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

2018-11-11 22:11

Nice work overall! Just a couple things to keep in mind:

• Your arrows are nicely done - they flow well through space, and they push beyond the two dimensions defined by the page to explore the depth of the scene as well.

• Your organic forms with contour ellipses are fairly well done, but keep working on getting those ellipses to fit snugly between the edges so as to maintain the illusion that the mark runs along the surface of the form. When you break away from that, the effectiveness of the technique deteriorates. Ghosting through the motion more can help improve your accuracy without sacrificing the confidence of the stroke. Also, I noticed that there isnt much variation in the degrees of your contour ellipses - as explained here, as the orientation of each cross-section shifts relative to the viewing angle, the degree of the ellipse will grow larger or smaller to match.

• Same points go for the organic forms with contour ellipses - keep working increasing your accuracy to keep them snugly fitting between the two edges (using the ghosting method). Also, Id recommend trying to overshoot your curves just a little bit (as explained here) to help you get the curvature near the edges right and convey the idea that they continue along the other side of the form.

• Your dissections are coming along great. Your wood texture there is likely the weakest one, and it employs more auto-pilot, less direct consideration of the kinds of marks youre trying to put down, and generally relies on randomness. All the others however are considerably better planned, demonstrate forethought, observation and consideration for what youre trying to achieve with each mark. Great work.

• Your form intersections are well done and demonstrate a good understanding of both the space the forms occupy as well as how the forms relate to one another.

• Your organic intersections show that youre wrapping your head around how these forms interact with each other, where their weight is supported and where they sag or slump against one another.

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

Uncomfortable in the post "Lesson 3: Drawing Plants"

2018-11-11 21:29

Youve done a pretty great job with this. There are a few things I want to mention, but by and large youre demonstrating a solid grasp of 3D space and construction as a whole, and are manipulating your forms with a confidence and flexibility that demonstrates an well developing understanding of how they can be used to achieve virtually any result.

Here are the few points I wanted to raise:

• With your leaves, youre generally doing a good job, though there are times where your edge detail breaks away a little too far from the initial, simpler leaf shape, and that simpler shape no longer serves as an effective scaffolding the support this new, more complex form. In such cases, it may be necessary to work in more phases, with some sort of intermediary shape/form in between, rather than jumping directly from A to C, so to speak.

• Also, you mentioned in regards to one of your leaves, subtractive bad? - generally yes. If at all possible, and it generally is possible, always work additively. That is, think of each and every form you put in space to be a solid form that actually exists there. Dont think of it as a hypothetical element that has to be committed - once drawn, its present. You can cut away from it, but youre going to end up with a greater sense of structural stability and tangibility if you keep building up from that more basic form.

• Also worth mentioning, especially avoid having your edge detail zigzag over your simpler edge from the previous constructional phase, as demonstrated here. You didnt do this often but I did see a couple places (like that maple leaf looking thing). It also tends to go hand in hand with zigzagging a continuous stroke. Instead, use individual strokes and lift your pen whenever the driving direction of the stroke changes. If you attempt to draw everything without lifting your pen, it ends up getting a little muddy and indistinct.

• I did notice a great deal of generic use of hatching lines here and there. Its not inherently bad (and can be useful to push certain elements back and out of focus) but I do think youre perhaps using it a little too easily at times. Actively avoiding the use of hatching lines often forces one to think more about alternative approaches that are better suited to the task at hand, and can further develop ones use of texture, line weight, and so on. So its best to leave it aside for now.

• Also worth noting - remember that line weight isnt something to be applied to the entirety of a silhouette or even a whole line all at once. Its really just about clarifying overlaps, which often means applying it to local sections of a given line, rather than the whole thing. I did see a number of places where you perhaps went overboard with line weight, and it somewhat diminished the effectiveness of having that line weight actually make it clearer as to which form was in front and which was behind. Just as with any tool, overuse can result in its effectiveness decreasing.

• Im pretty glad you included the lay-in for that bonsai tree, largely because while the result actually came out quite well, there are underlying issues that are much harder to identify with the final product that are a bit glaring when looking at the naked lay-in. The lay-in is actually quite flat. Theres a lot of complexity there already, in your layering of limbs and such, and a lot of contour lines that feel a little shallow (they dont quite hook around enough as they reach the edge to give the impression of a rounded surface continuing along the other side), that the forms themselves dont feel entirely solid. I think you bit off a pretty complex challenge here, and perhaps let the intricacy of it get the better of you rather than properly breaking it down into its simplest components, but all things considered you still did manage to pull it off with a fair degree of success. Once you notice those problems in the lay-in, they do stand out more in the final result, but by and large I would say you did as good a job of saving it as you could have. On the topic of the final result however, I do want to point out that theres a great tendency here and there to be a bit sketchy and rely more on drawing textual elements on auto-pilot rather than with the kind of clear consideration and observation of your reference. In direct contradiction of my previous point, that is probably one area where it could have been improved as well.

Also, unfortunately I dont have any demos lying around for those particular plants - Id do one for you right now, but unfortunately Im out of town for a funeral and dont really have the means. Message me next weekend if youd still like to see one, and Ill do one up for you.

Anyway, youre doing a pretty great job as it is. Keep these points in mind and consider this lesson complete. Feel free to move onto the next lesson.

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

2018-11-09 16:52

This is a massive improvement! Ill go ahead and mark this lesson as complete, so feel free to move onto lesson 3.

Uncomfortable in the post "250 Box Challenge"

2018-11-07 20:21

Very nice work! You've shown a great deal of patience and care in your approach to this challenge, and it seems to have paid off. I'm very pleased to see that you applied the line extension technique to each and every box, as well as the fact that you clearly included a wide range of box types - some with dramatic foreshortening, some with shallower foreshortening, and a great variety of orientations as well.

I'm honestly not entirely sure how useful scoring them would have been - it's more important to think about the reasons behind why lines were converging consistently or why they weren't, and identifying patterns that can then be corrected. That said, I don't think it did any harm, as long as it wasn't drawing your attention away from properly analyzing your results, page by page, which you did seem to be doing.

Continue to keep an eye on boxes that are very shallow in their foreshortening, as there are cases even towards the end (like 217) where your lines end up diverging when they should be converging (albeit very slightly). It's definitely one of the more challenging areas.

Also, while your overall estimation of alignment was pretty solid, I figured I'd share this demo I frequently offer as part of my box challenge critique, in case it offers more insight. It's about paying attention to how your lines exit the vanishing point, and thinking about the angles that would exist between each set of lines. If such an angle between two lines is minimal, you can generally just draw it as being actually parallel on the page by the time it reaches the box.

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

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

2018-11-07 20:12

By and large you've actually got a great deal of good work here. You're really showing a well developing understanding of how these forms all interact with one another, how they sit in 3D space and so on. Many of your constructions feel very solid and tangible, and they convey the sense that you actually believe that you're creating three dimensional objects, rather than just drawing on a piece of paper. That's a big improvement, and it's one we can see shift over the course of the set, so that's great to see.

There are a couple of areas that I've got suggestions for, but you're doing pretty well as it stands.

• The first recommendation has to do with how you're approaching drawing legs. This is an area where you have varying levels of success, but pretty consistently you do tend to jump into them at a slightly further level of complexity, and this results in those particular aspects of some of your drawings feeling a little less solid than they otherwise could. In my view, the best approach for constructing legs (in most cases) is to use very simple sausage forms to construct the segments, and reinforce their intersections with a single contour curve at the joint, leaving the rest of their lengths clear. Contour lines can very easily stiffen up a form, whereas this approach maintains that same solidity while also keeping the flowing, gestural rhythm of the leg. Keep in mind that a sausage form, as demonstrated here, is not just a stretched ellipse or ball, but rather is two balls connected by a tube of consistent width. If the leg you're drawing features additional masses, like those on this page, then you can add them on top of the sausages as their own separate forms.

• I think my favourite construction of yours is this bumble bee, and it also appears to be where your texture was most successful, especially when it comes to tackling fur and hair. It probably could have been even better had you held back on the fur a little more - that is, avoiding situations where you're trying to encircle the entire form - but all in all it came out quite well. Other attempts, like your goliath bird eating spider definitely had hairs that were far too competitive with the rest of the drawing, and drew attention away in a way that was clearly not intended. In your scorpion, there are some signs of observation, but it does seem that you didn't quite push yourself far enough there, and perhaps saw that these little dots were present, and then went to town stippling certain areas. It's important that you look closer into the reference image and identify what each mark you want to transfer over actually is communicating. Are those dots the result of little divots in the scorpion's carapace? In this case, consider how the light is hitting that surface to cause these little shadows - it might be more appropriate to capture them as little crescents (where light would still hit the far end of the dip, creating something other than a perfectly regular circle).

Anyway, all in all you're doing a great job and are showing considerable improvement and growth compared to your last lesson. Keep up the good work and feel free to move onto the next lesson.

Uncomfortable in the post "Lesson 5: Drawing Animals"

2018-11-06 22:23

I actually completely agree - there are definitely some issues, but you do still show progress over the course of the set. Overall your understanding of 3D space does improve, though I think that with some adjustments to your approach, you'll be able to do much better.

The first thing I noticed, and it holds true through the whole submission, is that you're actively trying to hide your construction lines. You're drawing them faintly, keeping them as invisible as possible, so as to maintain a nice, pretty end result. One of the most important things to realize and accept when it comes to drawabox as a whole is that we're not here to draw pretty pictures. Each and every drawing we produce for these lessons - from lesson 1 all the way to lesson 7 - are exercises. It's not about how they look at the end, but rather what we learn from drawing them.

Actively trying to draw lines more faintly or timidly changes how we draw them, changes what they tell us, and changes how we understand what we're constructing. Additionally, thinking that we're going to go into a lot of detail or texture from the get-go also changes our approach. It makes us less willing to really draw through our forms with confidence.

So that's number one - when drawing anything as a part of these exercises, before every mark you draw, think about what that line is going to contribute overall. If it's going to contribute to your understanding of the forms you're constructing and how they relate to one another, or if it's going to help communicate some key element of the object you're drawing, then draw it with a confident, persistent pace. Don't worry about keeping it faint or hidden or anything. The same confident, persistent pace. If however it does not contribute anything of value to any of those areas, or if its purpose is already being served by another line that is already present, then don't draw it at all. Afterwards, you can always go back in to add line weight to key local areas - not replacing whole lines with a fresh new "clean" stroke, but just emphasizing things that already exist to clarify how different forms and elements overlap one another, and to help build a more organized visual hierarchy of line.

What I mentioned just now about line weight being about small, local additions of weight rather than outright replacing linework or doing a clean-up pass is important, so i'm going to repeat it. Don't go back over a drawing to replace its linework - any and every line you add to a drawing is going to be a part of that drawing (for these exercises). There's no such thing here as a rough sketch and a "clean" drawing. It's all just one thing. It also helps that since we're not trying to replace entire lines, because it allows us to maintain that same confidence we have when we're drawing the initial lines, rather than having the strokes stiffen up because we're too focused on matching an existing line too closely.

The rest of the advice I'm going to offer is going to be in the form of a couple demo's I've got:

• Drawing a Wolf. Focus especially on what I say about how the legs are drawn - generally utilizing sausage forms, that are reinforced with a single contour curve at the joint where the sausages meet. It's a particularly effective approach that combines the flowing rhythm and gestural quality of these forms (note that a sausage is not just a stretched ellipse - it's two balls connected by a tube of consistent width), as well as their solidity.

• Drawing a Tiger's Head. Here, pay special attention to how the eye socket is not just a continuous, round.. thing. It's made up of several independent edges with their own directional, carved quality. Think of it as though you're actually carving into a ball - you're not just sticking an ellipse on there, you're actually cutting pieces of it away.

For now, I'd like you to do 4 more animal drawings, taking into consideration what I've said here. Focus entirely on construction - don't worry about texture, fur, or any of that stuff for now. With your next submission, you can add a little reminder for me to get into texture at that point, if I feel you've developed your construction further, as I do have a few points to share on that matter. I just don't want to distract you with it now.

Uncomfortable in the post "Lesson 3: Drawing Plants"

2018-11-06 21:57

Ah, that explains it. In the homework section, I recommend a 0.5mm, as the 0.3's tend to be a bit too narrow. Not horrible or anything, but they definitely make it easier to scratch away on the page rather than making bolder, more confident marks.

So the first thing I do want to point out is that in a number of pages, you fell back into your habit of using hatching in your drawings - something I mentioned at the end of my critique that you should not be doing for any of these drawings. It's really important that you take the time to read and note all of my instructions - both in the lesson and in my critiques. Hatching in general isn't something you should be doing in any of these lessons. Hatching is usually used as a form of shading, which you'll notice we don't cover at all in these lessons. The reason for that is that unlike most drawing courses, I find that most students will rely on shading in order to convey the illusion of form, and as a result, it ends up being a crutch that never quite does it. Adding more shading to a drawing isn't going to fix it if it feels flat - instead, we focus purely on constructional methods, like drawing through forms, well thought out contour lines, etc. We leave hatching and shading out altogether to keep students from attempting to rely on it.

Another issue is that while you're perhaps a bit more intentional in working through more of the steps of construction (though not always - I can see places where your leaves don't have any clear sort of deliberate flow line as a starting point), you're generally very vague and loose in how you employ those steps.

Construction is a process that focuses on the idea of answering questions, or solving problems. A drawing is essentially a series of answers. How far out do these leaves reach, in what direction does it flow, how many leaves are there, how big is this stem, and so on. We start with the most basic questions, and work our way towards the more complex in successive phases.

Once a question is answered however, we have to hold true to that answer - we can't treat it like a loose suggestion and approximate around it. That answer has been given, so even if it's wrong, we cannot replace it with a new one - at least, not in this drawing. We keep moving forward, accumulating answers.

What happens when you draw more loosely is that you end up with several different answers to the same question. Often they're subtle things, but they lead to subtle contradictions in the drawing which the subconscious picks up on, damaging its suspension of disbelief. That is ultimately all we're trying to achieve - we're trying to lie to the viewer, tell them that what they're looking at is not a drawing of a plant, but rather an actual plant in a three dimensional world.

You'll notice that in demonstrations like these, I'm very deliberate with every mark I put down. Each flow line is a representation of the forces driving that leaf. Each leaf shape is built directly around it, and I'm striving to limit the number of gaps. I'm not expecting perfection or anything, but it's really about what one is trying to achieve, and that comes through in one's drawing.

With that in mind, I'd like you to do just three more pages of plant drawings. Before you do however, reread the lesson, rewatch the intro and demo videos, and reread my critiques. Don't get ahead of yourself - take your time applying the ghosting method for each and every mark you put down, planning out your strokes, and so on. Remember that we're not sketching here. We're constructing.

Uncomfortable in the post "Lesson 5: Drawing Animals"

2018-11-05 21:45

Hahaha, i figured it must have been a mistake. Wouldn't have made much sense otherwise - and luckily, this won't delay your critique at all, as I took a peek early. You can expect to receive a critique some time tomorrow.

Uncomfortable in the post "Lesson 5: Drawing Animals"

2018-11-05 21:38

Your link appears to be pointing to /u/OrdinaryMushroom's work. Did you perhaps accidentally point to the wrong imgur album?

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

2018-11-05 20:26

You've done a pretty good job.

Your arrows flow fairly well through space, though I did notice that right now they're pretty limited to the space defined by your page. It's important to remember, and really to convince yourself that the page you're drawing on does not define the entirety of the world that exists in your drawing, but rather that the page is a window into a larger, three dimensional world. To this end, try deciding one end of a given arrow is farther away, and the other is closer to the viewer, and play with exaggerating the scale of each end to correspond with its distance.

Your organic forms with contour lines are fairly well done, though I did notice some stiffness to your contour ellipses, so be sure to push yourself to draw through them more confidently, and always apply the ghosting method (which helps us to be more confident upon the execution phase). Also, remember that the degree of your ellipses shifts slightly through the length of a given form (as explained here). You did a pretty good job of it with one of your attempts, specifically the top middle, but the rest are lacking this effect.

Your dissections are coming along quite well, and you're demonstrating a great deal of thought and consideration on a case-by-case basis, rather than trying to apply one-size-fits-all approaches to each and every texture. One suggestion I do have however is to think of the lines you're putting down as being representative of the shadow each miniature form (like each scale, each seed, each grain of dirt, etc.) casts on the forms around it. Usually we think of forms as being enclosed fully by lines, but if we treat the lines as actually being cast shadows, it gives us a lot more flexibility. For example, shadows aren't just lines - they can exist as shapes, and those shapes can merge together with their neighbours to create larger areas of shadow, whose contents are implied by the way their edges are carved and cut. Lastly, when blasted with a direct source of light, those shadows can also disappear, creating those lost-and-found effects that I see you attempting to harness here and there.

Your form intersections are fairly well done, though again I'm noticing definite stiffness to your line quality. It comes down to the ghosting method again - make sure you're applying it everywhere. It allows us to split the process of mark making into a number of steps, some where the brain is taking charge, and others - like the execution of the mark - where it takes a back seat so our muscle memory can do its thing. Also, watch for those stretched forms - like long cones and long cylinders. I mention in the instructions that you should stick to forms that are roughly equilateral, so as to keep overly complex foreshortening out of this already complicated exercise.

Lastly, you've done a pretty good job with your organic intersections. There's still room for growth of course, but you've explored how those forms interact with one another, slumping and sagging where their weight isn't supported, and so on.

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

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

2018-11-05 20:12

You've done okay, but there are a number of places where you've deviated from the instructions. I know you mentioned a few of them yourself, but I'm going to point them out anyway. Keep in mind that while you may not feel you can resist doing something because of what you perceive to be your nature, that's... largely bullshit. It falls into the same realm as people claiming to be 'perfectionists'. Everyone starts out with some issue of that sort, and part of pushing forward is a matter of developing the discipline to follow the instructions as they are written, no matter what you may personally wish to do at that moment. Don't make the mistake of thinking a character flaw is inherent to your nature, and locked in. It's not a part of who you are as a person, it's just something you struggle with right now.

So, starting with your arrows, you're certainly doing a pretty good job of having them flow through 3D space, pushing them through all three dimensions and not just those defined by the page you're drawing on. That said, I can see areas where you've very purposely stopped drawing certain lines where they get overlapped by others (and where you went back in with a lighter stroke to suggest where they'd be). In all of the drawings you do for my lessons, I want you to stay away from this - draw everything with the same kind of confident, persistent stroke, and draw through everything. Doesn't matter if something else overlaps, draw those lines anyway. This helps us to better understand how everything sits in 3D space, and helps us keep our linework smooth and consistent (rather than having it start and stop repeatedly, losing its flow throughout). Don't preoccupy yourself with the end result - all of these things are just exercises, and the focus is not on how it looks at the end, but what you learned in the doing of it.

This continues on into your organic forms with contour lines, where you've clearly been trying to push forward without consistently using the minor axis for each construction. You're also not keeping your forms simple, as instructed to here. Furthermore, your contour ellipses tend to be very rough and scratchy, or just generally uneven. You should be applying the ghosting method to each and every ellipse and drawing through them two full times before lifting your pen. It does look like you need more practice with drawing your ellipses in particular. Lastly, I'm not seeing any real shifting in the degrees of your ellipses through the length of each form. I explain this further in these notes, as well as this video.

I'd also recommend drawing these forms larger - right now you're forcing everything into a very cramped space, which tends to make these difficult tasks even more challenging. Give your brain more room to think, and give your arm more room to work. Working so small is likely also making it much easier for you to slip into drawing from your wrists, resulting in a lot of the scratchiness we're seeing. Draw from your shoulder.

There are many decent examples amongst your contour curves, though again - you've neglected your minor axis line, and are in turn having some trouble with keeping those contour curves aligned correctly. You are hooking them around at the edges and getting a decent sense of them continuing along the other side however, so that's good. Again, stick to simple sausage forms - making things more complicated isn't going to help you learn the material any faster or more effectively, but it is going to distract you from the main skills you should be developing through this exercise. That's why it's so important to follow the instructions exactly as they are written, rather than being lax with them. It's very easy to get distracted.

Your dissections are definitely a great start, and for the most part you're making good progress on developing your observational skills. Simplification will come later - all I really want to see from this exercise is that the student is paying careful and constant attention to their reference, rather than trying to work from memory. As we draw from reference, it's important that we continually look back to that reference to remind ourselves what is present there, how it's arranged, and so on. All in all you're doing well here, though there's plenty of room for growth.

The only thing I want to mention in regards to this exercise is that you're meant to start off with a normal organic form with contour lines. Here you've very clearly gone in fully aware of the fact that you were going to turn it into a dissection, so you specifically tried to make it as clean as possible - as a result, the underlying forms are pretty weak.

For your form intersections, you're making good headway and are developing your understanding of 3D space and how those forms are meant to interact with one another. You did however miss one of my instructions again:

Now, fill up the whole page with forms. I mean it, fill up the whole damn page. People tend to submit homework that has tiny groupings of two or three intersecting forms. I want to see an ENTIRE page of forms all layered on top of each other. It will get visually confusing, but push through it, and use line weight to emphasize certain lines over others.

You failed to do this, especially in that page where you made individual groupings of forms, something I specifically said not to do. You also have a number of cylinders that are stretched, rather than sticking to largely equilateral forms as instructed. This is one of those things that adds to the complexity of the overall exercise, and draws your attention more to the kind of dramatic foreshortening that results, rather than focusing entirely on how the forms sit in space and interact with one another.

You actually did a pretty good job with the organic intersections, and convey a good grasp of how those forms slump and sag against one another, building up a good illusion of forms piled up against one another in space.

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

• 2 pages of organic forms with contour ellipses

• 1 page of organic forms with contour curves

• 1 page, FILLED, of form intersections.

Make sure you reread the instructions for the exercises before you do them, rewatch their videos, and make sure you are not deviating or making things up for yourself. Follow the instructions to the letter and focus on drawing confident lines with a persistent pace, from your shoulder, using the ghosting method for each and every mark you put down.

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

2018-11-05 01:22

By and large this is much, much better. The bee and beetle are a bit of a mess, where you're way too focused on detail and lose track of the forms you're working with so they don't appear remotely solid, but the rest of your drawings are considerably better. In the other pages, you're clearly taking your time and building things up from their solid, simple components.

The only piece of advice I'd like to offer at this point is in regards to how you're approaching your legs. In most cases your attempts are pretty solid, but I do want to share a technique that I recommend to most people for drawing legs that uses sausage forms to create each segment. It was actually demonstrated in one of the demos I left you with, this one, as well as the louse demo, but you may not have paid very close attention to it.

Basically, construct each segment as an individual, complete sausage form (that is, effectively two balls connected with a tube of consistent width). Then reinforce the joint where they intersect with a single contour curve. It doesn't need any more contour lines than that, generally, so keeping the length of the sausage clear of them helps it retain a sort of flow and rhythm.

On the topic of legs, for your beetle (one of the two that didn't go so well), you're jumping into a lot of complexity with those legs. They've got a lot of swoopy, irregular shapes, so they don't maintain their solidity particularly well. It's better to build those out more simply (with the sausages), and then add any additional volume and mass afterwards (like if a segment has a fat end, add a ball to that end of the sausage and then merge them together.

Anyway, by and large you're doing much better, so I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete. Feel free to move onto the next one.

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

2018-11-02 22:09

There is definitely a good deal of progress that you're demonstrating over this set, and you do develop your understanding of form and space, but there is a major issue that is making this progress a lot more hard fought than it needs to be. The problem is that when drawing these insects, you are focusing on the end result. You are adjusting your lines and tailoring your approach to ensure that the final drawing at the end of the rainbow bridge is relatively clean. You're sketching your lines in roughly, faintly, exploring the space and form before committing with darker, richer strokes.

That is not what we're doing here. Our focus is not on impressing someone with our results, and we're not looking to pin anything on our fridges. The drawings for this lesson aren't actually any different from those - they're all just exercises, and the focus is on the process rather than the result.

When you go through the process of putting a line down, you shouldn't be factoring in how faint you need it to be, nor should you be sketching or exploring your drawing. Every mark you put down should be preceded both by the planning and preparation of the ghosting method, but you should also think about what your next line is going to contribute to the drawing, its construction, or your understanding of how the forms exist in space.

Every phase of construction is basically the answer to a question, or the solution to a problem. A drawing is really just a series of questions, and you're answering them as you go. For example, how big is a creature's head? If you look at the last page in your submission, you drew a ball for the grasshopper's head - you answered that question. But then you went on to undermine that initial answer and ignored the previous phase of construction in favour of a different answer.

This leads to conflicting answers on the page, and it undermines the overall cohesion of your drawing. You want every mark to work towards the same end, to tell the same story - to tell the same lie (since we're building an illusion here).

As such, the process of sketching lightly and then committing to a stroke doesn't work - the mark you put down in the first place was your commitment, and even if it's wrong, you have to follow through and continue on. Even if the resulting drawing doesn't end up being exactly what you were after, it can still be salvaged if the answer is still cohesive and consistent throughout.

Once you've got that construction down, you can go back to add line weight to emphasize sections of existing lines (note that you are adding line weight to portions of these lines, not replacing them entirely) to clarify how certain forms overlap others.

You can see this overall process illustrated in this demo. See how the pen I use doesn't even allow me to scratch faintly upon the page? Really, that's the reason I insist on the use of fineliners, which leave rich, dark lines no matter how much pressure you apply - at least, when they're not on their last legs.

Also, take a look at this demo. This is how I usually recommend students construct legs, using sausage segments, reinforced with a single contour curve set at the joint.

Before I mark this lesson as complete, I want you to do three more pages of insect drawings, this time incorporating everything I've said here.

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

2018-11-02 21:42

All in all you've done a good job, and have shown a good deal of growth between the first page and the last. You're also demonstrating a really solid understanding of both 3D space as well as the relationships between the forms you're drawing. You're drawing through all of your forms, and aren't skipping any steps, so your constructions generally come out very well.

I do feel that there are places where you're rushing somewhat, but I read the notes you wrote alongside them, where you've pushed yourself beyond the point of being afraid of failure, so all in all that's probably a good thing. If you maintained the really loose, rough approach throughout the rest of the pages, I'd have been concerned but you went back to balancing your control with that same confidence.

I really only have two recommendations:

• When drawing legs, I can see that you've experimented with a number of different techniques, and most of them gave you a varying degree of success on different fronts. Personally, the one that I generally recommend to students is the use of intersecting sausage segments, reinforced with a single contour curve right at the joint. I demonstrate this here. Keep in mind that a sausage is just two balls connected by a tube of consistent width. Keeping that width consistent contributes a great deal to its solidity. There are going to be legs that have strange bulges in places, but I recommend that you add these variations afterwards with additional forms (like drawing a regular sausage form, and then placing a larger ball around one end of it).

• You're doing great with general construction and lay-in, but most of your drawings tend to be quite small, and there's definitely a degree of roughness to them. For most purposes that's great, but since you've got a good grasp of form and space, I'd highly recommend that you do a few larger drawings, taking more time to lay them out and then get into greater detail. Exploring more of the smaller forms that exist on a construction, and more of the specific nuance that exists in a particular subject, will help you develop a better understanding of how to tackle minor textural elements (like the shadows cast by smaller bumps on a surface). That's something here that isn't bad, but in the few places where you have pushed forward with a bit of texture, it is lacking the same kind of conscientious thought and consideration that you demonstrate through your major constructions.

Anyway, I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete, so feel free to move onto the next lesson when you're ready.

Uncomfortable in the post "250 Cylinder Challenge"

2018-11-01 20:31

Over the course of the challenge, you definitely show a great deal of improvement on the spatial challenges of this exercise. As you point out in your own notes however, you definitely have issues with the linework aspect of things. In terms of the things you asked, what stands out to me is that you modified your approach solely on the basis that it wasn't giving you the results you were hoping for. Of course, the only way to improve is to face that challenge head-on. Remember that we're not here to draw nice cylinders, pretty plants, or cool animals. We're here to learn from the processes of failing in these activities in every possible way. Long story short - yes, more practice.

There were a couple of my own little issues I noticed as well:

• You're not drawing through your ellipses for most of these. It's something you should be doing for every single ellipse you draw for my lessons, and it helps maintain a confident stroke. You do it in a few places here and there (especially towards the end, where things get much better), but by and large you've tried to nail each ellipse in one go, it seems.

• When adding line weight, don't attempt to add it to the entirety of a line. You're not replacing an existing line with a darker one, you're taking that existing stroke and giving it more character and variation. Line weight should be added only to certain local areas of lines, usually to clarify overlaps or silhouettes at key points. This puts us in a position to execute those marks - with the ghosting method, just like any other - with more confidence, since we don't have to nail anything too complex.

Anyway, overall you're doing well, just don't flee from your mistakes. Face them head on so you can learn from them properly. I'll go ahead and mark this challenge as complete.

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

2018-11-01 20:06

Nice work overall! I do have a few things to mention however:

• Your arrows are looking pretty good, but one thing I noticed is that your arrows are very restricted to the dimensions of space defined by the flat page. They aren't flat in and of themselves, but they do not explore the full depth of the scene, in a way that suggests that you're still very much tied to the page. It's important to start thinking of it more as a window into a larger space, rather than that which defines the bounds of your space. Try thinking of one end of an arrow as being farther and the other as being closer to the viewer, and exaggerating the scale of the ends to match.

• Your organic forms with contour lines are very well done, and you're achieving a good sense of volume and conveying the illusion of the surface's distortion through space quite well. Just be sure to keep using the minor axis line for the organic forms with contour lines as well - they're important for getting used to the alignment of those curves, which is something that is slipping a little, especially when the forms twist and turn.

• Your dissections are looking great, and mark a very good start with tackling texture. One thing I want to suggest - which you're doing a little bit here and there, but I want to make it clearer - is rather than making efforts to enclose each element (be it a scale, a kernel of corn, etc) in line, think of the marks you're putting down as being the shadows cast by those elements and forms. Cast shadows are a lot more flexible, in that they can merge together with their neighbours to create large shadow shapes (whose contents are merely implied by the way their edges are carved and shaped), and more importantly, when faced with direct light they can be blasted away, resulting in those lost-and-found effects that allow us to convey the transition from dense to sparse detail.

• Nice work on both the form intersections and organic intersections. You're demonstrating a good grasp of 3D space here, as well as a solid understanding of how those forms interact with one another in space.

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

Uncomfortable in the post "250 Cylinder Challenge"

2018-10-31 20:59

Overall you're doing a good job, and while things are kind of uncertain through the bulk of it, near the end your cylinders look considerably more confident and solid than before, so I guess it's something you were thinking through and sorting out.

There are a couple things I want to mention however:

• Your straight lines have a tendency to waver here and there. I'm guessing this is related to what you mentioned in your submission, about having to hold your pen perpendicular to the page and losing control due to that. It's not uncommon for students to have to hold their pen in such a way, but the reason is that ink flows best in such a position. It largely becomes necessary when a pen is dying, or - more commonly - when a pen's tip has been damaged, which occurs when a student applies too much pressure while drawing. Either way, it is something you need to work on - a lot of your lines, specifically your minor axes as well as the side edges of your ellipses tend to wobble a bit and I can definitely see that being a problem moving forward. Make sure you're applying the ghosting method and drawing from your shoulder - switching up how you hold your pen may also be making you fall back to drawing from your wrist.

• Don't apply line weight to entire lines. You do this a great deal throughout, though not so much on that last page, but overall I can see you adding weight to entire lines, as well as all the way around ellipses, or halfway around them to encapsulate the whole silhouette. Line weight, as mentioned in the form intersections video in lesson 2, should only be applied to local areas. This specifically allows you to execute those strokes with the same kind of confidence you'd have used when drawing the initial lines. In turn this also helps you to avoid the kind of hesitation and wobbling that I see a lot here.

Now, in terms of the constructions of your cylinders and their general solidity, you're doing a great job - so keep it up. Your cylinders in boxes are definitely going to continue to need the most work, but all in all you're moving in the right direction and have until lesson 6 before that starts to become particularly important.

I'll go ahead and mark this challenge complete.

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

2018-10-31 20:31

Very nice work overall! I have just a couple of points to raise with some of these, but they're minor issues that you will simply have to keep in mind as you move forwards.

Your arrows flow quite nicely through 3D space, and I'm pleased to see that they explore all three dimensions rather than being limited to just the two defined by the page.

Your organic forms convey a strong sense of volume, and you're doing a good job of hooking those curves around near the edges and you've got a good shift of degree through the length of the forms. I do agree that you need to keep working on getting those contour curves to fit snugly between the two edges however, as having them fall outside of the form or float inside it breaks the illusion. Also watch the alignment of your ellipses to the minor axis, as you have some that are a little slanted.

You've tackled a great variety of textures and you're approaching each one with a good degree of consideration for how one should go about tackling each individual case rather than applying general solutions across the board. I'm also pleased to see that you're mindful of the curvature of the underlying form, wrapping the textures around rather than letting them flatten out.

Your form intersections are very well done, spatially speaking - what I do want to point out however is that your approach to adding line weight definitely needs some adjustment. Right now, as you mentioned for your arrows exercise, you are not drawing these with the kind of confidence you ought to be. As mentioned in the video for the form intersections video, you should be drawing each stroke - including those used to add weight - with the same process. Use the ghosting method and execute confidently. The key here is that you're not meant to reinforce the weight for entire lines - you should only be doing it for key areas, local sections of lines to clarify specific overlaps. This is considerably easier to do while also maintaining a confident execution.

Lastly, your organic intersections do a good job of capturing how these forms interact with one another, and how their masses are arranged, sagging against one another. One thing to keep in mind - remember that cast shadows are not pinned to the object that casts them - they are projected onto the surfaces below. So here you've got the shadows generally staying close to the initial forms, even when the ground underneath them gives way. In such cases, the shadow should be cast further down.

Anyway, I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete. Feel free to move onto lesson 3, though perhaps slow down a bit - you submitted 3 times this month, which is definitely a lot when compared against your pledge.

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

2018-10-29 20:31

Throughout this lesson you're demonstrating an exceptionally well developed understanding of 3D space and construction. Your lesson 3 stuff was pretty well done, but I think you've really hit a strong point of understanding here in how those forms can be manipulated and combined to create solid, convincing, tangible objects.

Not only that - you're also leveraging texture and rendering to great effect. At no point does it undermine or take focus away from the construction - you're very clearly thinking through all of these spatial problems and resolving them before moving onto even thinking about texture. On top of that, your details are understated and subtle - they focus on communicating without being overbearing or distracting, and your results are very strong because of it.

At this point, I have only one recommendation to offer - use sausages. Sausages are great for constructing things like legs, and even scorpion tails, and really anything else that functions like a chain of segments. Right now you're not doing too bad of a job with them (obviously, given that your work is solid), but there still is a lot of benefit to being able to construct things with complete, enclosed forms that are solid both as part of the construction as well as on their own. If you look at the segments used in many of your legs, if you separate a given segment out, it's not going to hold together quite as well.

You can see what I mean by sausages in this demo I did for another student. Basically, a sausage is two balls connected by a tube of consistent width. They can carry a flowing rhythm from sausage to sausage, which allows us to capture a nice sense of gesture. They're also very easy to make solid - all you have to do is reinforce the intersectional joint between sausages with a single contour curve, and you don't really need to add any more through its length. This also allows it to feel fluid and flexible.

That's really all I have to offer! You've done fantastic work here, so I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete. Feel free to move onto the next lesson!

Uncomfortable in the post "250 Cylinder Challenge"

2018-10-29 19:53

Nice work! I can definitely see over the course of the set that your overall understanding of 3D space has improved a great deal - as has the confidence of your linework and the solidity of your constructions. Your ellipses gradually become more consistent, and you make really good use of the minor axis as a tool throughout the challenge. Lastly, and perhaps most importantly, you're demonstrating a great deal of consideration of your results - you're not just drawing them and moving on, you're very clearly identifying issues and growing from them.

The one thing that I am noticing is that some of your cylinders come out feeling somewhat squished. This is completely normal, especially at this stage. The reason this happens is that while a single ellipse alone on a page can be said to represent a circle in 3D space, once you add additional ellipses, lines, forms, etc. they have to remain consistent with the initial ellipse's assertion, otherwise they'll contradict the idea that this original ellipse represented a circle at all.

Included on the challenge page, there was a video (which you didn't have to watch just yet, as it doesn't become properly relevant until lesson 6/7, and is reintroduced at that point) that goes over how to go about establishing an ellipse that jives with all the other assertions of a scene (like where certain vanishing points are). You'll find it here. It outlines a couple important points of criteria that will help you to assess whether or not a given ellipse actually does represent a circle, given all the other elements in the scene.

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

Oh, also worth mentioning - the image hosting website you chose was a bit of a dud. You don't have to use imgur, but it really does help me go through your work if the host you choose at least allows me to click through all the images one by one, though having everything laid out on a single page for me to scroll through (as imgur does) is even better. I honestly don't really mind when pages are presented out of order, if it means being able to go through them quickly and easily.

Uncomfortable in the post "Lesson 7: Drawing Vehicles"

2018-10-28 01:16

Drawabox as a whole is less about teaching a specific way of drawing, and more of a course that is meant to use certain approaches and techniques to increase your understanding and awareness of core concepts that exist underneath the surface. Specifically, we use concepts like construction, drawing through forms, using contour lines, etc. all to build up your understanding of 3D space, and to develop your own belief and view that what you draw is not simply lines on a flat page masquerading as 3D objects, but rather that what you're doing is creating solid objects that exist in a three dimensional world. If you truly believe that lie, then it becomes a lot more natural for your resulting drawings to actually convince others of that illusion more effectively, due to how your subconscious behaves while drawing, adjusting lines one way or another in a manner that your audience's subconscious picks up on.

I've probably mentioned this a number of times - all drawabox is, is a series of exercises. Lesson 1 and 2 is obvious in this regard, but lessons 3-7, where you're drawing actual things and building them up - those are also exercises that just happen to use specific kinds of objects as an example. So when you talk about drawing things "the drawabox way", while there's obviously a particular manner that implies, in truth there's no such thing. It's not a technique for drawing, it's a technique for learning how to think about space and form.

And sure, you can and will incorporate some of those techniques into actual drawing, in parts at least, it's only because it's something that helps you to think through those spatial problems. So you can certainly still do your drawabox exercises whenever, but if you're following along with another instructor's lessons, you should be following along with their instructions to the letter and not replacing their instructions with someone else's wherever you see fit. I tell people the same thing when they're following my lessons - follow my instructions to the letter, and if you think you know better because of something you've heard or read elsewhere, it doesn't matter because you won't truly know what you're meant to learn from this until you're all the way at the end - and perhaps not even then.

There's a lot of good that comes from trying many different things and different approaches, as long as you're throwing yourself into them completely - the only thing you should ever feel guilty about is if you're following someone else's material, but replacing their instructions wherever you see fit. It's something a lot of beginners do because they prefer one way over another, but without any understanding of what it's all for.

The other thing that's worth mentioning is that one should not be grinding any lessons 24/7 - I strongly encourage my students to spend only half of the time they're drawing specifically on trying to learn and improve. The other half of their time should be spent drawing for the sake of drawing - we all learn drawing because we want to do something, otherwise there would be no point, but many of us feel like we shouldn't start attempting it until we're ready. But in truth there's no such thing as being ready - you just do it, it turns out like shit, and you keep doing it anyway. If you don't, and spend all your time focusing only on "I need to get better", you'll either burn out (although I doubt you would, given how long you've kept at this, you've got an iron will to be sure) or you'll end up with polished technical skills and no sense of how to apply it.

Uncomfortable in the post "Lesson 3: Drawing Plants"

2018-10-27 21:14

Yup, you actually had some pretty good textures on your actual plant drawings. As for the nib, yes - you'll want to ensure that your pen makes confident, rich marks regardless of how much pressure you're applying. Otherwise it's too easy to fall into the bad habit of taking advantage of the lighter, fainter marks, and generally getting sketchier.

Uncomfortable in the post "Lesson 3: Drawing Plants"

2018-10-27 21:12

All in all you're doing a pretty good job, though at times you are notably... a little rushed. Not terribly, but there's definitely signs that you may be pushing through a little more quickly than you ought to, and as a result there are places where you could certainly be doing better. For example, in your olive branch, the leaves aren't bad, but you've got a lot of gaps where lines should be meeting that undermine the solidity of what you've drawn.

In your cactus, you've gone to great lengths to reinforce all of your lines with darker marks, effectively replacing the underlying linework with a "clean-up" pass. This is not how lineweight works - you are never to outright replace lines, or apply a consistent weight to the entirety of a single stroke. It is only meant to clarify certain overlaps with the addition of weight to specific localities. In that sense, the initial lines put down as part of your construction are always to be treated as though they're a part of the final drawing. You also need to ensure that your weight is drawn with the same kind of confident execution (and use of the ghosting method) that all your linework uses, so as to avoid the kind of stiffness that arises when we try to match an existing line too closely.

Also, for the same cactus, you should have constructed the cylindrical flower pot around a central minor axis, as it is a cylinder after all.

Jumping back to the right side of this page, you've definitely rushed through the smaller fern-leaf things along each smaller arm, and have fallen into the trap of drawing them in a more auto-pilot sort of fashion, resulting in a very repetitive, automatic pattern that doesn't do much good for the end result. Also, you should ensure that the smaller arms extend all the way to the edge of the enclosing shape. That's what that earlier step of construction defines - how far out these arms reach.

All in all I think you're moving in the right direction, but I am going to ask you to do 4 more pages of plant drawings, this time taking your time with each drawing. My ability to offer you directed, relevant and helpful advice is definitely stunted when students don't invest all the time they can and submit work that is not representative of their current skill level.

Here are a few other demos that should help:

• I noticed you were drawing a morel mushroom, here's a demo for that.

• https://i.imgur.com/xAvcrkT.png

• https://i.imgur.com/i1R2SGs.jpg

Uncomfortable in the post "Lesson 3: Drawing Plants"

2018-10-27 20:03

All in all you're doing a really great job. You're demonstrating a well developing understanding of construction and are working towards fully grasping how each of the forms you draw exist in 3D space. All in all, your understanding of 3D space has come along really well and in a relatively short period of time.

There is of course room for improvement and there always will be, and I am seeing a few bad habits here and there (which I've written out on this page of redlining instead of typing it all out, which my sore hand now regrets). That said, keep in mind that overall you're absolutely trouncing down the right path with considerable haste and gusto. Just keep those things in mind as you continue to move forwards - especially when it comes to your tendency to be sketchy before committing to your lines, as that goes against the core principles of drawabox. Sketchy drawing and that general approach is totally fine outside of drawabox - but we're stressing this particular methodology of one mark per line, ghosting through everything and making sure every mark we put down is confidently drawn, because it infuses students with good habits that will then allow them to be more economical and deliberate even when being a little looser in the future.

You'll notice that even when I do my demos, I pick a specific brush that allows for no opacity variation, only size. It's pretty unforgiving (even moreso than a regular fineliner), but I use it because it embodies the general approach I want my students to follow.

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

Edit: Oh shit, I forgot that I meant to do a quick demo of a maple leaf for you. That will be coming in a moment, I'll edit it in soon.

Edit 2: Here's your maple leaf. I made it more generic so it'd apply to other students struggling with leaves as well.

Uncomfortable in the post "Lesson 5: Drawing Animals"

2018-10-27 19:20

Very well done! By and large you're demonstrating an excellent use of the constructional method throughout this set, as well as a well developing understanding of how everything you're drawing consists of solid, tangible, concrete three dimensional forms. You've very clearly moved past thinking of what you're drawing as being a series of lines on the page, into the realm of actually believing in the illusion you're attempting to create. So fantastic work on that!

Here and there, there are some minor issues in terms of proportion and general observation, but it's nothing I wouldn't expect to see, and they appear more to be remnants as you continue to forge forwards.

I have just a couple of observations to offer in terms of places where your approach is a little askew:

• When drawing quadrupedal legs, you generally approach them quite well, but you have a tendency to draw the foot as one whole continuous segment. This results in the toes (the actual bit on which the animals walk) coming out somewhat flat because you're jumping straight into a more complex combination of toes too early, without having blocked in the additional mass. What you should be doing is separating that length into two segments (heel to ball of foot, ball of foot to end of toes), then splitting the latter into the toes.

• When you tackle fur, right now you're being a little too erratic with it. It tends to come out haphazard, a little poorly planned and thought out, and generally feels spiky. It's really important that with fur you design each individual tuft with care and intent. You can't do this on autopilot, because you'll end up creating a repeating pattern that the viewer will pick up on very quickly. Often times doing fewer tufts, but spending more time designing them will yield a much better result. Also keep in mind that you're just trying to suggest to the viewer what the surface quality of this object is - you don't have to really drill it into their skulls, just suggest it with a few tufts here and there.

• When drawing feathers, always remember that because they're arranged in layers, you're going to end up with a lot of cast-shadows from one layer of feathers onto another. Right now you're defining the edges of the feathers (though I like that you're allowing some of those edges get lost-and-found rather than enclosing each one entirely), but try and vary the thickness of the shadow. Remember that it is a cast shadow and not just a line - because lines don't actually exist in the world. Here's an example.

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

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

2018-10-25 22:39

That's up to you - just as long as you get the cylinder challenge done before you tackle lesson 6 you should be good, but it wouldn't hurt to at least read the notes on the challenge page.

Uncomfortable in the post "250 Box Challenge"

2018-10-25 21:13

Random boxes like from this challenge - though the other exercises you mentioned should already be covered as part of doing lesson 1 exercises as part of that warmup as well (which is explained at the start of lesson 1)

Uncomfortable in the post "250 Box Challenge"

2018-10-25 20:13

You've done a good job of working through the exercise, conscientiously applying the line extension method and generally being patient with the work and with yourself. There is definitely still room for improvement, but you've come a long way and will continue to do so. The most important thing when dealing with these boxes is to ensure that as you draw a line, you are thinking about all the lines that it's going to run parallel to. Don't think about the other sets (and don't focus too much on the corners themselves), think only on the other lines that are going to converge with the line you're about to draw - whether you've drawn them already or not.

Also, as explained in these notes, try and think about the angles at which these four lines meet at their vanishing point - those with very small angles between them can be effectively drawn parallel to one another as a part of the box.

Over the course of your set, you definitely play a lot with line weight, which is great to see. I do want to mention a couple things on that front though:

• Make sure you're applying the same ghosting method when you're adding weight. Don't draw slowly and carefully, be sure to plan and prepare beforehand and then execute with the same kind of confidence for your initial mark.

• Don't use line weight as a way to hide mistakes. I noticed a few places where you added a lot of thickness in certain areas in a way that looked off, so I'm assuming it's because you had something you wanted to cover up. In general, don't correct your mistakes, and don't go to any lengths to hide them, because both of these simply add more ink to a problematic area and draw more attention to it.

I'll go ahead and mark this challenge as complete, so feel free to move onto lesson 2. Be sure to continue practicing freely rotated boxes as part of your regular warmup routine though, as this is something you'll continue to improve on over time.

Uncomfortable in the post "250 Box Challenge"

2018-10-25 19:49

Nice work! You've definitely made good use of this exercise, and have demonstrated considerable growth over the set in a number of areas. Your conscientiousness with applying the line extension method definitely helped you improve those convergences - it is understandable that the boxes with shallower foreshortening did see a degree of divergence here and there. While it's essentially the same challenge (getting your lines to converge consistently towards the same shared vanishing point), both dramatic and shallow foreshortening manifest this difficulty in remarkably different ways. Dramatically converging boxes are difficult because it's very obvious when you've made a mistake, since there's a smaller margin for error, but shallowly converging boxes are difficult because the convergences are so subtle that it's easy to overshoot in the wrong direction and end up with divergence. For this reason it's important to practice both in considerably quantity in order to equally target both issues.

The majority of your boxes sit somewhere in between, which honestly is good for the most part, but just be sure to practice both extremes a fair bit as well. They won't come up as often (shallow foreshortening will come up more frequently than dramatic but usually it's going to sit somewhere in between), but it's still a good idea to get those kinds of challenges down.

Along with improving those estimations of convergence, you definitely showed a good deal of improvement with your experimentation with line weight. One thing I wanted to recommend on that front was to try and make your line weights a little more subtle. Line weight is less about shouting at the viewer that a particular line is much heavier, and more about whispering to the subconscious. Our subconscious is very attune to picking up the relationships between lines, even when minimal - so making a line only slightly thicker won't be apparent to our conscious brains, but we'll still pick it up subconsciously. This generally results in a more nuanced, effective result.

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"

2018-10-25 17:00

It's not really about work being perfect - my critiques are about the direction you're going in. Basically what I mean to say is that you're demonstrating an exceptional grasp of the material, and I don't see any misunderstandings - so as long as you continue to practice, you'll continue to see a great deal of growth over time (which is why we incorporate the exercises we've learned into a regular warmup routine).

Uncomfortable in the post "Lesson 5: Drawing Animals"

2018-10-25 14:28

When I block in my initial masses, I tend to estimate based on both the bones and musculature. This doesn't mean I always include enough muscle mass to add a lot of the extra bumps and stuff - in those cases I'll pile on additional forms similarly to the organic intersections exercise. That's basically what you were missing - instead of building up from the basic forms you started with, you kind of wrapped them in a larger form, leaving the initial masses floating arbitrarily within it, with no clear relationship to the construction as a whole.

In the elephant demo, I add organic-intersection type muscle masses in step 8.

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

2018-10-24 18:38

Really, really nice work! You've done an excellent job here, and I don't really have anything to complain about. Which is unfortunate, because I love to complain - but on the flipside, this is the eighth critique I'm doing today, and the last, so it's always nice to end on a high note.

Your arrows flow quite nicely, and explore all three dimensions of space to great effect. I like that you clearly know which side of the arrow is going to be further away and which will be closer, and you're scaling them appropriately to demonstrate a good grasp of how the page you're drawing on isn't the limiting factor in terms of the space those arrows exist in - it's merely a window looking out into a boundless world.

Your organic forms with contour lines - both ellipses and curves are very well done. They're snug between the edges of their form, they're aligned nicely and they accentuate the overall curvature of those masses to great effect.

Your dissections show a lot of growth, as well as a pretty impressive balancing act. Many of your textures here are quite complex, but you never rely on shortcuts like hatching or scribbling, and you're always mindful (with varying degrees of success) of the fact that the objects are curved. Even towards the beginning with your lego bricks, where that curvature is not necessarily pronounced, it is present.

On that same one however, I would like to point out that the little nubs on the lego bricks are themselves little cylindrical forms. Of course being so small, we wouldn't construct each and every one - but instead there is a much more useful approach to conveying them, and it applies to texture in general (as all texture is made up of little forms). In this case, rather than enclosing each cylindrical nub, instead it's best not to try to enclose them in line at all. Instead, rather than drawing the nub itself, draw the impact it has on the forms and surfaces around it. That is to say, draw the shadow it casts when it blocks a light source. This cast shadow is a lot more dynamic, as shadows can be as slim as a line or as expansive as a large shape. They can also merge with neighbouring shadows, creating large swathes of black whose contents are merely implied by the way their silhouette is carved. Lastly, those shadows can also be blasted away by a direct source of light, resulting in lost-and-found edges that can make it a lot easier to transition from a dense concentration to a much sparser one.

Moving onto your form intersection, you've demonstrated a solid grasp of form and how each one both sits in 3D space on its own, as well as how it relates to its neighbours. Despite your struggles, your organic intersections follow the same path, going as far as to firmly demonstrate an understanding of how these forms can actually interact with one another - where they'd sag under their own weight where it fails to be supported by other objects.

You've done a fantastic job and should be proud of yourself. I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete, so feel free to move onto the next one.

Uncomfortable in the post "Lesson 7: Drawing Vehicles"

2018-10-24 18:29

I'm going to be a little brutally honest here, but given that this is your 21st homework submission, you've probably developed a thick enough skin to bare it.

This is not what I was asking for. Not even close. You went in with some very, very inaccurate assumptions, and what you've written there really does reflect that. Ultimately, it happens - all that's lost is some time, but I know for a fact that you can absolutely do much better than this.

I think figuring out how to draw the tread in the rubber of the wheels was one of the main challenges, making them look 3D and barely having any space to draw them. Maybe I should've drawn the whole wheel bigger but that would've meant a lot more work for this mini-exercise.

Every submission for drawabox should absolutely be the best you can manage at this stage. If you could have put in more effort, more time, and yielded better and more meaningful results, then that is exactly what you should do. I can't give you any sort of useful advice if what I see is not the best of your current ability.

Yes, you should have drawn the wheels much bigger. You should have also constructed them using cylinders as a starting point - meaning, making good use of the minor axis to do so.

The focus of this exercise is not on detail. It's still about construction, and 80% of it is based on nailing that underlying form, starting with a cylinder, and going down into a more nuanced wheel with bevelled edges. It is, after all, a drawabox exercise, and as you well know form and construction is everything around these parts. It needs to feel solid and confident, and this is VERY MUCH a spatial problem. As I've probably mentioned before, our brains benefit considerably from having more room to think when dealing with these kinds of challenges.

It may help to look at this video, created by the first student I had go through this wheel exercise. She did use an ellipse guide for this (she mentions it in the video and talks about where she got them), and I still strongly recommend that you pick some up.

Now, I do want you to do this exercise again (although you may cut it down to 15 wheels instead of 30) - but before that, I did notice that you haven't actually completed the 250 cylinder challenge, and your work here makes me think that perhaps you should do that first. But maybe before any of that, you should give yourself a little break. Whether you did the exercise correctly or not, you did put a lot of time and effort into this, and I imagine that it did take a lot out of you.

We all make mistakes, and sometimes we accidentally veer down the wrong path. Give yourself a little time to recover from that, then dust yourself off and get back on the road.

Uncomfortable in the post "Lesson 5: Drawing Animals"

2018-10-24 18:14

Your cat and kangaroo are very, very well done and show a great use and understanding of construction. Your boar is... kind of an unfortunate stepchild. You built that sausage for the torso, but then wrapped it in a much more arbitrary shell that wasn't really supported by the scaffolding you'd built up at that point. That whole outer shell is just guesswork, which firmly undermines the rest of your construction and makes the drawing fall flat.

BUT 2/3 is still excellent, and we all have drawings that just come out looking wrong now and then. You're clearly understanding what you should be aiming for, and are demonstrating a good grasp of the material. So let's sweep Mr. Piggy under the rug and move onto lesson 6.

Keep up the good work.

Uncomfortable in the post "250 Box Challenge"

2018-10-24 18:12

Really nicely done! You've got a lot of great stuff here, and demonstrate a good deal of growth over the set. By the end, you're demonstrating a solid understanding of 3D space, along with consistent convergences towards vanishing points, confident linework all executed conscientiously using the ghosting method, and lastly a lot of great experimentation with line weight to help further the illusion of solidity of your forms.

You're doing great with the boxes, so the one piece of advice I'll offer will have to do with the last bit - the line weight. It's pretty normal to jump at line weight with a lot of exaggeration, and it's a good way to learn it, but as you continue to move forwards it can come to a point where things get so thick that they start to get a little cartoony. You're not nearly there, but you could stand to be a little more subtle with that weight. The thing about line weight is that it's all about relative weights between different lines. A mark could be a little bit thicker - unnoticeable to our conscious brain - but our subconscious would still pick up on it.

That kind of subtlety and nuance is what we're ultimately after. Line weight is about whispering to the viewer, rather than telling them firmly and directly. Speak to their subconscious, and less to their conscious brain, and you'll find that your drawings start to develop a really beautiful sense of liveliness. You may also want to think more of weight being applied to either end of a given line (resulting in a particular corner being generally heavier rather than a side being heavier), as this also can lead to the sort of tapered weight along the length of a line that also gives us a sort of energetic quality.

Anyway, keep up the great work and consider this challenge complete. You're welcome to move onto the next lesson.

Uncomfortable in the post "Lesson 3: Drawing Plants"

2018-10-24 17:51

Your submission is a bit of a mixed bag. Largely your drawings are quite nice, but in a number of ways they stray from the focus of this lesson.

The biggest issue is that you're extremely focused on the end result. Your attention is primarily on detail, texture, etc. and by and large you're approaching things in a somewhat sketchier manner than what is espoused here. Along with this, while you are being mindful of construction, you're treating previous phases of construction more like suggestions and explorations rather than solid, concrete scaffolding meant to support further forms and detail. Every phase of construction serves to answer a question - for example, how far out do a set of leaves go. If in the next phase you push your leaves further out, then you're wasting focus and energy on answering a question that has already been resolved. Not only does this steal attention away from those that haven't yet been answered, but it also leads to contradictory information in your drawing - where two simultaneous answers exist to the same question, undermining the cohesion of the overall result.

Lastly, you're largely overusing contour lines. I see this a lot in students who aren't really thinking about what purpose that technique is meant to serve. A contour line is meant to help describe the deformation of the surface of an object - two is certainly more effective than one, but you quickly end up with diminishing returns. One or two well placed, well planned and well executed contour lines are vastly more valuable than a dozen that have been done quickly. Usually when I see this issue, the given student has a bunch of sloppy ones all jammed in there - yours are actually done fairly well, you're just adding so many for no real reason.

In your page of leaves, you've got a number of these that don't actually follow the steps for the exercise. You're visibly skipping steps on those towards the bottom left of the page, and jumping into more complex edge detail without the appropriate scaffolding to support it. In others you are applying the steps, though you're actively drawing construction lines to be might lighter and fainter, in order to hide them. Don't - I want you to draw each and every mark with the ghosting method, focusing entirely on putting them down confidently rather than wasting effort on hiding certain marks, or even thinking about which ones should be hidden. Before you put a mark down, think about what it's going to contribute to the drawing. If it serves a constructional purpose, or adds some other value to the drawing, then draw it with that same confidence. If however it fails to serve any concrete purpose or its contribution is already being covered by another stroke, then leave it out. Later on you can come back to add line weight to key local areas in order to help organize and create a hierarchy of your linework, but that should not be considered at this point.

Here are a couple leaf-related demos that you should take a look at:

• https://i.imgur.com/8dRSkVY.png

• https://i.imgur.com/8gGun9h.png

The last thing I wanted to mention was in regards to your branch exercises. You're doing a good job, though you do still need to continue to work on ensuring that your segments aim towards the next ellipse as you lift your pen up, so the next segment goes directly on top of it. The end result (ideally, though this is difficult) is that all your segments will blend together into a single visible stroke. Right now you've got a lot of fly-aways that fall out of line.

I'd like you to take another shot at this lesson. Take your time, and focus on following the instructions directly. A lot of students come in with familiarity with sketching and other approaches to drawing. Remember that we're following a very specific approach here, with a specific goal. We're not really concerned with texture or the end result - each drawing is an exercise that teaches you about how to manipulate form within 3D space, and the real value there is not a pretty picture we can pin to our fridge door, but rather what the process of each drawing teaches us about construction.

I'm not sure if you're currently using a fineliner or a ballpoint pen, since you're currently showing a lot of purposely faint lines that are a lot more difficult to achieve with the former. Lessons 3 onwards must be completed with a fineliner, so be sure to pick some up if you haven't been using them thus far. For the redo, I don't want you to worry about texture or detail - focus entirely on the construction of the plants, and take that as far as you can before moving onto the next drawing. No hatching, no texture, etc.

Lastly, you generally seem to be completing this work rather quickly (for better or for worse), but as a result you've had a lot of submissions this month. As such, I ask that you hold onto your work until November.

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

2018-10-24 17:14

Everything here is looking solidly done. I understand that you still feel uncertain with the form intersections, but all things considered you did do a pretty good job. It is important to understand that, as mentioned in the lesson, I'm not terribly focused on the actual intersections themselves, but rather more on your ability to place many objects within the same scene without them feeling inconsistent. The intersections are something I want students to try and to start thinking about, and all things considered, most were still correct. As you push through the lessons and continue to develop your understanding of 3D space (which is what drawabox is all about), your ability and confidence in this area will continue to improve.

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

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

2018-10-24 17:11

You've shown a considerable amount of improvement over this set. You started out with a clear intent to employ and apply constructional techniques, but not necessarily the strongest understanding of how to go about it. You didn't take any shortcuts, you didn't neglect drawing through forms, or skip constructional steps - you just seemed more hesitant about how you were going about it.

As you pushed through however, you noticed a lot of the little mistakes you were making, and you started moving forward with a lot more confidence and boldness in terms of the choices you were making. There's a lot less second guessing and a lot less hesitation through the end of the set, and with that you demonstrate that you yourself seem to believe in the solidity of the forms you're drawing a lot more than you may have previously. Where near the start it was clear that you were drawing lines on a flat page, by the end you're constructing solid objects in a three dimensional world, and it's clear that you believe that. We tend to convince people more easily when we believe in our own lies.

One of the issues I was going to point out based on your earlier work had to do with segmentation. Whenever you had those nice layered chunks along abdomens and such, you had a tendency to avoid having them break the silhouette, and missed out on a major opportunity to convey that addition of form and volume. You seem to have picked up on this yourself however, and there are a number of cases in the last few pages where you're boldly punching through that silhouette to add layers of segmentation, to great effect.

The other thing I wanted to mention was how you're drawing legs. You experiment with a number of different approaches, which is definitely great to see. I generally find that the best way to construct legs - especially in insects, but it's applicable to other animals as well - is to build the individual segments as sausages (that is, balls connected by a tube of consistent width). Where these sausages intersect, there should be a healthy overlap, and the intersection/joint should be defined by a clear, concise contour line. There's no need for contour lines through the length of this sausage however, as reinforcing the joint is generally enough. This approach allows for segments that flow smoothly and convey the gestural rhythm of a limb without it getting overly rigid, and while still maintaining its solidity. I explain this further in this old demo. It also touches on the segmentation issue.

You actually do have some drawings where you use sausages, I just wanted to emphasize this as being the more effective solution in most cases.

So! I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete. You're free to play around with a few more, but you're welcome to move onto the next lesson whenever you feel ready.

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

2018-10-23 21:07

All in all there are a number of major issues that are holding you back, and from the looks of it, these are changes in your approach since your last submission.

The biggest issue that ties everything together is that you are currently very focused on your end result. You're clearly interested in keeping the final drawing as clean as possible, as detailed as possible, and in general terms, as impressive as possible. Unfortunately, that completely veers away from the point of drawabox - we're not here to impress anyone, and we're not here to create pretty drawings to stick on our fridges. We're here to learn from the processes we apply while drawing them. Each one is an exercise in construction, meant to develop our understanding of 3D space, and our overall belief that what we are drawing exists in three dimensions, and is itself a solid object. Not that it represents one - that every form we draw actually exists in a 3D world, to which our page is just a window. We do this - trying to fool ourselves - because the easiest way to convince someone of something is to believe in the lie yourself.

As you push through your homework, you apply fewer and fewer constructional concepts. You do start out with varying degrees of construction in your first few pages, but it's just something that derails. My guess is that you perhaps misunderstood the assignment - the only difference between the lay-ins and the full drawings is that the full drawings start out the same way, but they simply go further.

So I do have a few specific critiques to offer, but overall you are going to have to redo the 8 pages of insect drawings:

• In your lay-ins, you experiment with a few different approaches to drawing legs. Some of them involve the segments as stretched ellipses/balls, others you've got tubes where you've added contour curves to reinforce their form and so on. The approach that generally works best is similar to the first, but in it we use sausage forms as segments that intersect, and then we reinforce each joint/intersection with a single contour curve. The benefit here is that sausages (which are essentially two balls connected by a tube of consistent width) can be much more flexible than a stretched ball (which tends to be very stiff), and as such it can carry the rhythm and flow of the legs to great effect.

• When you've got segmentation on the abdomen (like wasps, grasshoppers, etc), remember that you want to layer that stuff on top of the underlying forms. This is going to result in forms that break the silhouette of the previous one, since they're being stacked on top. I see this here and there, but overall you're not taking as much advantage of the silhouette detail as you ought to be. The silhouette itself, especially when broken, is an extremely effective way to communicate, as this is what the eye picks up first before observing any of the internal detail. Also remember that this should be additive - don't construct the form and then cut into it to create your segmentation - build out from it.

Here are some old demos touching on what I've mentioned here:

• https://i.imgur.com/rQvn6kV.png

• https://i.imgur.com/I6nDc7l.png

• https://i.imgur.com/mDeATkB.png

And lastly, a demo that goes over the whole process of completing one of these constructional drawings as you should be doing them:

• https://i.imgur.com/n7ryMhP.jpg

Remember - don't draw detail that isn't yet supported by the scaffolding and structure already present. Start simple and work your way up. Draw EACH form in its entirety, and draw through everything. We need to understand how each form relates to its neighbours, and how it all sits in 3D space.

Oh, worth mentioning - the spider on page 2 was actually quite well done, and the end result was believably three dimensional.

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

2018-10-22 17:27

All in all you're doing a good job but there are a few things I want to draw your attention to.

• Your arrows flow pretty nicely through space, though one thing to notice is that right now they're fairly restricted to the two dimensions defined by the page itself, and don't push much into the depth of the overall scene. It's important to remind yourself that the page you're drawing on is only a window into a larger three dimensional world. Try and identify one end of your arrow as being farther from the viewer and the other closer, and exaggerate their scale accordingly.

• Your organic forms with contour ellipses are fairly well done, though one thing I noticed is that your ellipses have a tendency of being quite stiff. You need to be drawing these more confidently, applying the ghosting method to maintain control through the initial planning and preparation phases, but ultimately committing to your stroke without hesitation, and trusting in your muscle memory. Mistakes happen, but it's better that your ellipse be smooth and evenly shaped, than accurate but stiff and rigid.

• Your organic forms with contour curves have a notable issue - the whole idea of contour lines is that they present the illusion that a line sits on the surface of a form, and in doing so, it describes how that surface deforms through space. None of yours actually attempt to capture this illusion - all of your curves sit outside of the form (rather than snugly between either edge of the form), so at no point do you establish the illusion that they actually sit on its surface. They do help describe the overall form a little bit, but that illusion is weakened considerably. There are a few instances where you've drawn the contour curve snugly between the edges, but usually the curvature is somewhat off because you're not properly employing the "overshooting technique" I recommend, where you just let the curve continue along the other side of the form a little before lifting your pen.

• You've got a good start with your dissections. Some of your textures are a little more cartoony and oversimplified than others, but overall you're demonstrating a good approach. When you end up with this sort of cartoony look, it's often because you're not following the reference as closely as you ought to, and relying too much on your memory. Remember that human memory is not designed for this kind of thing - you have to continually look back at your reference between every couple strokes to ensure that every mark you're putting down is meant to reflect and represent a specific element that is present there.

• Another point that may help is to think of the lines you're drawing as being representative, not of actual lines that exist (because such lines don't exist in the world), but of the shadows the little forms present there cast when they block the light. The thing about cast shadows is that they can expand, become thicker, merge with other shadows creating large shapes, and so on. They can also be blasted away by a direct light source, resulting in lost-and-found lines that make it much easier to transition from areas of sparse and areas of dense detail. Right now, you're largely enclosing each little element - each scale, each pebble, etc - in its own shape. Because they're enclosed, it's quite difficult to transition from sparse to dense and leave more detail to be implied rather than directly captured. Thinking more about shadows helps a great deal with this. I talk more about this in the texture challenge notes.

• Your form intersections are coming along quite nicely. One thing I wanted to mention though is that it looks like your added line weight is done with a different, thicker pen - this results in a visible jump from one thickness to another. I'm definitely glad that you're applying weight only to certain local areas, but you should be doing it with the same pen. Line weight is usually to be kept subtle, and your weights should transition smoothly - meaning, when you add that extra weight, your pen should start at a light pressure and increase through the stroke, to create a tapered, blended effect. In general, this is how all your linework should be done - not full pressure all the time, but a tapered stroke that'll imbue your drawings with more energy and life.

• Your organic intersections are looking good - just that same issue I mentioned with your organic forms with contour lines is present.

Before I mark this lesson as complete, I'd like you to do two more pages of organic forms with contour curves.

Uncomfortable in the post "Lesson 3: Drawing Plants"

2018-10-20 18:52

Your results here are a bit mixed, but overall you do demonstrate a considerable improvement over the set. There are a number of things that I want to point out however.

To start with, when you go through your leaves exercise, you only really seem to be thinking about the steps outlined in the lesson in the simplest of terms. You've got to think of them as being a tool you're stowing away in your toolbox. IKEA furniture is a good example: the techniques I impart are not the full set of instructions, specific to any one piece of furniture. They're the little hex key you're given to tighten all your screws and bolts. When you're done, you put it in your toolkit for later, and pull it out whenever anything that could ostensibly fit on its end needs to be tightened.

Similarly, anything that shares the qualities with leaves - anything relatively flat that has a strong sense of directionality and flow - can be used to this end. Even elements that exist as part of a larger leaf - like maple leaves, which have many arms to them - can use this concept. You've done many of these on your one page of leaf exercises, and you explored with a few different approaches, but here's how you really should be tackling it: https://i.imgur.com/BbC3qYv.png

There are two other major issues:

• You are very preoccupied with detail, but you're working largely from memory when it comes to adding such elements, resulting in the texture you add looking rather cartoony and overly simplified. Detail is time consuming, and cannot be rushed - you need to get into the habit of observing your reference not only carefully, but also frequently. Ensure that every mark you put down relates directly to some specific feature or element you're trying to capture, and don't let yourself draw for more than a few moments without looking back at that reference. Always remember that human memory, especially as a beginner, is not designed for this kind of task.

• You're drawing all of your leaves quite small, which has a number of negative repercussions. Firstly, we think through spatial problems a lot more easily when we give our brains a good deal of room to work. Secondly, when your lines are much thicker relative to the overall size of the drawing, we lose any real sense of nuance or delicacy - all your details end up merging together unintentionally, making it look messy. It's common for students to end up drawing smaller out of a lack of confidence, because they feel like it'll help them hide their mistakes, but in truth it just causes them to make more mistakes.

Moving onto the branches exercise, you're moving in the right direction, though your lines are definitely a little stiff. Apply the ghosting method, and ensure that when you actually put a mark down, you do so with a confident, persistent stroke. When you're putting a mark down and your pen touches the page, any opportunity to avoid a mistake is gone - all you can do is push through without hesitation, and try and invest more time into the preparation and planning phases of the ghosting method.

Now moving forward into your constructions, you do continue to show that general stiffness but there is considerable growth and demonstrating of a stronger grasp of the constructional method. For example, this construction was actually done quite well. You do not skip steps, you draw through your forms, and you're quite conscientious about putting everything down. Your leaves could definitely stand to flow a little better (always remember that the leaf is driven by external forces - similar to the arrows in lesson 2 - don't think of them as being a single static object with a start and an end point - think of them as being something that reaches and extends itself, attempting to go further than its own physical bounds will allow). Again, it comes down heavily to the confidence of your execution.

This one was also quite well done, though don't have your leaves end as you've done where they enter the soil of the pot. Each leaf tapers down to a stem, even if it's not visible in the drawing - it's important to draw each form in its entirety (which you're mostly doing), so as to best grasp how it exists as a concrete entity in 3D space. Having them stop like this and leaving them as an open-ended thing undermines both the illusion of their solidity and your own understanding of them in space.

The rest are a bit of a mixed bag, with others that are quite successful, and others (like this one, this one and this one) falling very flat due to issues already mentioned.

You are absolutely on the right track though, and while there is plenty of room for growth, I still feel fairly confident in marking this lesson as complete. I've said a lot here however so make sure you take the time to read through it all and apply it to the material in the next lesson.

Uncomfortable in the post "Lesson 3: Drawing Plants"

2018-10-19 17:53

This is vastly better. I'll go ahead and mark the lesson as complete, so feel free to move onto the next lesson.

Uncomfortable in the post "Lesson 5: Drawing Animals"

2018-10-19 14:03

• No real harm in drawing forms over your reference image to better understand how it's constructed

• You can do that, but every additional technique you apply while drawing is going to pull on your focus, which is a limited resource. Proportion is certainly important, but it's more important to me that you do everything you can to get your grasp of construction to a solid point before specifically targeting proportion.

• I'd really rather you stay away from pencil for these lessons, even as side-sketches and proportion studies.

• By study your reference, I'm really saying - in a general sense - don't guess and don't work from memory. The biggest problem when it comes to proportion is usually that students don't look at their reference image enough, so they end up relying on the faulty information in their heads. If you're drawing the legs, look at how they relate to, say, the torso (how far above the ground level is the torso, so what space do you have to work with when dropping in the legs), stuff like that. It doesn't go so far as to measuring every little detail, just an awareness of how whatever you're trying to capture at that moment relates to other elements of the object.

Uncomfortable in the post "Lesson 3: Drawing Plants"

2018-10-19 03:59

Definitely better. Left one has plenty of room for improvement, but you're going in the right direction.

Uncomfortable in the post "Lesson 3: Drawing Plants"

2018-10-19 00:24

You did the second from the top left correctly (although you added edge detail subtractively instead of additively), but not the far left center. Take a look at this: https://i.imgur.com/n2QRSG7.png

Uncomfortable in the post "Lesson 5: Drawing Animals"

2018-10-18 20:18

All in all you're doing a pretty great job. There's definitely plenty of room for growth, but you're absolutely on the right track and you're showing that your understanding of space and the relationships between these different forms is improving a great deal. Your constructions feel structurally sound and believable, and while some of the proportions will certainly improve with continued honing of your observational skills, it's all certainly getting there.

There are a few points that I want to raise that should help continue to steer you on the right track.

• The most significant point is that I noticed that you did seem somewhat preoccupied with detail. Often when I see this with students, it suggests that they may not be paying as much attention to establishing as solid of a construction as they can, because they're often thinking too far ahead and splitting their focus. Keep this in mind - detail, no matter how attractive and alluring, holds very little value here. Our focus is completely on learning how to construct solid objects, and no amount of detail is going to fix the weaknesses in our underlying structure.

• You have a tendency to oversimplify feet and paws, though to varying degrees. On some of the wolves, they're just nubs (which shows a lack of attempt), whereas in other places you've at least tried to flesh them out, though either way they do tend to fall behind your torsos.

• At times you do draw smaller than you should, and also smaller than you could. No need to squeeze two drawings into a single page - take advantage of the space you have afforded to you. Spatial problems like construction benefit considerably from being given more room for your brain to work.

• Your chameleon is adorable, and its head is very well structured. Very strongly three dimensional, great work. You'll also notice that it has minimal texture/detail, you really gave yourself the chance to focus entirely on how it exists in three dimensions.

I'm not sure if you've seen this before, but I have this wolf demo which outlines a lot of the more specific issues I saw in how you approached your construction. Pay special attention to what I say in regards to constructing legs with sausage segments and reinforcing their joints/intersections with a single contour curve. Also, while the head construction stuff there is useful, I've also got this tiger head demo that goes further in depth with that.

While you're doing pretty well already, and show considerable improvement by the end of the set, I'd like you to do three more pages of animal drawings taking into consideration what I've said here and leveraging what I've shown in those two demos. For these three pages, don't include any texture or detail - take construction as far as it will take you, and leave it at that.

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

2018-10-18 20:03

Your arrows are looking pretty good - they flow nicely through space, and do so in an organic, fluid fashion. One thing that you will want to keep in mind for the future however is that currently they do feel somewhat limited to the dimensions of space defined by the page - they do move into the third somewhat, but I recommend considering each end of the arrow and consciously determining for yourself one as being farther away from the viewer and the other being closer, and exaggerating the scales of these ends to match. This will help you break more into that third dimension, exploring the depth of the scene and developing that internal understanding that the page you're drawing on is merely a window to a larger, infinite world.

Your organic forms with contour ellipses are looking very solid. The contour ellipses are fairly well done too, though one thing I noticed here was that your contour curves don't shift in their degrees over the course of the form. This is something you do quite nicely with the contour ellipses, so I'm certain you understand the concept (if not you can check out these notes) - just be sure to apply it with your contour curves as well.

Moving onto your dissections, this is a pretty good start. You're clearly demonstrating careful, patient observation of your reference image, and seem to be making a strong effort not to work from memory or fall back to scribbling or more chaotic approaches. One recommendation I have as you move forwards is that when you've got a texture that consists of many smaller, concise, separated elements - like the far right side of the first page of this exercise - instead of enclosing each and every one of these elements in its own solid border, try and think more as though you are capturing the impact those elements have on their surrounding area. The primary impact a form has, is its cast shadow.

So rather than drawing a series of lines that separate out each individual element, think more about implying its presence by drawing its shadow - the great thing about cast shadows are that they can be combined with neighbouring ones to create larger shadow shapes. They can also be blasted away completely under direct light, causing that sort of 'lost-and-found edge' effect that allows us to transition from really dense texture to sparser areas without the kind of sudden shift we see in your attempt. I've got more information about this on the texture challenge page notes.

Both your form and organic intersections do have room for improvement, but they're heading in the right direction. You actually did quite well with the intersections of only boxes, and I'm very pleased that you started off with that. As you add different kinds of forms, it does become more clear that your overall grasp of 3D space still needs development, but it's the sort that will continue to grow with practice and exposure to these kinds of exercises.

For your organic intersections, I want you to try and think more about how those forms would slump and sag against one another, under their own weight. Try and picture them as a bunch of water balloons all piled on top of each other - they're not stiff, but rather need something else to hold them up.

Anyway, I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete, so feel free to move onto lesson 3. Just be sure to continue practicing the exercises from this lesson, as well as the previous one, as part of a regular warmup routine (as explained at the beginning of lesson 1).

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

2018-10-18 16:09

Nice work over all, but I've got a few suggestions as you continue to move forwards:

• Your arrows are looking great - they flow really nicely through space and explore all three dimensions rather than being limited to those defined by the page itself. Not much to add there.

• Your organic forms with contour ellipses fit well between the edges and show a nice, subtle shift in degree over the length of the forms to properly depict how they move through space. Don't forget to draw through your ellipses though - I stress this in lesson 1 and it's something you should do for each and every ellipse you draw for my lessons. It'll help you achieve the appropriate confidence behind each mark to ensure that you're keeping them smooth and consistent. It should be mixed in with the ghosting method.

• Your contour curves are coming along well, though watch their alignment to the central minor axis line. They have a tendency to slant a little, which also throws off the illusion. Contour curves like this are most effective in this context when they represent a slice of the form that runs perpendicular to the form's overall flow/directionality.

• Your dissections' textures are a good start. This exercise is more about seeing how you tackle texture, and you are showing a well developing grasp of observation, and an approach that is growing nicely. I do however want to point out that you are still relying a bit much on general erraticness or chaos to convey certain textures that may be more complex - in general, try to avoid randomness, scribbling, and even basic hatching lines. These are things we use to avoid looking deeper to identify the complex rhythms that are present under the surface. It's not always easy to see this kind of thing, but being able to fall back to simpler, more generic and less appropriate shorthands for texture will keep us from properly learning how to handle them.

• Your form intersections, spatially, are looking good. Your line quality is notably scratchy however - not as bad as it was previously, so you are improving, but there are signs that you're still rushing through and employing bad habits like correcting mistakes by reflex, or automatically reinforcing strokes. The ghosting method is everything - that means patiently working through the phases of laying down your points, ghosting through the motion to build up your muscle memory, and then executing once with confidence. If you make a mistake, no big deal - keep moving forwards, fixing it will only draw more attention to your mistake.

• Your organic intersections are coming along well and convey a good grasp of how they all interact with one another, how they slump and sag where their weight is being supported.

I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete, but if there's any one thing you take away from this critique, I'd hope it'd be the bit in your form intersections about that sloppy linework. While it is improving, that's the kind of issue that really needs to remedied sooner rather than later. It all comes down to patience and discipline, and fighting that urge to be thinking 10 steps ahead. Focus on what you're doing at that very moment, and on nothing else.

Uncomfortable in the post "Lesson 3: Drawing Plants"

2018-10-17 19:37

When it comes to judging the quality of your work, there's little to be gained from comparing yourself to others. There's no standard you're meant to reach here, and there's no real way for you to fully grasp just what route one has taken to reach this point. Some have been at this a lot longer, some have spent their time more efficiently, some have simply been exposed to more along the way. None of that matters, nor has any bearing on you.

Furthermore, comparing yourself to some personal standard of achievement - for example, a rate of completion that you might personally like - is equally unhelpful. There's no way for you to know or grasp how long you're supposed to take to complete any of this, and thinking about that is only going to draw you away from your singular job: providing me with what I've asked for.

All I ask for is relatively simple: I want to see the best you can currently do, with your skills as they are now. I want you to follow my instructions to the letter and to invest as much time as is needed to come back with the best you can currently manage.

Anyway, overall you're not doing particularly poorly. There are some issues I want to address, but nothing stands out as being uniquely bad.

Your leaves flow quite nicely through space, and I think you've done a pretty good job with the basic construction of those forms. When you get into greater edge detail however, I am seeing a pretty common issue students have. Firstly, the way you're adding the extra edge detail doesn't build directly off your simpler, previous phase of construction - it merely treats it like a suggestion, especially in the way that your more complex edges tend to cut in and out of that line. Instead, if at all possible (and it almost always is), build directly off that edge. Your lines should come off the edge, and then return to it - and generally work additively, as though you're adding onto the initial simple form, rather than subtracting from it. Secondly, don't draw a continuous zigzagging stroke back and forth through the entire length of the edge. Build up individual strokes, one by one. I demonstrate this further in this demo.

Also worth mentioning, when your leaf contains sub-sections which themselves can be characterized as themselves being smaller leaves, apply the method to them as well. Don't think of these techniques as being very specific things we do in specific cases - they are general techniques that, whenever you see the opportunity to use them, you should.

Your branches exercises are coming along well, but keep working on getting your segments to aim towards the next ellipse when they stop, so the following segment runs directly on top. Right now you have a tendency for those segments to stop pointing slightly away, resulting in loose ends sticking out along the edge. Remember that the final goal is to have all your segments blend together fluidly into a single perceived stroke.

Your plant constructions, especially towards the beginning, are fairly well done, but one issue I see is in regards to how you handle line weight. You are treating it largely as though you're replacing your "final lines" with a clean-up pass of fresh, darker strokes. Instead, line weight should only be used to clarify the overlaps at specific local sections of existing lines. They should be drawn with the same confidence you'd apply when drawing the initial line (meaning, leverage the ghosting method so as to achieve a smooth, fluid stroke rather than drawing slowly and carefully, which results in a noticeably stiffer mark).

A few pages into your plant drawings, you start to think a lot more about detail and texture, and I think this is where you get hit the most. I'm seeing something that again is common to students at this stage - when you know you're going to get into detail, you allow it to distract you before you even get to that stage. The way you do your construction changes - you make efforts to use less linework, you skip some steps here and there, all because you're focused on the end result. A good example of this is this page, where you jump ahead to all kinds of crazy wavy edge detail on those leaves without the proper underlying, constructed structure to support that kind of complexity. Your actual texture and detail also fails to flow along with the leaf, to the point where you have what appears to be the stem of the leaf represented as texture, and completely misaligned.

Always remember - texture and detail doesn't really matter that much. Construction is everything, and while you are going through the process of constructing your object, you should not be thinking or leaving room for texture or detail. Detail should be left as an afterthought, to be added only to that which already feels solid and well constructed. Our drawings here are not meant to be focused on the end result - they are each and every one of them exercises, meant to train us in our spatial reasoning and construction.

This page was admittedly much better - the texture wasn't great (it was largely quite erratic rather than carefully planned and directly observed, so you'll want to work on pushing yourself to look at your reference more frequently to ensure that you're not working from memory, or trying to auto-pilot your way through a texture), but the underlying construction was much stronger and you took the time to draw each leaf in its entirety. It's not perfect, but it's much better because you were focusing more or less in the right places.

All in all, there's plenty of room for growth, but you're headed in the right direction. Just remember to always focus on construction above all things, and to ensure that when you want to add more complexity, make sure there is enough structure and scaffolding there to support it - otherwise you're probably skipping a step.

I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete, so feel free to move onto the next lesson, and be sure to keep what I've mentioned here in mind.

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

2018-10-16 17:30

Really fantastic stuff! You've demonstrated a really clear and strong grasp of 3D space as well as construction, and you've leveraged your understanding of both to create a lot of convincing drawings of a wide variety of insects. It's really quite clear to me that you've analyzed your subject matter a great deal, and while you applied a good deal of detail and texture to a number of these, you were clearly focused on the construction until that was properly established, rather than allowing yourself to get distracted by the little bits and bobs you may have wanted to apply afterwards. A lot of students do that - they get caught up in all the detail they want to add that they approach construction in a thoroughly distracted manner. None of that happened here - you very clearly compartmentalized the various phases of your drawing.

There are only two things that I want to point out - they're less about problems and more about keeping you firmly on the path drawabox is meant to set out. It's not to say that this is the only path one can walk, but rather it is the one you've elected to travel and for the most part you're doing a good job of it.

The first point I want to raise is that you are definitely a little bit looser and sketchier with your linework. It's not to such a great degree, but you're visibly keeping certain marks very light and faint, gently scratching them onto the page in order to keep them from interfering with the final result. Absolutely keep in mind that drawabox is entirely about confidently stepping through all the phases of construction without trying to hide anything. It's not really about producing a pretty end result, it's entirely focused on what you learn from manipulating these three dimensional forms. You'll notice in many of my demos, like this one, I very clearly draw every single line - nothing's faint or hidden. Afterwards I go back to add line weight to specific areas to clarify overlaps and create a sort of hierarchy of form and detail, but that doesn't impact how I work through it earlier on.

I'm actually unsure of whether you're using a fineliner here or a ballpoint pen - it does look more like a ballpoint in that you're able to vary just how faint your marks are, although it could just be that your pen is dying. Either way, it's best to approach this with a pen that makes a rich, dark line, regardless of how much pressure you apply, varying only in the thickness of the stroke.

The other thing I wanted to draw your attention to was the way you draw your legs in certain cases. The spiders are a good example. I find the best way to capture the legs is to construct the segments as sausage forms. In your drawings, you applied a number of different approaches, some of which came quite close to what I'm suggesting, but often times the forms were just barely connected, with minimal overlap, to the point that their connections didn't feel entirely solid.

Here's how I recommend doing it. Build them with sausages, ensure they overlap well, and then reinforce their joints with a single contour curve clearly defining the intersection. With this, you don't need further contour lines through their lengths (which can needlessly add stiffness and reduce their perceived flow), and it'll keep everything both solid while balancing a nice sense of gesture.

Anyway! You're doing really well, so just keep the points I've mentioned here in mind as you continue to move forwards. I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete, so feel free to move onto the next lesson.