaped. Yours here are alright, but there is a hint of stiffness to them, largely because you've tried to nail them in a single go. Draw through them at least two full times before lifting your pen, and draw them using the ghosting method, with a confident execution each time.

On that same note, I noticed that you're generally managing line weight well, except on your spheres where you've tried to reinforce the entirety of the ellipse with extra weight. Doing this, rather than limiting line weight to key local areas (parts of existing lines, never the entire stroke) will cause you to draw more slowly and carefully rather than with the kind of confidence that is required. Doing so will stiffen your line work, and take what was initially fairly smooth and underline the solidity of the form itself.

Lastly your organic intersections are coming along quite well, and convey a well developing grasp of how these forms interact with one another in space.

I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete, but keep the points I've raised in mind. Feel free to move onto lesson 3.

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

2018-12-17 21:18

To be completely honest, I think this is sliding a little backwards relative to where you were previously. The main issue that I'm noticing is that you seem to give the impression that you don't see what you're drawing as being solid, three dimensional forms. Your drawings suggest to me that you're still seeing the marks you're making as a collection of lines on a flat page.

To start with, I want you to give these notes from the development version of the new website. You can poke around some of the exercise descriptions there as well, as they've all been updated to be considerably more thorough. There are still missing images and videos and such though.

Next, I want to ask you a question: have you continued to work on the exercises introduced through lessons 1 and 2 as part of a regular warm up routine? While not perfect, your work on the organic intersections exercise demonstrates a much better grasp of 3D space than what you're showing here. It shows that you grasp how these forms interact with one another, and it shows a belief in the illusion you're creating, whereas your insects are just flat shapes pasted on top of one another.

I am also noticing that your contour lines are falling short at times. For example, looking at the fly, they don't quite hook around as they reach the edge, so they don't give the impression that they stay on the surface of the form and continue onto the other side.

So here's what we're going to do. First, I want to see you do two pages of organic forms with contour curves, followed by two pages of organic intersections. After having done that, I want to see one drawing of a fly. This will give me a general baseline, and we can go forward from there.

Uncomfortable in the post "250 Box Challenge"

2018-12-17 20:50

Nice work! You've definitely progressed a great deal, both in terms of your linework and the confidence behind each stroke, as well as the consistency with which your sets of parallel lines converge towards their shared vanishing points.

There are of course still some little hiccups here and there, and I'd suggest two things as you continue to work on them:

• When drawing a line, sometimes we have a tendency to think about the other lines that it will meet at a given corner, or the other lines that share a plane with it. Instead, think only about the other lines that run parallel to it, including those that haven't yet been drawn. Only focus on how it converges with them, towards their shared vanishing point, and don't let anything else distract you.

• While thinking about these other lines to which your stroke is parallel, think about how they all leave the vanishing point and the angle between them. Any lines that have a very small angle between them as they leave the VP are going to be running virtually parallel to one another by the time they reach the box, so you can take advantage of this relationship. I explain this further in these notes.

Anyway, I'll go ahead and mark this challenge as complete. Feel free to move onto lesson 2.

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

2018-12-17 20:40

You've got a lot of great flow and exploration of all three dimensions of space with your arrow exercises, so that's good. I am noticing however that your linework does seem a little bit more rushed - confidence is important, and you've got that in spades, but it needs to be preceded by the application of the ghosting method. This means taking your time to plan and prepare before executing your mark.

I believe that this overall tendency to rush is something that is apparent through the other exercises as well.

Your contour ellipses are looking decent, but there are clear areas to improve on:

• Keep an eye on the positioning of your ellipses. You actually do this pretty well in a number of these, but there are as many where you don't seem to have put in the same amount of effort to get the ellipses to fit snugly between the edges. This impedes the illusion we're trying to create, that the ellipse is a line that runs directly on the surface of the form. When the ellipse ends up floating inside the form, or if it falls outside of its bounds, then it breaks the illusion that the line actually runs along the surface of the organic form.

• For the most part, your ellipses either all have the same degree, or the change in their degree seems somewhat arbitrary and unintentional. Remember that as you move through the length of an organic form, the angle at which you view a given cross-sectional slice is going to change, revealing either more or less of its face (and therefore causing the degree of the ellipse to increase or decrease accordingly). I explain this further in these notes.

• Your alignments to the central minor axis line tend to be off pretty consistently, which suggests that you may not be paying much attention to that requirement.

Your organic forms with contour curves are pretty hit and miss - as with all the rest of this work, I get the feeling that you're capable of much, much better, but that you've kind of plowed through this lesson focusing more on getting through it.

The dissections exercise is meant to be pretty challenging at this point - really an opportunity for students to be exposed to observational drawing, to struggle through the challenges of taking something they see and transferring it to the page. Rather than expecting to see any success here, it's more about getting students to think about how they're approaching it, and to experiment somewhat.

You do start out doing that, to an extent, but it doesn't last particularly long. I wouldn't actually consider any of these attempts at the exercise complete. Rather, they're quite scattered and half-finished.

Now, your form intersections are coming along reasonably well. There are a couple of instructions you didn't seem to catch from the lesson though:

• Don't use forms that are particularly stretched in one dimension, like longer tubes. Stick to forms that are equilateral, or roughly the same size in all three dimensions, so as to keep complex foreshortening from making an already difficult exercise even more challenging.

• Don't work in small groupings of forms - fill the whole page with a single network of forms that are interconnecting in a variety of ways.

Now that said, you did visibly shift from the rushing you were doing previously. Your linework is confident, but planned, and you're thinking through what you put down. By and large you did a good job, aside from not reading the instructions as closely as you should have.

Lastly, the organic intersections are pretty catastrophic. From the looks of it you're struggling with how the forms relate to one another, in terms of what you're actually trying to accomplish. You've shown in the previous exercise to have a reasonable understanding of 3D space, so I think you've just jumped in without thinking about what you were actually doing in the exercise.

Try and think of this as though you've placed a waterballoon on a flat surface, and then placed another on top of it. Consider how it would sag and slump under its own weight. Then add another, and another, creating a stack - but only moving on from each one once you feel confident in your understanding of how those forms relate to one another.

By and large I am not pleased with the overall theme of rushing - either through the work, or through the instructions. I would like you to do this lesson again, as I am fully aware of the fact that you can do much better than this. My critiques aren't going to be worth much unless I'm reviewing examples of your best, and while I've scraped together what advice I could offer, there's not much more I can do for you unless you're investing the appropriate amount of time and focus into each task to which you set yourself.

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

2018-12-17 05:03

I currently don't have you down as being eligible for private homework critiques (those are reserved for the folks who support drawabox on patreon). If you are a patreon supporter, then check your inbox as I'll have sent you a message asking for your reddit username.

Otherwise, I did notice you submitted your work to the subreddit to have the community review your work. That's one great free option, another is to have the folks over at the discord server give you a review.

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

2018-12-17 04:55

Unfortunately you haven't left me a lot to be critical of. Your work is exceptionally well done, especially through the first two sections. Your lines are drawn with great confidence and without any signs of hesitation, resulting in smooth, even strokes. This carries over into your ellipses as well, where it helps maintain ellipses with even shapes, no wobbling, or no awkward deformations.

Into your boxes section, your plotted perspective is looking fantastic. I do start to see the first hint of an issue in your rough perspective boxes however - it seems to me that you may finally be starting to tire. What suggests this to me is that your line quality gets ever so slightly weaker here, with a few visible waverings in your lines. Not quite the wobbling that comes with hesitation, but perhaps signs that you're not drawing with as much confidence as you could, or perhaps aren't putting as much time into the use of the ghosting method as you ought to before executing your mark.

Your rotated boxes, though a bit uneven, are very well done. It's worth mentioning that this exercise, along with the organic perspective one, was assigned with the intent of exposing students to a different kind of spatial problem that they may not have otherwise considered. I don't expect students to nail this just yet, and while there are a few little hiccups with the angles of your boxes, you've done an excellent job. I'm especially pleased with the fact that you kept your boxes well structured and stuck to fairly narrow, consistent gaps, helping eliminate as much guesswork as possible.

Your organic perspective boxes do tend to show that weaker line work again, especially as you push on through the exercise. I can see places where you've gone over existing lines with another stroke to reinforce it - something you should generally avoid. One mark per line is all you need, and when you find yourself drawing additional ones by reflex, you need to step back and consider whether or not you're applying the ghosting method as conscientiously as you ought to.

There is definitely room for improvement here as far as getting your sets of parallel lines to converge consistently towards their shared vanishing points, but that's entirely normal and expected, and will be the focus of our next step.

I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete. I'd like you to move onto to the 250 box challenge next. Be sure to read through all of the notes on the challenge page and watch the video there as well, as they go over a few techniques that'll help you make the most of the exercise.

Uncomfortable in the post "250 Box Challenge"

2018-12-15 21:40

Oh damnit, I messed up. I screwed up something in my records, and accidentally assigned your reddit username to the wrong patreon, who's since cancelled. My mistake! It should now be fixed.

Uncomfortable in the post "250 Box Challenge"

2018-12-15 20:29

Overall you've done a pretty great job and have shown definite improvement in terms of getting your convergences to behave more consistently. The execution of your lines also gains a greater confidence as you go, which diminishes the slight hesitation I see near the beginning of the set.

With your issue, the key to the problem is a little counter-intuitive. Basically, you're struggling with that back corner. It's a common problem, but the solution comes from not fussing so much over corners themselves. When adding a line to our box construction, there are a few different sets of things we can think about.

1. We can think about all the lines that meet at a given corner we're working from.

2. We can think about all the lines that make a particular face we're constructing.

3. We can think about all the lines that run parallel to the one we're draiwng.

Most people will do #1, at first. Sometimes people progress into #2, which is a little more effective. #3 however is the correct approach - you focus only on maintaining a consistent convergence between all the lines that share a vanishing point (that is, the set of parallel lines). If you achieve that, then the rest of it falls into place. That means thinking not only about the line you're drawing and those you've already drawn - but members of that set of parallel lines that have not yet been drawn as well.

Additionally, it does help to think about how these lines leave the vanishing point itself, and the angles between them as they do so. When you have lines that have a very small angle between them, by the time they reach the box, they'll be running virtually parallel to one another. This is a very helpful relationship that we can take advantage of. I explain this concept further in these notes.

Anyway, you've done well. I'll go ahead and mark this challenge as complete. Feel free to move onto lesson 2.

Uncomfortable in the post "250 Box Challenge"

2018-12-15 20:22

Overall you've done pretty well. Your linework started out a little shaky at first, but by the end became much more confident and consistent, so that's a pretty big win. I'm also pleased that you did apply the line extension method, but I did catch a few on the last page where you extended certain lines in the wrong direction (the red lines in 246, 245, 243, 242, 248, 247, etc). So that's a bit weird. Extending the lines off into the distance is an important part of this exercise, as we're studying how they converge rather than how they diverge.

Anyway, as for your question, as with a lot of the exercises and techniques we get into here, it is necessary to think beyond the technique itself and think to what it implies or represents. This is often something that emerges through repetition - hence the reason we're doing so many of these boxes.

The Y method is less about the Y shape itself, but rather about how it gives us a single line point to each of the three vanishing points of a box. It doesn't have to be configured in a Y, though usually we're working with the corner that is positioned closest to us, and we usually do get a Y. Sometimes however - if we're oriented more towards staring down one of the box's edges (something more similar to 2 point perspective) or down one of the box's faces (something more similar to 1 point perspective), then the angle relationships will no longer match a proper "Y". But the concept of having one arm pointing towards each vanishing point still stands (if you're confused about an arm can point towards the third vanishing point in two point perspective, these notes and their explanation of "vanishing points at infinity" may help - they're from the new lesson/website content that will be released on christmas, which includes a full revision of lesson 1's boxes lecture).

So basically, while the Y itself doesn't survive all permutations of a box, the concept the Y represents still does. This exercise is less about teaching you to employ a certain technique, but rather about using a technique to get you started, and developing your mental model of 3D space along the way.

Anyway, I hope that helps. I'll go ahead and mark this challenge as complete. Feel free to move onto lesson 2.

Uncomfortable in the post "250 Box Challenge"

2018-12-15 20:09

I noticed that you're currently not pledged, so technically not eligible for the private critiques. That said, I did check my records and you'd been pledged for a while, and did pay last month, so I'll go ahead and do the critique anyway. Also the box challenges are generally pretty easy to critique.

You've done some pretty great work here. Early on you were definitely a little less attached to the idea of extending your lines, but admittedly I am glad that you at least did them intermittently, rather than trying them a bit and then giving up for a huge period of time. In doing so, you were periodically checking your work, identifying what you had to keep in mind, and even if it wasn't being applied across the board, it was a much better strategy than it could have been.

I am, admittedly, very pleased with the fact that through your second half you committed to them much more, and it's fair to say that through this challenge you improve a great deal not only with keeping your convergences more and more consistent, but also with the confidence of your linework. By the end your boxes look quite solid, your use of the ghosting method is on point, and your rate of success improves considerably.

One kind of mistake I tend to see here and there in your work is the tendency to have your lines converge in pairs. It's a common issue, and you actually don't do it that often, but basically it occurs when we focus too much on all the lines that define a particular plane that we may be working on, rather than always thinking about all of the lines that are going to run parallel to the one we're drawing. It may seem kind of counterintuitive, but when you go to draw a given stroke, instead of thinking about the corners at which it meets other lines, or the plane to which it belongs, you'll achieve the greatest success if you focus on all the other lines with which it shares a vanishing point - including those that haven't yet been drawn.

It can also help to think about how these lines leave the vanishing point, and the angles between them. Those with very small angles are going to be virtually parallel by the time they reach the box itself, so this can be pretty helpful to consider. I explain it further here, though I get the feeling that based on your work, you do already understand this concept.

Anyway, I'll go ahead and mark this challenge as complete. You should be good to move onto lesson 2.

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

2018-12-15 19:57

I'll start out by saying that your last couple of pages are in considerable ways, redeeming - the grasshopper especially. It depicts a well developed grasp of how the forms you've used sit in space and relate to one another, and also present an excellent example of how the mentality of construction is meant to be applied - starting from simple, yet entirely solid forms, and building upon them to maintain that solidity throughout while also building up greater and greater complexity.

Additionally, it's very clear that you've done a great deal of observation, studying and note taking on your subject matter throughout this work. You've approached all of your drawing here in a very analytical fashion, and have been mindful of your goals.

There are however a number of issues, especially early on.

• For your first ten pages, and in various places after that, you rely quite heavily on roughing in an underdrawing, then going back over it with a sort of "clean-up" pass (my guess is with a different pen entirely). This is something I talk about back in lesson 2, in the form intersections video. While this is an effective approach in general, it is not something I want you to do in my lessons. I don't want you to sketch, or put any mark down that you are not fully committed to. This builds too much of a dichotomy between the "final drawing" and the construction, and breeds a lack of equal respect for those construction lines, which are at the very least equal to whatever is considered the "final drawing", if not far, FAR more important. Every mark we put down at any point must be weighed - we need to think about whether or not it contributes in a meaningful way to our understanding of the forms we're creating, how they sit in space or how they relate to one another, or whether it communicates some key piece of information to the viewer about the nature of what's being drawn (like texture or detail). If it doesn't, or if another mark would accomplish that specific task better, then we don't draw the mark. On the other hand, if it does, then we draw it with full confidence, not attempting to hide it or keep it faint. Then, when we come back later to decide whether or not we want to add line weight to it, if we do want to add line weight, we do so to specific limited areas - not the whole line. Attempting to do it to the whole mark will result in drawing slowly and stiffly, wobbly all the way. Instead, we draw with the same confident use of the ghosting method.

• In a lot of your drawings, I'm seeing ample use of contour lines in places where frankly I think they play a valuable role. I do think you should definitely be putting more thought and planning into them however - they tend to come out vastly more shallow, undermining the purpose they're meant to serve in the drawing. Your contour curves on your grasshopper, especially along the various parts of the body, were much better.

• When drawing legs, an approach I generally recommend is using simple sausage forms to create the various segments, allowing them to overlap/intersect, and then placing only a single contour curve at each joint with none through the sausage's length. Sausages are great because they allow us to achieve a smooth, gestural rhythm, while maintaining solidity. I demonstrate this further here.

• Also worth mentioning, your use of hatching. In general I think you're waaay overusing it, and you're kind of sloppy with it as well. In general, just because you may think something should be filled in doesn't mean that there is any actual reason that this is required, or even a good idea. I have a few examples. In this wasp, you made the decision to fill in the shadow. Frankly, not the worst call - a nice black shadow may have made it pop, and you did the right thing in drawing an outline beforehand. Filling it with sloppy crosshatching didn't really do you any favours though - you could have just as well left it empty if you didn't have the tools on hand to fill it in cleanly, but instead the hatching not only reduced the overall presentation of the drawing, but it also created a focal area (through the use of greater contrasting light areas and darker strokes) where you didn't mean for there to be one. In this dragon fly, you added hatching to the abdomen to accentuate its roundedness. What you were doing here was adding form shading - something we don't actually ever do as part of drawabox (I find it serves as a crutch that distracts students from learning how to convey form through constructional techniques instead). The bigger issue though is that every mark you put on the surface of a form is going to serve as a contour line of some sort. It sits on that surface, and therefore it describes it. These little marks are quite straight, and instead flatten that form out. Generally if you're going to apply any kind of form shading to a tube-like form, it's generally better to do it length-wise. Lastly, in all your drawings of this beetle, you always fill in its little beady black eyes. There's no logical reason to do this though, if you think about it. We're treating the rest of the object as though it's a single flat, matte colour - taking into consideration the local colour of this element is entirely out of the ordinary. In general, ignore local colour, and focus on form alone.

Now, I do want you to do 3 more insect drawings - more in the vein of your grasshopper, following the drawabox approach to drawing that I've described here (this demo also helps characterize it). I'm confident you're capable of it, but I do want to see a little more before I mark this lesson as complete.

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

2018-12-15 19:16

From what I can see, your work is generally very well done, demonstrated by smooth, confident linework with no real hesitation or wobbling in your strokes. Your ellipses are generally even and remarkably tight (though in a few cases it does look like you're drawing through them quite a lot - I'd stick to 2 or 3 times, leaning more towards 2 full rounds before lifting your pen). Your use of the ghosting method is apparent throughout, as you're clearly thinking through and planning each mark you put down before executing it, properly separating the process of mark making into its key parts.

In addition to all of this, you're remarkably thorough - while I prefer students to stick to the recommended number of pages (people can really get away from themselves when they start focusing more on their own satisfaction with the results and can fall into grinding which is not a great use of one's time at this point), I do keep an eye on just how the pages are used. While you've definitely done much more than the required amount, you also used the hell out of each page, and that's great to see, especially when it comes to your plotted and rough perspective boxes exercises.

You've also shown considerable improvement on the rotated boxes exercise, where you were doing pretty well from the start, but your overall confidence working without clear vanishing points in this manner has developed a great deal. Personally I think the central one is likely the best, probably due to the proportions for your boxes.

Lastly, your organic perspective boxes are about where I'd expect them to be, or perhaps a little head of that. You're demonstrating a well developing grasp of 3D space, and I'm pleased with your tendency to maintain a fairly consistent sense of scale by avoiding overly dramatic foreshortening across all the boxes in a given scene. There is room to continue improving on keeping your sets of parallel lines converging towards their shared vanishing points consistently.

Now, all of this aside, there is one glaring issue that I hope will be avoided in future submissions - the images you've uploaded are unbelievably small, and it's made for a particularly challenging review. If there's some technical limitation (I've had students who were stationed out of the country for work and relying on shoddy internet with throttling and bandwidth caps), then I can understand that, though in such a scenario I'd consider how the space is being used. Posting just the recommended number of pages and allowing yourself to zoom in closer to them would definitely help a great deal.

Anyway, I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete. I'd like you to move onto the 250 box challenge next. Be sure to read through all of the notes on the challenge page and watch the video there, as they go over a number of techniques that'll help you make the most of the exercise.

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

2018-12-15 19:05

Honestly, your work here is about as close to perfect as I'd expect it to be. That doesn't mean there isn't always room for growth and improvement, but as far as every point I was hoping to see students hit, you've nailed them all.

Your lines are confident and smooth, executed with no hesitation and ample prior planning and thought. Your ellipses are much the same, able to maintain a smooth, even shape. Your boxes convey a strong grasp of 3D space and how they can be manipulated within it freely. Most importantly though, you've followed all my instructions to the letter. That is perhaps the most challenging thing for students, as there is so much written there that it can be overwhelming (though an imminent rebuild of the website, to be released on December 25th, will hopefully help though not outright solve that problem).

The areas that will improve with continued practice are all entirely normal expected. Things like controlling the degree to which your ghosted lines overshoot their target, tightening up your ellipses as you draw through them so the multiple passes come closer together and merge into a single visible stroke, and so on.

Jumping forward, there are two exercises that are intentionally meant to be more challenging than students can usually manage - the rotated and organic perspective boxes exercises. They're more about exposing students to a different kind of spatial problem that they may not have otherwise considered, and to break them away from the overly rigid chains of the all-too standard one/two/three point perspective systems.

That said, you did a fantastic job with the rotated boxes, keeping the set well structured, with narrow gaps between them in order to limit guesswork, and covered a full range of rotation on each axis. Your organic perspective boxes are coming along well too, though they're more in line with what I'd expect to see. A great start working with arbitrarily rotated forms, but there's still work to be done in keeping your sets of parallel lines converging towards their shared vanishing points. Again, that's normal and expected.

I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete. I'd like you to move onto the 250 box challenge next. You can read through the notes there and watch the video, as I'm sure you will. They go over a number of techniques that'll help you make the most of the exercise.

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

2018-12-15 18:56

Prior to looking at your work, the most useful piece of advice I can give you is to cut that self-effacing shit out, at least when you're submitting something you've put time and effort into. We do that to put up the illusion of modesty, but in truth it serves as a shield to ready ourselves for criticism. In turn, it also makes that criticism less effective.

When you submit work to someone, do so with confidence - even if you have to fake it. If you've invested time and real effort into it, then it's worth something regardless of its quality.

So there are a number of things to work on here, and I'll break it down by exercise:

• Your arrows aren't bad - you're clearly making an attempt to scale the far end to be smaller than the closer end, creating a bit of a perspective shift. To push this further, also try compressing the space in between the flowing lengths of the arrow - everything gets smaller as things move farther away, including the space in between objects.

• Your organic forms with contour ellipses are looking okay, but there are a couple things to keep an eye on. Firstly, your ellipses are pretty close to being aligned correctly, generally speaking, but there is some deviation here and there. Definitely continue to work on that. Additionally, I'm noticing that your ellipses have a pretty limited shift in degree, if any at all, which results in them looking a little stiff. As we move through the length of an organic form, the angle at which we see each cross-section changes slightly, and as we look at cross-sections further from us, we'll be able to see more and more of the face of that circular cut. As such, the degree of those ellipses is going to shift through the length of the form. Try and replicate this in order to make it feel more natural. I explain this a little further here.

• In your organic forms with contour curves, I noticed that you employed a different tactic when drawing your forms. From the looks of it, you drew a line underneath, and then went over it with a heavier mark (possibly with a different pen?). I'm not really sure why you've decided to approach it this way, but in general I want you to stay away from replacing the entirety of a line with a heavier stroke, even if you're trying to add line weight. There's no need for line weight in this exercise, but when you do add it, it should only be to limited sections of an existing line, rather than the whole thing. It should also be added with the same pen (to avoid overly heavy, garish looking marks), and it should be drawn with the same kind of confidence you used when drawing the initial mark.

• I'm also noticing that your contour curves tend to feel a bit stiff, in ways that suggest that you may not be drawing them as confidently as you could, and perhaps not applying the ghosting method as stringently as you ought to. The curvature is actually pretty decent, but what catches my eye is the fact that your lines stop very abruptly, without the natural sort of tapering that occurs as we lift our pen off. This tapering gives us the impression of a more natural, flowing line, whereas having the line stop suddenly without it is going to look much more stiff. This tends to happen when a student is drawing a mark more slowly.

• Also worth mentioning, in both organic forms exercises (though much moreso in the contour curve one) the forms you're drawing have a little more complexity than they perhaps should, and it's making the exercise more difficult than it needs to be. Stick to simple sausage forms that maintain a consistent width through their length, with no pinching or wobbling in between. This will help you focus your attention on the challenge of applying believable contour lines.

• Your dissections are a good start, and that's really all I'm looking for here. I want to get students to start thinking about observing reference and working on how they approach that. Your work does suggest to me that in certain places you have a tendency more to work from memory (that is, looking at your reference for a while, trying to record it all to your memory and then drawing without looking at it for a prolonged period of time). Try to change those habits into looking at your reference, identifying the visual elements and how they're arranged, and then picking one or two marks to put down that specifically reflect something present in that reference, and then going back to studying your reference. Spend most of your time observing, and only a small fraction of it actually drawing.

• Also something helpful - when drawing texture, think of it as though instead of drawing lines that fully enclose all the tiny forms present there, approach it by implying their presence by capturing the shadows they cast. So when you have your chips of paint, for instance, there you've very clearly enclosed each individual piece. Instead, you could capture the shadow it casts - leaving certain sides open and allowing them to bleed into one another. This allows you to control the density of the texture you're creating, rather than having such hard borders between them. Shadows consist of shapes rather than limited lines, and they can be merged with one another to create larger compound shapes, or they can be blasted away with direct light to create a sort of lost-and-found-edge effect where most of the texture in a space is left blank.

• Your form intersections certainly do improve over the set, though there is room for improvement that'll come from continuing to practice with it. Additionally, and perhaps more importantly, there are signs that you didn't follow the instructions as closely as you could have. Specifically, in the instructions I mentioned you should stay away from forms that are overly stretched (like long cylinders and such) because they bring too much foreshortening in to complicate an already difficult exercise. You don't seem to have noticed that, as you used quite a few of them.

• Your organic intersections are alright - you are demonstrating a growing understanding of how these forms slump and sag over one another, though your use of contour curves here and the forms themselves generally don't give a strong illusion of solidity. The most important point here is to stick to simple sausage forms that maintain a consistent width through their lengths, rather than undermining that solidity by making them more complex with little pinchy areas or areas that swell slightly. I do suspect that much of this was unintentional, perhaps due to less than confident linework.

• Also worth mentioning, when you're drawing shadows, remember that a shadow is not connected or pinned to the object that casts it. It is not an extension of line weight and does not adhere to the form in the same way. Instead it is projected onto a surface below it - no matter how far that surface is - and it wraps itself along it.

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

• One more page of arrows

• One more page of organic forms with contour ellipses

• One more page of organic forms with contour curves

• One more page of form intersections

Be sure to apply what I have listed above. I'd recommend reading over my critique for a specific exercise as well as the full instructions for that exercise immediately before attempting it again.

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

2018-12-15 18:25

By and large you've done an excellent job here. Your arrows flow confidently through all three dimensions of space, your organic forms convey a strong sense of volume, your dissections explore a number of textures and their application to generic surfaces in a way that is specific to each case rather than more general and one-size-fits-all, your form intersections though a bit weaker at first end up looking much more solid and convey a strong sense of how each form sits in space by the end, and your organic intersections demonstrate a well developing grasp of how these forms relate to one another.

There's just a few things that I want to bring to your attention, most fairly minor:

• On your organic forms with contour ellipses, I can see that you're pushing yourself to keep those ellipses pinched snugly between the edges of each organic form. Keep this up - there are some places where you're slipping a little, and it does weaken the illusion we're creating, but I'm pleased that you are conveying a strong intent (rather than not being aware of the issue) and are clearly working at it.

• For your contour curves, I noticed that your tend to maintain a single width throughout. It's not really a question of line weight here, but rather that I'm not seeing the characteristic tapering that usually occurs when someone touches down on the page or lifts off, and as a result the lines do feel a little stiff. This may be a sign that you're drawing a little too slowly to allow for that tapering to be visible (your curves also are a bit stiff which adds credence to this hypothesis), or that you're pressing too hard too soon. The tapering is pretty helpful in making strokes feel more natural and lively.

*Your dissections are honestly pretty fantastic, and while I can see what you mean by leaning a bit hard on stippling, it's far from the worst thing you could be doing. I tend to keep an eye out for students using hatching all over, which tends to look far worse. That said, try and think about what you're trying to represent with those little stipplings and vary how you draw them each time to correspond with your goal. For example, if you're trying to capture little pits and pores in a surface, you may want to draw small crescents instead (because when light hits such a thing, it's likely to light one side and cast a shadow along the other).

• I noticed in your first attempt at the form intersections exercise, you did use a lot more stretched forms, though the instructions specifically mentioned that you shouldn't as they add needless complexity to an already difficult exercise. I am pleased however that you seem to have corrected this during your following attempt, and the results came out much better for it.

Anyway, I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete. Keep up the great work and feel free to move onto lesson3.

Uncomfortable in the post "Lesson 3: Drawing Plants"

2018-12-14 18:16

You've got some good stuff here, but there are a number of things I think I can say that should help in a few areas.

In your leaves section, they're generally pretty well done, but there are a couple adjustments I'd make to your approach:

• Your linework stiffens up at times with hesitation - it's really important, especially when nailing that flow line, that you draw it with the confidence of the energy the line represents. It captures the forces that drive this leaf - air currents, wind, etc - and serves as a representation of them on the page. As such, you need to really push that stroke out and maintain a smooth, consistent trajectory.

• When adding edge detail, wherever possible, work additively rather than subtractively. As shown here, don't zigzag your lines (draw individual strokes with singular trajectories, don't change the trajectory mid-stroke to create a hard corner) and don't cut back into your leaf shape. Think of it more as though you're either building onto it (with separate lines coming off that edge and returning to it) or like you're lifting sections of that shape up to create a ripple. Neither of these cut into the shape, even if the result ends up sitting a little inside the original silhouette.

• For multi-armed leaves like the maple leaf you drew, construct each arm with the leaf construction method, as shown here, then merge them together. Think more critically about what the method allows you to accomplish and don't fall into the trap of thinking "it's the leaf method, so we apply this to all leaves no matter how complex they are". It's a technique used to convey a more gestural, flatter form that flows through space - sometimes leaves are made up of several of these.

Your branches are coming along well, and you're doing a pretty good job of getting your segments to blend together into a single continuous stroke. There are some hiccups here and there but that's entirely normal and expected. You'll continue to improve with this the more you use the technique.

In that first sunflower attempt, you've got some nice, confident flow to those petals. One thing I am noticing though is that you're going beyond the initial bounding ellipse you drew, treating it more like a loose suggestion. When applying the constructional method, I want you to treat every single phase of construction like a decision being made - in this case, how far out you want your petals to go. Once made, you should not contradict that decision if you can help it. Yes, the leaves don't actually go out to a single radius, but construction itself is an exercise in building up your spatial reasoning, and so our goal isn't to create a 100% faithful reproduction of the image. If you go on to contradict that initial decision, you'll end up with many conflicting answers to individual questions, which in turn will weaken the overall illusion of solidity. One question, one answer.

On your second stage of the sunflower, you definitely dived hard into attacking the texture of its central area. Experimentation is great, but there are a couple things I want to mention about how you went about it:

• You saw something seemingly chaotic, so you attacked it by applying similarly chaotic techniques. Cross-hatching, semi-random strokes, etc. Keep this in mind: no texture is ever going to be random. There are always rhythms, patterns and such that govern each texture, and it is a matter of taking more time to observe what kind of visual elements and microforms are present that give that texture a particular kind of appearance, and how they're arranged, and the flows they follow. In general, do not use hatching - it's a sort of "catch-all" shortcut that students will use when they don't take the time to identify what is actually present there.

• Once you've identified the actual forms present within a texture, what you want to do is not actually draw each individual form as you might for an overall construction - instead we imply their presence by drawing the impact they have on what sits around them. Specifically, we draw their cast shadows. Cast shadows are flexible - they're not lines, they can expand into entire shapes, and these shapes can merge with one another to create large, solid areas of black that do not attract the eye any more than they need to. They can also be blasted away with direct light to create lost-and-found edges, allowing us to transition from a solid black area, to a middle ground of texture, to a blank rest area. We remain in full control of where we apply our texture, using it as a tool to communicate certain properties of what we're drawing, rather than being beholden to the idea of having to match the photograph. I'd recommend looking at the notes on the 25 texture challenge for more information on this, though on December 25th the release of the rebuilt drawabox website and all of the new lesson content will go over this in much greater detail as well.

The last point I want to make is that as you push on through your plant drawings, you have a tendency to lay down loose, sketchy lines before committing. This is fundamentally against the techniques and mentality that drawabox is trying to instill, and it's something you need to pull back on.

Every single mark you put down should be drawn with the ghosting method and with the full confidence of a mark you intend to be seen. Before making such a mark, consider what the purpose of the line you're about to put down is, and whether or not another line might accomplish this task more effectively, or if another one is already doing so. If it contributes in a meaningful way to your construction, your understanding of space or form or the relationships between forms, or if it communicates an integral piece of information to the viewer, then draw it. Otherwise, don't. Don't sketch roughly and think on the page.

Following these principles will help you develop your linework to be more confident and concise, and will improve your line economy as well. It's not a matter of being more precious with your lines - simply of thinking about what you're putting down before you do, being aware of what you're trying to achieve with each stroke, and ultimately executing that mark with full confidence and no hesitation.

Before I mark this lesson as complete, I'd like you to do 4 more pages of plant drawings, applying what I've mentioned here.

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

2018-12-14 02:41

You've got some good stuff here, but there are a few things I want to draw your attention to throughout your work that are perhaps going down the wrong path in a few ways. I figure this is better done visually however, so I've done some redlining for you: https://i.imgur.com/hce1Qxj.png

So the main things that I noticed were:

• Above all else, you keep jumping between applying construction properly, starting out real simple and working your way up in successive passes to greater complexity. We try to start every construction with forms that will give the impression of being solid without any further development. Balls, simple sausage forms, etc. Then we build on these to reach greater levels of that complexity.

• The degrees on your contour ellipses tend to be off - be more mindful of what the degree implies about the cross-section it represents. A really wide degree implies that the cross-section is facing the viewer. A narrow degree implies that the form is flowing across the viewer's field of view, with the cross-section facing away from them.

• Every form you draw should be complete and enclosed. Don't stop a line where it gets hidden by another form - treat it as though we have xray vision. Drawing through your forms in this manner will help you better grasp how everything sits in 3D space, and how these forms relate to one another.

• Try getting used to drawing your legs with simple sausage forms as segments, as demonstrated here.

I'd like you to do another 4 pages of insect drawings. Draw them big (you can do one drawing per page), and apply what I've mentioned above. This lesson is not about drawing insects, it's about applying the constructional methodology to insects - so focus on construction all over. It's clear that you can do it because you have a few cases here and there that are really well done.

Also, you may have seen this already, but if not - check out this demo. Notice how I block everything out as an individual, complete form, and don't worry about anything that gets overlapped? Try and approach everything in that manner.

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

2018-12-13 22:23

In your lines section, you're demonstrating a good thing - a great deal of confidence behind your linework. At the same time though, you're leaning a bit too hard on that, and aren't taking the time to plan and prepare enough before each stroke to ensure that the confidence is directed effectively. As a result, your linework has a tendency to be a touch sloppy at times.

This gets better when you get into the ghosting method, but this is a technique you definitely need to continue to practice. It allows you to draw with that lovely confidence, but the time needs to be invested beforehand in order to keep the line smooth as well as accurate. Right now you're making good progress, but you'll want to work on minimizing how much you overshoot your end points when ghosting.

The same applies to your ellipses - the ghosting method can and should be used here as well. You are doing a good job of keeping your ellipses mostly even and smooth, but they get a little too unravelled and start to loose their shape. It's great that you're drawing through your ellipses as instructed, but keep working towards tightening them up and limit yourself to drawing around the ellipse two full times before lifting your pen - no more (and no less) than that.

This unravelling is especially prominent in your funnels, where I think you may have gotten ahead of yourself, and likely rushed through the exercise somewhat. The focus is not on completing the exercise, but rather on doing every single part to the absolute best of your current ability. What you're showing me needs to be your best, otherwise my advice isn't going to be as relevant, and therefore won't be as helpful.

Your plotted perspective is solid. Your rough perspective is reasonably well done too, though there are two things missing that were mentioned in the instructions:

• You're not framing your compositions (that is, you should be starting with a clean rectangle drawn with a ruler, and then drawing your boxes inside of it as though it were a picture frame).

• You're not going over your boxes as described here. This will help you identify where your estimation of perspective tends to drift.

You did a pretty good job with your rotated boxes - I'm glad that you kept the boxes fairly structured with narrow gaps between them. You also covered the rotation pretty well. The only issue I can see is that you accidentally made the boxes immediately around the center much longer than they should have been, but that's not an uncommon mistake, and it's generally one that's hard to fix once you've made it.

Lastly, your organic perspective boxes are pretty loose and haphazard, especially when it comes to line quality. The box constructions themselves aren't a big issue (do need to work on keeping your sets of parallel lines converging towards their shared vanishing points but that's normal and expected), but the boxes won't feel solid if your lines aren't smooth and straight. As such, it's extremely important that you use the ghosting method here, and really with every mark you put down.

I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete. I'd like you to move onto the 250 box challenge next. Be sure to read through all of the notes on the challenge page and watch the video there as well. They go over a number of techniques that'll help you make the most of the exercise.

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

2018-12-13 22:09

Your lines do start out a little wobbly and stiff in the first exercise, though that's fairly normal. Once you hit the ghosting method the line quality definitely improves a fair bit and you show the willingness to push through with a confident pace, which in turn keeps your lines fairly smooth. You're also keeping this up through the boxes section, so that's solid. There's certainly room to improve, but you're hitting the major notes so far.

Your ellipses are alright, though here and there I can see signs of hesitation where you slow down and that wobbling/stiffness comes in again. Be sure to apply the ghosting method here as well and to get used to executing the marks with the same kind of confident persistence you would with straight marks. Any opportunity to avoid a mistake is over as soon as your pen touches the page, so all you can do is push through and complete the mark.

Your plotted perspective is looking good. Your rough perspective is also fairly well done, though don't forget to go over the completed work as described here to help identify where your estimation of perspective tends to drift.

Your rotated boxes are a good start, and I'm pleased with how you're keeping your boxes structured with narrow gaps between them, which helps to limit the need for unnecessary guesswork. You are however struggling with getting the boxes to rotate relative to one another. This is normal, as this exercise is more about exposing students to a different kind of spatial problem they may not have otherwise considered, but it is something we'll work on. Towards the right side of your set you're doing a somewhat better job, though the rotations are still quite subtle and need to be pushed farther. On the left side however, your rotations are going in the wrong direction. As you move left from the central box, you rotate well for that first step, but the box following that seems to attempt to reverse that rotation. As shown here, watch how the vanishing points slide along the horizon as the box rotates. One VP gets closer to the box and the other slides farther and farther away. Similarly, the plane towards the VP that's getting closer turns away from us, making less of it visible, while the plane on the other side becomes more and more visible.

Your organic perspective boxes are coming along well, and you're demonstrating good line quality. There's still work to be done with keeping your sets of parallel lines converging towards their shared vanishing points in a consistent manner, but again - that's expected, and we'll be working on that next.

I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete. I'd like you to move onto the 250 box challenge next. Be sure to read through all of the notes and watch the video there as they go over a number of techniques that'll help you make the most of this exercise.

Uncomfortable in the post "Lesson 3: Drawing Plants"

2018-12-12 21:35

Overall it's a pretty good start. There's definitely areas to improve, but you're making solid efforts to employ constructional techniques and that's really what I'm focusing on right now.

• So on the point about the crinkly edges of your leaves, one thing that helps is to always work additively and really adhere to the lines you've put down in your previous stage of construction. As shown here, each "wrinkle" is drawn separately, rising off the original edge and falling back to it. Don't zig-zag or go in and out of your leaf shape. In general, if you can help it, don't cut back into the form and lean towards building onto it or treating it as though you're taking that surface and lifting it up or down.

• Your branches are moving in the right direction, but keep pushing the flow of your line segments. Right now they're a bit stiff, and you'll need more practice to get them to overlap one another more. You can still see those little bits sticking out at the end of each segment.

• In some of your flower petals, I can see places where you've either neglected to draw the flow line altogether, or haven't quite captured the sort of driving force that should be pushing behind them. Try and keep in mind that the flow line really represents the forces and energy that pushes the leaf or petal - usually airflow and wind. Give it a lot of confidence - often i'll draw a little arrow head at the end of it to remind myself that this flow line is symbolic of a moving force with no clear start or end, so I can then carry that into the enclosing shape I draw next.

• This page definitely has a lot of subtractive stuff on the leaf edges, and a great deal of zigzagging. Just pointing it out to make the previous point about it a little more strongly. Here's another demo of how I add some spikier leaf edge detail.

• On that same page, it is worth mentioning that the strawberries also tend to be a little less solid because of how you've cut back into them. Cutting and working subtractively isn't inherently bad, but it's a lot easier to do it while thinking in 2D, rather than how you're solving those same problems in three dimensions. Cutting back without thinking of how this cut exists itself as a form in relation to the larger form you're cutting from is going to really undermine the illusion you're trying to create.

I think overall you are demonstrating construction well, there's just plenty of room for growth, and room to continue pushing yourself in terms of the confidence of your linework. I am going to go ahead and mark this lesson as complete, as you can tackle this stuff just as well in the next lesson. So feel free to move on.

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

2018-12-12 21:09

It probably wouldn't be a bad idea to go over that exercise again and make a point to apply the ghosting method. You don't seem to be using it in your organic perspective boxes.

Also, if you're posting for critique, I don't currently have you down as being eligible for the private ones. If you are a current patreon supporter, check your inbox as I'll have sent you a message when you pledged. If not, you're welcome to submit it directly to the subreddit or on the discord server where the community can help you out.

Uncomfortable in the post "Lesson 5: Drawing Animals"

2018-12-11 20:56

You're certainly showing some growth here, but there are still a few things I want to point out and clarify.

• On the wolf, you did a pretty great job applying the demonstration. Just a couple little hitches here - the ribcage could have stood to be a bit larger, and the head ended up being a bit too small. Proportional issues like this are pretty normal, but it is something to keep in mind. Always remember that the ribcage is generally going to be half the torso length, and the pelvis is usually about a quarter, leaving another quarter of a gap between them. I really did like the contour ellipses you used to establish the intersection between the neck and torso though, and for the most part you applied the sausage leg segment technique quite well.

• For the head studies on the next page, there are a couple issues. First off, watch the curvature of the 'center line' you're drawing on your initial cranial ball. If we were to extend it to a full contour ellipse, its degree would suggest that it was turned away from the viewer, and we'd be seeing too much of its edge and not enough of its face to really make sense in this configuration. This results in the muzzle of both heads being a little off the "true" center. Also, when you get into details like the horns and teeth, you start to flatten out and don't put enough time/focus into understanding how these forms are actually meant to connect to the rest of the construction - this stands more for the horns. You can't draw them as flat shapes, as this will undermine the rest of your construction's dimensionality. Lastly, watch those eye sockets - take a look at some animal and human skulls and study their shapes, and also look more closely at those in the demos I provided. You've often got yours peaking somewhere along the middle of the top edge, and that's not generally something that is present.

• There are two major issues that stand out with your second wolf drawing. Firstly, it definitely appears to me that it is way too small. As such, you're really making this way more difficult than it needs to be by robbing yourself of the room to really work through these spatial problems effectively. Secondly, you've gone back to using stretched ellipses rather than sausages for your leg segments. These may feel like they're the same, but they're not - being ellipses, they'll gradually get wider to their middle and then get more slender again, on both sides. This makes them tend to appear quite stiff as they are expanding/shrinking equally on either side. Sausages instead maintain a consistent width through their lengths, giving them the flexibility of a tube, and make them a better choice for something as gestural as a limb.

• On your ferret, I like the way you're approaching the limbs, it generally provides a good sense of solidity while maintaining a bit of flexibility to it. My biggest concern here is how you've added the extra mass on the back. As I show another student here, you need to think about that more like the organic intersections from lesson 2. You're dropping an independent mass and moulding it to the surface of your existing torso. You need to think about how it sags around it and hugs that other surface. You can't simply drop it in like a sticker and throw in a couple vague contour lines and call it done. There's a lot more spatial problem solving involved.

• I'm going to largely skip over the rhino, because it is basically a misfire, including a lot of the issues I've pointed out for the rest (not using sausages, the point about your extra masses, etc.) - though I will point out that you seem to have decided not to start from a cranial ball this time and didn't really apply any construction there whatsoever.

• For the camel, you've got stretched ellipses again rather than sausages. I can understand why it may seem more appropriate here due to how long and slender their legs tend to be, but it does make the result feel awkwardly stiff. I do like how you approached the neck, though perhaps fewer contour lines are in order - you don't generally need so many, as achieving the illusion of solidity is going to be as effectively captured with just one or two. Lastly, that mass for its hump - well, given that the demo I linked on the ferret actually involves a camel, that should speak for itself. I do want to mention though that the torso should always be handled as a sausage constructed between the ribcage and pelvis, with a slight sag to, and a dip on its back. We sometimes counteract this with extra masses, but we still want that bit of a sag anyway to keep things looking natural.

• Your lizard was actually quite nice. Way too many contour lines in the tail, but the general construction felt solid and three dimensional throughout. Don't skip steps like blocking out the rib cage though, it's a bad habit!

I'd like you to do another six drawings. Same deal as before, no detail. You're making progress, but I want to see you apply what I've mentioned here before I let you move forward.

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

2018-12-11 20:38

Nice work! From what I can see, your work does appear to have been conducted quite patiently and carefully, and you've invested your time in the right places. I don't see anything that particularly stands out as having been rushed, though I'm sure it always has the tendency to sneak through in little ways here and there.

So, to start with, your lines section demonstrates an excellent use of the ghosting method, and the general concept of executing each mark with confidence, following taking the time to plan and prepare to improve your chances of achieving accuracy without bogging down the actual mark making process with hesitation. This carries over into your ellipses as well, where they're achieving a smooth and even shape due to your process and the separation of processes involved.

Your plotted perspective is looking pretty solid, as are your rough perspective boxes. I'm also quite pleased to see that you applied the line extension method to check how your estimation of perspective may drift - this is important to keep in mind as you continue to work on these exercises, to see where you can improve, and what patterns exist in the mistakes you're making.

Despite the rotated boxes being intentionally difficult and focused more on exposing students to a different kind of spatial problem that they may not have otherwise considered, you've done a great job. You kept your boxes nicely structured, with narrow gaps between them to limit the use of guesswork. Now, you could stand to push that rotation more (the outermost boxes should be rotated so much that what would have been the front face for the middle box should be almost completely turned away). Still, great work.

Your organic perspective boxes are coming along well too. There's still some room to work on keeping the convergences of your sets of parallel lines consistent towards their shared vanishing point, but that's normal and expected. This exercise is much like the rotated boxes, more about exposing students to new problems to think about, rather than expecting perfection right off the bat.

I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete. I'd like you to move onto the 250 box challenge next. Be sure to read through all of the notes on the challenge page and watch the video there, as they go over a series of techniques that'll help you make the most of the exercise.

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

2018-12-11 20:23

You're making good headway but there are some things I'd like to point out that should help you improve.

• Your arrows are flowing pretty well, and I can see that you're attempting to scale the far end with perspective, but one thing that isn't being scaled is the space between the lengths of your arrow. Basically, everything gets compressed as it moves farther back - so as your arrow-ribbon folds back on itself, the visual space between the different sections is going to end up smaller and smaller on the page.

• Your organic forms with contour ellipses have some real great confidence to them, and I'm glad that you're sticking to nice, simple sausage forms. Keep working on getting your contour ellipses to fit snugly between the edges of the form though, that's pretty critical to the illusion we're trying to create - that the lines run along the surface of the form.

• Your contour curves are pretty good on their left side, but towards the right you have a tendency to curve them too shallowly. One thing that comes to mind is that you may not be rotating the page to find the most comfortable angle at which to draw them, so definitely make sure you're doing that.

• In your dissections you've covered a great variety of textures, and I can see clear attempts at attacking each one with a clear, tailor-made solution rather than trying to tackle things with one-size-fits-all approaches. There are a few things i want to point out though. First off, make sure you're thinking about how the texture wraps around the three dimensional surface, especially as that surface turns away. Right now your textures are flattening out the surface. A good example of this is the brick/stone texture on the first page of this exercise. Secondly, get in the habit of looking at your reference more, and relying less on your memory. Even looking away from the reference for moment will start throwing away critical information about what was present, how it was arranged, and so on. Look back at your reference after every few marks or so, and make sure the marks you're putting down correspond in some way to a feature you identified in that reference. Lastly, rather than drawing the visual elements and forms you see present on the surface of an object, try to draw the shadows they cast. This is a lot more flexible than trying to capture each one and enclose it individually, because shadows can merge with one another, they can deepen and expand, and they can also be blasted away to produce a lost-and-found sort of effect, where an element is only represented by a couple tiny marks here and there implying its presence.

• Your form intersections are a decent start, but there's definitely room for improvement. Work on making your forms feel more solid and three dimensional before moving on (for example, when you're drawing a sphere, make that circle as even and confident as you can, and then try adding a contour line or ellipse on it. Marking out the "pole" (as one might find on a globe) can be very helpful to build that illusion.

• Your organic intersections are looking pretty good. They give a good sense of how these forms relate to one another and how they sag and slump against each other to settle in space.

I am going to go ahead and mark this lesson as complete, but be sure to keep working on this stuff as part of a regular warm up routine, as well as the exercises from previous lessons. Doing 2 or 3 exercises at the beginning of each sitting for 10-15 minutes will help you continue your progress with them as you continue to move forwards.

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

2018-12-11 20:08

All in all I'm quite satisfied with your work. Your lines section is pretty solid - a few wobbles through the super imposed lines exercise where you're still a little caught up in accuracy over the smoothness of your execution, but you seem to be fixing this as you move through the second page as well as the ghosted lines exercise. From here your lines look considerably smoother, and the degree to which they are straight is pretty normal. This will improve with practice, and you already show a good deal of growth over the set.

I do agree that your ellipses have a good deal of room for growth, and that you are struggling to get them to fit snugly within the space they're afforded, but it is also clear to me that you are aware of this (even outside of your comment), and that you are working towards fixing it. That's really what I'm looking for here - the quality will come with the warmups and continued practice, but only if the student understands what they're meant to aim for. You clearly do, and are already making moves to improve on these fronts.

Your plotted perspective boxes are fine, but your first attempt at the rough perspective boxes suffers in its line quality. It's pretty clear that in this case you've not put in as much time drawing each line as you could have, especially based on previous lines you've already demonstrated. This isn't abnormal, but it is usually the result of a student being used to applying a certain amount of time to all tasks. First to each individual line, then to each individual ellipse, and finally to each box - but since each box is made up of several lines, that results in each line being rushed needlessly.

Your later attempt at the rough perspective boxes at the end of the set demonstrates a good deal of improvement, where you're clearly affording each line a good deal more time. As for missing the vanishing point, that's totally normal. We extend our lines to identify how far off we are, not so we can chastize ourselves for it, but simply so we know what to work on next.

Despite being designed to be intentionally challenging, the rotated boxes exercise was done fairly well. This exercise, along with the organic perspective one is really only meant to expose students to a different kind of spatial problem that they may not have otherwise considered. That said, you've achieved some great structure here, kept your gaps narrow and consistent, and took advantage of these neighbouring edges to limit your guesswork. The actual rotations between your boxes could certainly stand to be pushed and exaggerated further in order to cover the full 180 degree arc on each axis, but this is a great start.

Lastly, your organic perspective boxes are coming along well, though there is more room for improvement, especially when keeping the convergences of your lines towards their implied vanishing points consistent. Again, this is totally normal, expected, and will be the focus of our next task.

I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete. I'd like you to move onto the 250 box challenge next. Be sure to read through the notes and watch the video on that page as they go over a number of techniques that'll help you make the most of the exercise.

Uncomfortable in the post "Lesson 3: Drawing Plants"

2018-12-11 19:54

You're doing pretty well. There are some things I want to bring to your attention, but by and large you're demonstrating a decent grasp of the material, and are developing your understanding of the use of constructional techniques.

Here are the few things I want you to keep an eye on:

• With your leaves, keep pushing the idea of how these things flow through space. That initial flow line is critical, and you're doing a decent job of capturing how the leaves flow through space, but try and always remind yourself that this represents the forces that impact the leaf. Try not to think of the flow line as being something that starts and stops, something that is static in space. While the leaf itself may in fact have a beginning and an end, the forces it represents do not - they are the air currents and wind that flow beyond it. I frequently will add little arrow-heads at the end of my flow lines to kind of reinforce this idea in my mind, that the flow continues on.

• Also for the leaves, when drawing your initial enclosing of the leaf shape, leave out any additional wobbles. Construction is all about starting from something dead simple and gradually building up from there, never adding visual information that cannot be supported by the supports and structure that are already present. So in this case, I'm referring to leaves like the center of the second page, where the edges are quite wavy.

• Last thing about leaves - in this page you tackled a leaf with many branching arms. You got the right start, but didn't quite followthrough all the way. Here's how it should be approached.

• For your branches, while here and there you do still need to work on how your line segments overlap and keep them flowing continuously, you're actually doing quite well, and are getting it pretty close to correct most of the time. It's just a matter of continuing to keep on top of that last mile.

• Your constructions here are looking pretty solid, but watch out for how you're building subtractively from that stem. Instead, wherever possible, work additively - that is, rather than cutting away from a form you've added to your scene, build on top of it. In this case it'd mean adding a little extra mass to the joints along that branch, perhaps by adding balls along its length.

• In the cactus on this page, you've done pretty well with the construction, but when dealing with detail, keep an eye on how the visual elements are actually spread out over a surface. Here it does seem like you went a bit heavy on those little pods, and that they wouldn't normally be laid out quite in that fashion. Always look back to your reference and avoid working from memory at all costs (which happens even when looking away from our reference for a few minutes - draw only a couple marks before looking back).

• I am noticing that when tackling flower petals (hibiscus and other flowers), you have a tendency to ignore the necessity of the flow line, or you try and spread its job over several flow lines/contour lines. Using a single one even when the petal seems broad rather than pointy is still important, because you're capturing the essence of how it moves through space. Always draw these lines confidently and think of it like the arrows from lesson 2, which are driven with a strong sense of force and energy.

Anyway, you're doing a pretty good job, so keep it up. I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete, so feel free to move onto the next lesson.

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

2018-12-10 21:37

Your work is coming along well, though there are a few things I want to draw your attention to.

• Your arrows are coming along well. Initially you were focusing more on how those arrows would flow across the space defined by the 2D page, but into the second I can see where you've started pushing into the depth of the scene. On that first page, I did notice a point where you have two arrows overlapping and you stopped one where it was hidden and continued it along the other side. In general, I want you to draw your lines continuously for these lessons, even where they get overlapped. More like this. This allows you to keep your lines confident and smooth.

• Your organic forms with contour lines are coming along well but there are a couple issues. For your contour ellipses, watch the alignment to your minor axis - you want those contour lines and the cross-sectional cuts they define to feel as though they're running perpendicular to the flow of the overall form. Secondly, in your contour curves, you very clearly drew most of your curves outside of the bounds of the form. This exercise is very much about building the illusion that these lines run along the surface of the form, and therefore are able to describe it. Breaking this core tenet by either having the lines fall outside of it or float arbitrarily inside of it will undermine its effects.

• Nice work on your dissections - I can clearly see a great deal of effort and patience put into studying your reference images, and I can see where you're trying to focus more on the shadows cast by each smaller form, and how that allows you to control the texture density throughout the surface and transition from sparse, white areas, into areas of greater detail.

• Your form intersections are alright, but they're definitely held back by one key point that you seem to have missed or ignored from the intersections - at the beginning of this exercise, I say to avoid forms that are not equilateral, and are instead stretched in one dimension. For example, long tubes, long cones, etc. I don't want you to tackle these here because they tend to bring the complexity of far too much foreshortening into the mix, which makes it more difficult than it needs to be and draws your attention away from the core spatial problems we're dealing with here. By and large you did alright, but I do feel like you'd have done a better job had you followed the instructions as intended.

• Your organic intersections are looking solid and show a good grasp of how these forms interact with one another, slumping and sagging against each other where their weight is not supported. A few more forms would have been nice to really fill out the page, but you are demonstrating a good grasp of the material here.

I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete, though there is definitely room to grow. Be sure to continue practicing all of these exercises (and those from the previous lessons and material) as part of a regular warmup routine, picking two or three at the beginning of each sitting to do for 10-15 minutes before starting your main work.

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

2018-12-10 21:30

Nice work! By and large you've done a pretty great job. Your arrows show a good grasp of how you're working in a three dimensional world rather than a bunch of lines on a flat page. Your organic forms with contour ellipses are getting there, though keep an eye on the ellipses that fall either outside of the bounds of the form or end up falling short of that edge. It's pretty important that you work towards getting the contour lines to fit snugly between the two edges, though this does take some definite getting used to. Also watch their alignment with the minor axis - keeping this aligned will help give the impression that the cross-sections are running perpendicular to the overall flow of the form.

Your contour curves are generally coming along well, and you're getting the curvature of the lines near the edges to hook around reasonably well. There is room to grow here however, mostly in terms of the alignment of the curves to the minor axis.

Your dissections show a good deal of patience and care, that you're willing to take your time and really study your reference images closely rather than working form memory. One suggestion that I do have - and this comes up most of all in the cantaloupe skin, is that while it's great that you've recognized the presence of all of these little forms along the surface, we don't actually want to draw and enclose each one in its entirety. Instead, it's much more effective to draw the impact they have on the surface around them - specifically, this means capturing the shadows they cast rather than the forms themselves. Here's an example of what I mean. This allows us to flow more smoothly from areas of high detail density to areas where it is more sparse, and allows us to control that transition to a much finer degree. Cast shadows are by nature much more flexible, because we can determine that maybe in one location it is being hit so directly by the light that most of the shadows are blasted away, whereas in others, the cast shadows can be so strong that they can engulf entire sections of the surface.

Your form intersections are coming along well, and are demonstrating a solid grasp of 3D space and how these forms interact with one another within it. Your scenes are looking consistent and I'm not seeing any major spatial contradictions between them, which is great. You're also making good headway with the actual intersections, which are really something I mean for students to start thinking about, rather than expecting them to be able to pull them off just yet.

All in all your organic intersections are coming along well. You are definitely demonstrating that you understand how these forms exist together within space, and how their presence impacts each other. Where one form's weight is not supported, it sags and slumps against whatever is around it. This is the kind of interaction that suggests a well developing grasp of how all of this works as solid forms, rather than just as a collection of lines on the page.

Keep up the good work. Be sure to continue focusing on your organic forms with contour lines when you warmup, but overall you're doing well. I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete, so feel free to move onto the next one.

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

2018-12-10 21:07

Really, really nice work. You've just about nailed each exercise, and have demonstrated a strong grasp of the concepts covered in each one and across the whole lesson.

• In the arrows exercise, you've shown a good grasp of how the scene you're working has great depth to it, exploring all three dimensions rather than limiting yourself to the two dimensions of the page itself.

• In the organic forms exercise, you're showing an understanding of how the cross-sectional contour ellipses turn more or less towards the viewer through the length of the form (shown by a shift in degree), and you're achieving a strong curve all the way around with the contour curves rather than having them come out too shallow and ruin the illusion you're creating. One thing to mention here though - keep working on getting those contour lines to fit snugly between the edges of the form. Having them float a bit arbitrarily in the middle or fall outside those bounds will undermine the illusion we're creating. Based on your work, you likely know and understand this and are getting it right more often than not, but it was worth mentioning.

• Your dissections demonstrate a keen eye and good habits as far as observation go - you're clearly not working from memory, so you're picking up the wealth of details and visual information in your reference and are organizing and applying them very effectively to keep the results fully under your intentional control. Don't worry about the smudges - it's really not a big deal.

• Your form intersections demonstrate a strong understanding of 3D space, and a good grasp of how these forms fit together within it. Not only are you drawing these forms consistently within the given space (which is the main focus of the exercise), but you've had considerable success with the intersections themselves, which are more intended to be something to think about rather than an area I expect to see a lot of success.

• Your organic intersections capture how your forms would slump and sag against one another, and how their volumes, masses and surfaces interact with one another in space.

Really great work. Keep it up and consider this lesson complete. Feel free to move onto the next lesson.

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

2018-12-10 03:59

Your lines section is fantastic. Your execution is confident and smooth without a hint of wobbling, but still manages to maintain a good deal of control and accuracy with each stroke. You commit to every mark you make and don't show any signs of hesitation or fear of making a mistake, which is exactly what I want to see and will continue to serve you well throughout these lessons and for all the drawings you do.

I strongly agree with your self-assessment. The ellipses are really the only place where you're showing any considerable difficulty, and it stands in stark contrast to the results in the other sections. The biggest issue that I'm seeing is that, while you're drawing through your ellipses (which is great), you are definitely having difficulty keeping it from unraveling. A certain degree of looseness is expected, though in many cases here you do seem to be struggling with keeping them under control. My first guess would be that you may not be drawing these from the shoulder without realizing it, as a smaller radius to your arm motion (perhaps you're drawing them from the wrist?) will require a lot more additional movement from your fingers to accomplish ellipses of any considerable size. You also may not be applying the ghosting method, or not doing so enough - which is strange to be due to your obvious use of it everywhere else, so I'm not confident that's necessarily the case. That said, proper use of the ghosting method will help you develop the muscle memory and acquaint yourself with the shoulder motion needed to execute each mark.

One thing that I do want to recommend here is that you limit yourself to drawing only two full turns of each ellipse, just to keep the ellipses from getting too out of control. You'll still be able to get that driving confidence with which to execute them, but it should help keep things a little more in check.

Other than that, it's really going to be a matter of practice and getting used to using your arm for these kinds of shapes.

It is worth mentioning that I do feel that your later attempts - the retries that is - are certainly better, though at times a bit more stiff. It's really going to be a matter of finding a balance between drawing with that driving confidence and keeping things under control - though I generally find proper use of the ghosting method does allow you to achieve both.

Now your boxes section is extremely well done. Your plotted perspective is solid, but that's no big surprise. You've done a great job of the rough perspective boxes as well and I'm pleased to see that you've applied the line extension method to identify where your estimation of perspective tends to drift.

Your rotated boxes - an exercise largely meant to be quite challenging and like the last exercise (the organic perspective boxes) really only meant to expose students to a different kind of spatial problem they may not have otherwise considered, was done very well. Both attempts are well structured and achieve a full coverage of both axes, in terms of achieving the full 180 degrees of rotation.

Your organic perspective boxes are on the better end of what I'm used to seeing, though still do have the expected room for improvement. One thing I noticed as well was that in that second frame on the first page, you do get noticeably chicken-scratchy when adding line weight. That's something to keep in mind, though elsewhere (especially that first frame) you're much more successful. There's still work to be done in improving the consistency of the convergence of sets of parallel lines towards their shared vanishing points, but that's normal and is what we will work on next.

I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete, though you'll definitely want to focus your warmups on the ellipses. I'd like you to move onto the 250 box challenge next. Be sure to read through all of the notes on the challenge page and watch the video there, as they go over a number of techniques that'll help you make the most of the exercise.

Uncomfortable in the post "Lesson 3: Drawing Plants"

2018-12-10 03:47

By and large you are doing a pretty good job, and you're definitely showing improvement on the front of those struggles with perfectionism. There is still plenty of room to grow, but I can see you applying construction a fair bit, and clear examples that you understand the concepts involved.

There are a couple things that I want to draw your attention to:

• You've got what looks somewhat like a fern leaf among your leaves, where you've drawn the overall leaf shape of the whole arrangement, but draw each smaller sub-leaf as simple spikes coming out from the center. For this, you should be applying the same leaf construction method to each individual sub-leaf, as demonstrated here.

• Your branches are coming along, though you do need to keep working on getting each segment to aim towards the next ellipse. Right now you've got a lot of segments that veer off course, and as a result, the following segment doesn't overlap it properly. The result we want to achieve is having all of the segments blend in perfectly, following the same trajectory. It does appear that you're striving for this, which is good, but I did feel that it was necessary to point it out just in case.

• Your constructions are coming along well, but I am noticing a certain timidity to your linework in general. Part of it is that your lines have a tendency to come out a little bit faint - not necessarily just in the way a dying pen would produce a mark, but in their a slight stiffness that is present there. Make sure that you put every single mark down with the same kind of confident, persistent pace. If you make a mistake, that's fine - you'll deal with it - but hesitation out of fear of making a mistake is always going to hold you back. Once you decide a mark is going to contribute to your construction or to the drawing as a whole, make sure it goes down with the same confident execution you'd add to something integral to the final result.

• Always remember the importance of the flow that drives each leaf or flower petal. I see in some of your constructions that you're not quite applying this principle across the board. Every single flat form needs that kind of strong, gestural flow that really drives how it moves through 3D space. That initial line is incredibly important towards making the petals and leaves look alive and avoid stiffness. Think as though this line is an arrow representing all of the forces of wind and air currents that guide and control the leaf or petal in question, and try to imbue your stroke with that kind of energy.

Aside from that, you're doing well. I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete, so feel free to move onto the next one.

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

2018-12-09 00:54

There's some good and some bad here - but the good is very good, and the bad is a pretty normal issue that a lot of students struggle with at first, but that is generally pretty easily resolved.

First with the good - you're demonstrating an immense degree of patience and care with how you lay out your exercises, and the sheer volume you pack into one page. I assign the homework in pages for just this reason - it helps me to identify a student's personality and their personal drive. Some will do the bare minimum (or somehow manage less than that, leaving way too much blank space), and some will go above and beyond, trying to use every bit of space they can. You're the latter, and that'll serve you very well in the future.

The bad is that when you draw your lines, you're highly focused on accuracy, to the detriment of the flow and smoothness of your lines. As a result, you're drawing quite slowly and carefully, which results in a lot of wobbles in your linework throughout the lesson. Instead, you need to be executing your marks with confidence, trusting in your muscle memory and not allowing your brain to consciously guide your hand as you draw. Here's a silly comic illustrating the point.

This issue is pretty much across the board - it's causing your lines to wobble, it's making your ellipses uneven, and it's making your boxes feel less solid. Ultimately, this is what the ghosting method is designed for - it allows you to split the process into multiple phases, where you invest all of your time in planning and preparing, before committing and executing the stroke you've practiced.

Now, most everything else is really well done. If you ignore the wobbly lines, you're demonstrating a good spatial awareness, and you're following all the instructions to the letter.

Your rotated boxes and organic perspective boxes do have plenty of room for improvement, but that's expected and you're within the normal ranges. Both these exercises were assigned in order to expose students to a different kind of spatial problem that they may not have otherwise considered.

With your first attempt of the rotated boxes, you weren't quite rotating the boxes along the side much at all (those on either side were fairly parallel to one another, with edges converging towards the same vanishing points. Your second attempt however did have more rotation to it, which is good - they just needed to be exaggerated more to cover the full 180 degree arc on each axis.

Your organic perspective boxes are coming along well. We'll continue to work on keeping the convergence of your sets of parallel lines consistent towards their shared vanishing points, but it's all coming along quite well.

I am going to mark this lesson as complete, despite that glaring wobbling issue. This is because I want you to move onto the 250 box challenge next, which should give you ample opportunity to work on your methodology to achieve smoother, more consistent linework.

Be sure to read through all of the notes on that challenge page and watch the video there before starting the work, as they go over a number of techniques that'll help you make the most of the exercise.

Uncomfortable in the post "Lesson 5: Drawing Animals"

2018-12-09 00:47

Definitely a big improvement. There are still areas to work on, but by and large you've definitely grown so I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete. You're free to move onto lesson 6.

Here are the things you still need to work on: https://i.ibb.co/0cx1rFK/witchoftherock.jpg (for some reason imgur wasn't working...)

In addition:

• Your bear's back legs have no knees.

• When you add the additional masses, think more like you're doing the organic intersection exercise from lesson 2 - don't just shape out an arbitrary blob and give it contour lines. Try and imagine as though you're layering an actual (simple) mass on top and build up that way. I demonstrate what I mean here, towards the bottom.

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

2018-12-07 21:30

Overall your work is coming along well, but there are a couple things that I want to point out.

Your super imposed lines are looking pretty good - the lines are confident, you're focusing on keeping your execution confident and avoiding slowing down or trying to be too careful while actually making the mark, so there's not much wobbling or wavering.

Your ghosted lines do seem a little sloppy at times, though I think I know why. It relates to the question you had about stopping/overshooting. Right now you're trying to tackle a lot of different things at the same time, and I think you might be biting off a bit too much all at once. You've got maintaining a confident stroke, keeping the line straight, getting the line to pass through both points, and finally stopping at the appropriate location. Instead of doing all of these together, try one at a time.

Think of it as though you've got stages of this exercise (and by extension, the planes exercise as well). Until you're able to keep your lines straight/smooth, don't worry about anything else. Once you've got them straight, try adding on the requirement of having them pass through both points. Once you're getting that, add on the final requirement of having them start and stop at the correct points. By breaking them up like this, you can build up the important skills steadily rather than splitting your focus before you're ready.

Also, I do think that you could probably put a little more time into the ghosting/preparation before the execution, as this should help you build up enough muscle memory to get a little more control behind each line. This applies to your ellipses as well - you have a tendency to end up a little loose, and your control suffers from this. We do want to make sure you're continuing to execute the marks confidently, but accuracy is still important. It's just that achieving it means investing more time before execution. Right now you're definitely struggling to keep those ellipses within their specific, defined spaces.

Your plotted and rough perspective boxes are looking pretty good, and I'm very pleased to see that you applied the double checking method to the latter, so you could identify where your estimation of perspective tends to drift.

Your rotated boxes and organic perspective boxes are both a good start - these exercises are really more about exposing students to a different kind of spatial problem rather than expecting them to be able to nail them at this point (they're notoriously challenging so don't worry about that). It's just a matter of changing how you regard the challenges involved in drawing in 3D space.

In your rotated boxes, you are actually heading in the right direction, you just need to exaggerate the rotations between your boxes more. Right now they're covering a fairly limited range of rotation, rather than the full 180 degree arc on each axis.

We'll also get some more work in next on your organic perspective boxes - you're headed in the right direction, but we'll want to focus on getting the convergences of your sets of parallel lines to be more consistent as they head towards their shared vanishing point.

I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete. I'd like you to move onto the 250 box challenge next. Be sure to read through all of the notes on the challenge page and watch the video there before starting the work, as they go over a number of techniques that'll help you make the most of the exercise. Also, look at this as a further opportunity to work on your use of the ghosting method and improve your overall line quality.

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

2018-12-07 00:43

By 'local area' I just mean that you're not adding weight to an entire line at a time. You're adding it to certain sections, local to that line. It sounds like you had the right idea, but from what I saw you were pretty liberal about adding it at least on the first two pages. The last page of form intersections was much better, even though the difference is rather subtle.

Uncomfortable in the post "250 Box Challenge"

2018-12-06 22:44

Basically, there's many ways of thinking of a box:

• Eight corners.

• Twelve lines.

• Six planes/faces.

Each of these impact how we think about the construction of a box and how the components relate to each other. As such, none of those I just listed are ideal.

Instead, we think of our boxes as being composed of 3 sets of parallel lines. Each set contains 4 lines, but we think of the whole set together. So what you were demonstrating there was that you were thinking of one plane at a time, and as a result, the parallel lines of the given plane converged nicely together, but ended up somewhat disconnected from the plane on the opposite side of the box.

Uncomfortable in the post "250 Box Challenge"

2018-12-06 22:18

Nice work! I'm very pleased to see that you stuck with the extension method through most of this, and I can definitely see considerable improvement on the consistency of your convergences over the course of the set. Towards the end you're really doing a remarkably good job of estimating the angles of your lines, and the resulting boxes appear much more solid and believable for it.

One thing I notice here and there is that you've got some places where you double up your lines in a way that doesn't suggest you're adding line weight. Usually it's one line that looks a bit weak and rough, alongside another that looks darker and more confident. Whatever's going on here, make sure you're only executing one mark per line, and that it's done using the ghosting method with full confidence behind your execution. Line weight should be applied the same way (using the ghosting method to go over an existing line), but never follow up with an extra stroke by reflex without the appropriate planning and preparation.

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 "250 Box Challenge"

2018-12-06 22:14

You definitely got off to a great start and showed considerable progress for a while. It's really unfortunate that you stopped applying the extension method however. There were still plenty of areas where you were making certain mistakes (like how in 72, the lines going up and to the right were converging in pairs rather than all four together at one point, a common mistake that comes from thinking more about how the planes exist independently). Deciding not to apply the extension method afterwards didn't fix the mistakes, it just made it much easier to ignore them. Your time and effort on the last 150 could have been spent much better, and you could have solidified things to a much greater degree.

That said, your boxes are still looking pretty decent, though there is plenty of room to improve on keeping your convergences consistent. You're good to move onto lesson 2, but I'd recommend incorporating some freely rotated boxes (and applying the extension method to error check them) into your warmup routine. Also, it wouldn't hurt to take the last couple pages of boxes or so and applying the method there to familiarize yourself with the more subtle mistakes you're making.

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

2018-12-06 22:10

My first thought was to laugh at the idea of winter in San Diego - given that I'm from Canada - but I remembered how cold it got in late fall when I was in LA, going through these same exercises myself some years ago.

ANYWAY, your work is extremely well done. Your arrows flow very nicely through all three dimensions of space. Your organic forms each look solid, convey a strong grasp of form and volume as well as how the cross-sections and the viewing angle of them shifts through the length of the form.

You may claim your dissections are not satisfactory yet, but I think it speaks more to your standards being a bit messed up. And that's not one of those backwards compliments - there's a lot of importance that I put on being able to see the value of what you've produced. Always digging into the "not good enough" isn't healthy, and it's not sustainable long term. Your dissections demonstrate an excellent grasp of how to deal with reference imagery, and a visual library that is already developing quite well. It shows that you understand how to organize information rather than just applying it as densely and as thoughtlessly as possible - everything is clearly set out with an awareness of the value of rest areas as well as areas of interest, and each texture is approached in a specific, case-by-case manner, rather than applying any one-size-fits-all techniques.

Now that's not to say there isn't room for improvement. The first page is definitely better than the second, and one thing that caught my eye was that the stone wall texture didn't quite wrap around the whole form properly. Here's what I mean, using an image from the new lesson material that'll release with the new website rebuild on christmas: https://d15v304a6xpq4b.cloudfront.net/lesson_images/e58b7887.jpg

I'm actually pretty pleased with the fact that you picked up pretty early on that the feathers were a bad choice. Usually I don't like it when students add little self-critical notes, but here it was definitely pertinent and I'm glad you did.

Moving forward, your form intersections convey a strong grasp of 3D space, along with a good sense for how these forms relate to one another within it. I'm not a big fan of how you went over everything with a darker line though. You did a pretty good job of keeping that second pass clean but I still much prefer students keeping their extra line weight to limited local areas of existing lines, and using them only to clarify overlaps rather than applying them as generally as you have here.

Lastly, your organic intersections do a great job of conveying your understanding of how these forms sag and slump against one another, as well as your own belief and understanding that what you're drawing is in fact solid and three dimensional, rather than just lines on a flat page.

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

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

2018-12-06 20:36

You've got something of a mix here - you've got a number of exercises that are demonstrating a solid development of your understanding of 3D space and how forms interact within it, but there are also a number of areas where things do feel a bit rushed.

Your arrows are looking pretty good. On the first page, you were a bit restricted to the space defined by the page you were drawing on. By the second page however, you showed considerable improvement on this front and started to push more into the 3rd dimension, exploring more of the depth of the scene.

There are a few issues in your organic forms:

• I mention in the lesson that you should stick to simple sausage forms. You definitely have a lot more complexity in the forms you chose, with some tapering in the midsection, branching, etc. All of these properties will distract you from the core of the exercise, because now you've added another challenge to contend with before nailing it at its simplest state.

• There's not a lot of consideration going into the degrees of your contour ellipses and curves, which suggests to me that you're not keeping in mind what these contour lines represent (cross-sections of the organic form) and what the degree describes about them (how much each cross-section is turned towards the viewer). The angle at which we see the cross-sections changes as we move through the length of a form. There's more information on this in these notes.

• Some of your contour lines are a bit loose - make sure you're applying the ghosting method before executing your mark confidently, so as to improve your general control and accuracy without losing the evenness of your ellipses. Since we're creating the illusion that these lines run along the surface of the forms, it's critical that the contour curves fit snugly between the edges and not fall outside of the organic shape or float arbitrarily within it.

Your dissections are looking pretty well done, and you've clearly put a lot of work into observing and studying your references, so good work there. I do feel that you somewhat rushed through actually creating the underlying forms however, and that you neglected to draw through them to keep them solid. You were definitely rushing forward to get to the texture work and didn't quite take the time to ensure that the forms you were adding texture to were as believably 3D as you could make them. When doing this step, forget about what you're going to be doing next - focus only on making them solid.

I can definitely see you thinking about how each small form you're adding to your texture casts its own shadow, and how this effectively constitutes the marks we're making (rather than drawing each micro-form, we're drawing the impact they have on their surroundings). That's excellent, so keep that up. There is room for improvement but you're headed in the right direction and it's largely a matter of getting used to these kinds of challenges.

Your first page of form intersections definitely had some rather wobbly line quality, and you did jump into doing a few different groupings of forms rather than one big one taking up the whole page (contrary to the instructions). This gets better into the second page, where your line quality improves and you start trying to deal with all the forms together. You could definitely use more of the page (there's a lot of space left blank), but it's an improvement. You're also showing that you're thinking through the 3D forms and how they relate to one another, and are generally conveying them in a way that feels cohesive and consistent.

Lastly, your organic intersections are kind of sloppy. Not a lot of time has gone into each individual form, so they feel rather loose and lack the kind of solidity that sits at the core of this exercise. I do think that you're capable of much better than this, given the time.

Before I mark this lesson as complete. I'd like you to redo the organic forms with contour lines section (1 page of contour ellipses, 1 page of contour curves) and then two pages of organic intersections.

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

2018-12-06 01:01

I see. Well, while that is definitely a valid challenge, that particular example has a few hints you can take advantage of (though they won't always be present on all such objects).

Take a look at this. Across the top, you've got two lines that run straight across, running parallel to one another. You can use that to kind of establish the angle/convergeance of lines on that axis, and extrapolate to those further to the bounds of the object. Then you can go along the inner verticals to find the convergence for your vertical lines, and extrapolate from those towards the outside of your bounds again.

Often times these kinds of hints exist, and while you can't always guarantee they'll be there, it's good to keep an eye out.