Uncomfortable in the post "Lesson 3: Drawing Plants"

2018-10-16 14:33

Mixed is pretty accurate. There are a number of things you're doing quite well, but I one thing that really jumps out at me is the fact that you're somewhat preoccupied with getting more detailed than you need to, but without working your way up to it and devoting enough time to observation and mindfully drawing your marks with consideration for what each stroke is meant to represent or help capture.

For example, your leaves flow quite nicely through space in the first exercise, but for the most part you approached most of the texture/detail on autopilot ("there's lines here so I'm going to draw a bunch of lines") rather than taking the time to consider how each individual line should be drawn in order to have the greatest impact. Also in other areas, you leveraged hatching purely for the sake of rendering (adding light/shadow), which is something I'd like to discourage. When you shade for shading's sake, you end up missing out on a lot of the finer surface detail that could be communicated through more careful use of your linework. All in all, try and stay away from hatching (I don't mean any and all lines, just the ones that don't actually relate directly to a texture present on the surface). So the second from the top right on this page is fine, and fairly well done, but the bottom left on this page is not.

All in all, texture and detail is a distant second to construction, so it's usually best to push it out of your mind until your construction is really solid. And when it comes to construction, don't rely on any kind of shading. The techniques we've covered in lessons 1 and 2 (contour lines, drawing through forms, etc.) are going to be more than enough to capture the illusion of 3D form, and if you're not confident in your ability to do that just yet (which you should be, that's actually coming along fine), the answer is not to lean on shading as a crutch.

Your branches are coming along, but you certainly do need to be more mindful of how each segment ends, putting more effort into steering them towards the next ellipse so your next segment runs directly on top of the previous one.

Jumping into your actual plant construction, there's some good and some less so. One of the biggest issues I'm seeing across the board is that you're often times skipping steps. We're getting into constructional drawing here and the very core of it is that you never add detail or information that the existing structure and scaffolding cannot yet support. A good example of this important rule not being heeded are the berries here. You drew the outer enclosure, which is correct, but then you drew a bunch of cloud-like bubbly blobs rather than a series of balls all clumped together. That bubbly blob is WAY more complex than individual spheres, and there simply isn't enough structure there to support such a complex form.

Keep in mind that the goal here is not to produce a bunch of visually pleasing images. Each drawing is an exercise in construction and spatial reasoning. The end result doesn't matter, it's all about what you learn about navigating and working in 3D space, and manipulating simple forms to create more complex objects. You've got to make sure each and every form you construct feels solid and three dimensional, and work on developing your own understanding of how they itneract with one another.

Another issue is that on your cabbage page, you've got a lot of different leaves, but you did not draw each leaf in its entirety. Where it gets overlapped by another leaf, you stopped. We want to draw everything completely in order to fully understand how each leaf sits in and flows through space. It comes back again to this being an exercise. We're not going out of our way to create cluttered, messy drawings, as we still want to think before each mark we put down to consider what it contributes to the construction and drawing, but if a line has an important role to play to this end, then it should be drawn fully and confidently.

All that said, you are showing a developing grasp of construction - you're just not all the way there in terms of the habits and focus I want you to exhibit.

I'd like you to do 4 more pages of plant drawings.

Uncomfortable in the post "Lesson 7: Drawing Vehicles"

2018-10-15 16:13

All in all you've got a lot of good work here. There are a few things I can point out to help you continue improving, but you're generally heading in the right direction. Also, while your widths are usually somewhat exaggerated, the length and height proportions are pretty well done and you capture a good sense of each car's particular personality and characteristics.

The first thing that jumps out at me when looking at these drawings is that there's definitely a sense of subtle misalignment in a lot of places. Often times it's a matter of your starting point - the enclosing box - where its sets of parallel lines may not be converging consistently enough.

I also feel that you are being pretty thorough in the early stages of construction (subdividing your box as needed, finding all your anchoring guidelines and such), but one thing that will likely help a great deal is to continue to carry over that thoroughness into actually drawing through the simpler forms you lay into that defined, subdivided space. For example, breaking your car down into fully drawn, concrete boxes and such rather than jumping so soon into the more intricate details of the vehicle. There's just too big of a gap from the scaffolding you have down and the next step you're trying to produce, and you need something to bridge it.

This should remedy a couple major concerns I have in regards to the solidity of some of these drawings. The biggest of these is the fact that whenever you have to draw some kind of a curve, because it doesn't have enough supporting structure preceding it, it ends up being somewhat arbitrary. Remember the nature of a curve - it exists as an approximation of many possible combinations of straight lines, and so it's very easy to end up with a curve that looks as though it could represent a variety of different configurations, and this is what contributes to the resulting lack of solidity.

Instead, we need to draw curves that feel like they represent something very specific and limited - we do that by working in the reverse. We establish the configuration of straight lines first, then round them out whilst sticking as close to that original configuration as possible. Deviate too much, and we lose the specificity and solidity.

The other issue is specifically with the giant meatballs you used for tires on your backhoe. Generally companies like Caterpillar, Deere, Ford, etc. don't use meatballs because they simply don't have the toughness to withstand the kinds of weight and pressure those tires are exposed to on a daily basis. I'd be surprised if a meatball would even manage to hold itself together while standing still.

The issue here is pretty similar to one I see students doing when drawing leaves with intricate edge detail. They'll often make two common mistakes:

• They'll draw that edge detail going in and out of the simpler constructional scaffolding (both building additively and subtractively, which essentially means they're treating that previous stage as more of a suggestion rather than building directly off of it).

• They'll zigzag a single continuous stroke back and forth, mushing all of the little details and features into a single, smoothed, averaged craptacular line that loses any of the nuance and specificity it would have required.

The solution is to build it up with individual marks, and to do so additively - that is, you have a form, now you're tacking more stuff onto it. You're not cutting back into it, and you're ensuring that every further element builds directly off of your original. I demonstrate that in this leaf demo.

In the case of your meatballs tires, it's even simpler than that. The cylinder is a concrete form - as are the treads you're adding to it. These things have thickness, they're solid, you're tacking on smaller forms. Of course, as is with most textures, it may be more worthwhile to draw the shadows these tread forms cast rather than constructing each individual chunky form on its own. It depends on the situation.

All in all, you're doing a pretty good job, but there are some things I want you to work on. So here's what you're going to do:

• 30 wheels. Wheels are fucking magnificent, they're like a microcosm of the whole car, in that they have their own particular personality to them. They come in a variety of shapes and configurations with differently bevelled tires, different treads, different hub caps, etc. This is actually an exercise I'll be adding to the start of this exercise once I've gotten around to rewriting this stuff. Once you're done, submit this to me and I'll do a quick critique.

• Once I've critiqued your wheels, 3 more pages of vehicle drawings. You'll have learned a lot from the wheels, but I also want you to take to heart what i've said here and try to apply it.

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

2018-10-15 15:12

Overall you've done a good job. There's a few things I want to mention but most major points seem to be in order, and there are a number of things you've done very well.

Your arrows flow quite nicely through space, and I'm pleased to see that they very clearly explore all three dimensions rather than being limited to those defined by the page itself. You capture the notion of depth well by exaggerating the scale of either end of the arrow.

Your organic forms with contour lines are fairly well done, with a few hiccups here and there. With your ellipses, your first page definitely marked some struggling in terms of keeping the lines snugly between the edges of the form. As soon as the contour line goes outside of those bounds, or floats arbitrarily within them, you lose the illusion that it's a line running directly on the surface of the object. I also noticed that your linework earlier on was a bit stiff and clunky, though this also improved onto the following page.

For the most part your contour curves were well done, but there were a few cases where your alignment (to the central minor axis line that runs through the center of the form) was off, and where your contour curves didn't quite hook around convincingly on one side. One example of the former is 19, while an example of the latter is 24. That said, these issues often go hand in hand, as misaligning them will generally result in one side being much harder to hook around properly.

Your dissections were phenomenal. You've clearly got a solid grasp of how to approach conveying the smaller forms that exist on the surface of larger ones to make up different kinds of texture. You're not showing any kind of overwhelming noise or any elements that become distracting, and you're doing a great job of balancing them across the form with a strong focus on communicating each individual texture rather than getting caught up in detail for detail's sake. Excellent work.

Your form intersections absolutely demonstrate a strong grasp of 3D space and how those forms relate to one another. The one thing I want to point out is that I absolutely do not want you to fall into the habit - especially in relation to drawabox - of doing under drawings followed up by a "clean up pass" where you replace the lines with more carefully drawn, darker strokes. This is a great way to end up treating the initial construction too loosely, and stiff follow-up lines. In the video for this exercise, I stress the importance of adding line weight locally, to specific sections of existing lines rather than to lines as a whole, in order to clarify overlaps. Don't. Replace. Lines. All your construction should be drawn with the same planning and confidence, as though they are meant to be part of the final drawing - which they are. All we're doing at the end with line weight is organizing them in a visual hierarchy.

Lastly, your organic intersections were well done, though this same thing applies. You did do your construction loosely, and you did follow them up with a clean up pass - so no more of that in the future. Aside from that, in terms of your spatial understanding of how these forms relate and interact with one another, you're doing great.

I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete. Keep up the great work and feel free to move onto lesson 3.

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

2018-10-14 17:15

I definitely agree that you're showing improvement, especially on the front of patience and generally taking your time. It varies from exercise to exercise, but overall you're demonstrating an upwards trend.

Your arrows are well done. They're flowing smoothly through space, and exploring all three dimensions rather than remaining limited to the two dimensions defined by the page itself. I can see that you're mindful of which end is closer to the viewer and which end is farther, and you're conveying that through the exaggeration of scale of either end.

Your organic forms with contour ellipses are coming along, though it is important to take a little more time when applying the ghosting method to push the notion that each ellipse or contour curve must fit snugly between the two edges of the organic form. The whole idea of a contour line is that it runs along the surface of the form - so if the line isn't snug between the edges, if it falls outside of the form or floats arbitrarily inside of it, then this breaks the illusion that it's actually tracking along its surface. Also, keep in mind that the degree of your ellipse should shift slightly over the course of a form, to convey the idea that the orientation of each cross-section changes slightly relative to the viewer's viewing angle. I explain this a little further in these notes. I see some minor variation here and there, but it looks like it may not be intentional in every case. All things considered however, you are doing a pretty good job. In most cases your alignment is correct (though continue to keep an eye on this, there are a number where they're a little slanted), and your ellipses are generally drawn quite confidently and remain fairly evenly shaped.

Your dissections are a great start, and they show that you're willing to take care and really study your reference images rather than just rushing ahead with actually drawing. You're clearly regularly returning your gaze to the reference, and you're working pretty hard not to rely on memory. You're absolutely on the right track here, and you'll continue to develop with practice. I have one suggestion for things with scales or brick-like tiling - try not to focus too much on enclosing each entity (each brick or each scale) entirely. Instead, focus on drawing the shadows those forms cast, rather than the lines themselves. Cast shadows are a lot more dynamic, in that they can expand into larger shapes, which themselves can combine into a large swathe of solid black, or they can be blasted away by direct light into nothingness. Shadows can be lost and found, and this kind of approach leads to a much more fluid, natural texture rather than fully enclosed shapes stitched to an object's surface. The texture challenge's notes explains this further, especially in regards to being able to vary the density of your texture as needed over the course of an object.

Your form intersections are coming along. There's plenty of room for improvement, but you are doing a pretty good job with my main focus here - which is testing your ability to draw many forms together within the same space in a way that they feel consistent and cohesive. I did however notice a few things I want you to avoid in the future:

• You're clearly drawing a lot of your lines to be purposely faint and light. Don't do this - it takes mental effort to draw things lighter and to hide them from the final drawing, and that energy could be better used on focusing on the construction of each form. You're also quite sketchy at times - like with your ellipses as well as some of your lines - rather than drawing each stroke with the full confidence of one being drawn using the ghosting method.

Lastly, your organic intersections are fairly well done. Your line quality is a bit sketchy again, but in terms of the spatial understanding you're demonstrating a good grasp of how these forms would interact and sag against one another.

Overall you're doing a pretty good job. You've got a number of things I've mentioned here to keep in mind, but 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"

2018-10-09 03:23

I'll work that in a little more clearly as part of the general rebuild/reorganization of the lessons. It's true that the main focus is building around a minor axis to start with, but you're right - that could certainly be alluded to more clearly.

Uncomfortable in the post "250 Cylinder Challenge"

2018-10-08 20:18

You're demonstrating a pretty good grasp of what you're aiming for, and all in all you're most of the way there. I'm very pleased to see that you're drawing your minor axes so they stretch all the way through each cylinder (for some reason I keep getting students who only draw them midpoint to midpoint - i think your tendency to draw those little major axis lines at the midpoint is actually a pretty good idea and I may enforce that later to keep students from making that mistake). Your ellipses and lines are confidently executed, and you're maintaining nice smooth strokes and even shapes.

There's only one thing I want to mention - you've focused this set purely on drawing cylinders around an arbitrary minor axis. This is more or less fine, though as you move forwards I do want you to practice starting them inside of boxes as demonstrated in the video. This can be extremely useful, especially when we start requiring the construction of very specific cylinders in specific orientations. Starting them off in a box can allow us to control where they sit in space a lot more easily, whereas achieving the same with a minor axis as the starting point can be a lot more challenging.

This isn't something that really comes into play until lesson 6 however, so you have plenty of time to practice that.

Keep up the great work. I'll go ahead and mark this challenge as complete.

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

2018-10-06 22:08

You've really done a fantastic job here, and honestly I don't agree with your self-assessment (which is often the case - students tend to judge themselves more harshly than necessary, and it's the sort of thing that they learn to do less and less over the course of time).

To start with, your arrows flow quite nicely through space, and they do a great job of exploring all three dimensions including the depth of the scene, rather than being limited to those defined by the page. You've used the exaggeration of scale to great effect.

Your organic forms with contour lines are doing a great job of conveying the illusion of volume and the distortion of the surface they're drawn upon. One area where you'll want to keep working is to get your ellipses and curves to fit snugly between the edges of a given form, so you can really drive home the sense that the lines do in fact run along the surface of the forms. When the lines fall outside of the edges, that illusion is lost. Also, keep an eye on the degree shift of your ellipses. I see certain cases where you were mindful of it, and others where your contour ellipses/curves tended to follow the same degree throughout the length of a form, despite how the viewing angle for each cross-section would inevitably change. I expand on this concept in these notes.

Your dissections show that you're doing a great job developing your understanding of how to observe carefully, what kinds of details to pay attention to and how to ultimately organize them along a given surface (with mindfulness towards how they wrap around that surface). You are at times a little sketchy (like the eagle feathers and the pineapple/ananas) but you definitely show a strong move forward with that sort of thing and are in general ahead of where I'd expect you to be at this stage.

Your form intersections, though they were certainly challenging for you as they are for everyone, show that you not only have a strong grasp of what I'm assessing with this exercise (the ability to construct solid forms that feel consistent within the same scene, rather than contradicting each other in terms of how they affect our perception of space and scale), but you also show an exceptional understanding of what I merely want students to try, and expect them to have considerable trouble with. That is, the actual relationships between those forms, how they intersect and so on. You've done a great job here.

Lastly, your organic intersections are coming along well. You've constructed solid forms, and you're doing a decent job of conveying how they interact with one another. There are some places where perhaps the forms come off as stiff - not stiff in terms of a stiff drawing, but rather that the characteristics of the objects themselves are conveyed as being stiff, where they're not really sagging as much as they perhaps should where their weight is not supported. The forms are still entirely believable however.

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

Uncomfortable in the post "Lesson 3: Drawing Plants"

2018-10-04 22:59

You're definitely achieving a nice sense of fluidity, but it's true - your work does appear rushed in a lot of ways, and as such there's far less solidity to support your fluid, gestural lines than there ought to be. As a whole, it seems like when you're drawing these objects, that you set your focus to a specific part, and then fail to take any other aspect of what you're drawing seriously.

For example, on this page

you've done a fantastic job with the leaves, especially those towards the center. Further out to the side (especially the cluster on the right side) you're putting less effort into planning and preparing with the ghosting method before executing your mark. The cylinder underneath is actually pretty well drawn (I'm very pleased to see that you're capturing the thickness of the pot's rim, for example), but the lines throughout are extremely faint and light, which contrasts heavily with the leaves. You also drew through the ellipse of the base there way too much - you should only draw through an ellipse two to three times, but I'm sure that one was an outlier.

On this one, you really got the flow of the leaves down quite well, and I can see you trying to apply the segment-by-segment method of constructing branches to the the stem (which I'm very pleased to see, though you need to continue working on getting the lines to overlap smoothly rather than having the end of each segment stick out). The bit at the top was notably more haphazard, however.

Now that's not really that bad in this case, as it's a complicated sort of construction to tackle with a lot of smaller details, but it is very clear that you've approached it in a way that involves less thinking and more drawing by instinct. That's the sort of thing we're trying to work against - we don't want to draw from our gut, just putting marks down where they 'feel' right. We want to think through each and every line we put down. Everything should be thought out.

Lastly, on this page the individual leaves on each larger cluster were definitely drawn quite sloppily. In this case, it's best to view each smaller element as a leaf of its own - and so you apply the same leaf construction method (starting with the flow line and then building around it).

So overall, there's definitely a reason it didn't take as long as you expected it to. You've got a lot of strengths with how you draw fluid, flowing lines, but you need to think more before each mark you put down, and you need to make sure every form you put down feels solid. Don't make your drawings disjointed, where one part is extremely faint, and another is much darker, and don't purposely try to make certain lines especially light. Draw each and every line with the same kind of confidence, and then come back later to organize things with a little additional line weight here and there to clarify specific overlaps.

Also, you mentioned that you didn't pay attention to detail or texture - that's perfectly fine, and I can see that reflected in many of your drawings.

Before I mark this lesson as complete, I'd like you to do another four pages of plant drawings, taking into consideration what I've said here and generally putting more time and planning into each mark and each individual form you construct.

Uncomfortable in the post "Lesson 3: Drawing Plants"

2018-10-02 19:13

Yup, that'd be fine.

Uncomfortable in the post "Lesson 3: Drawing Plants"

2018-10-02 18:54

Later in your new set you definitely show improvement, especially on this page. There are a couple things that jump out at me though:

• In my previous critique I mentioned how you were, when constructing leaves, generally adhering to the simpler construction more closely, which was good. My only adjustment there was that you had been cutting back into it in order to add more complex edge detail, rather than building out from it. In these new pages (like this one), you continue to cut back into it, but you also stop adhering to it at all and end up treating it more like a loose suggestion. Look at the demo I linked previously. The middle example is what you're doing now, the right side is what you should be doing.

• With constructions like the prickly pear, don't be afraid to allow your forms to overlap and intersect with one another. In that drawing it definitely seemed that each form was just barely touching the others, which resulted in a weaker connection between them. As shown here, letting your forms overlap and intersect can be a very good thing - just make sure that you establish how they're actually intersecting by placing a contour line to help define it.

• Aside from the first point I raised about your leaf construction, on this page there's a couple issues that stand out to me. Firstly, your linework feels rather stiff. This is likely in part because you're zigzagging back and forth, so you need the added control that comes from drawing slower (instead of zigzagging, construct each stroke separately, each one applying the ghosting method). The contour curves there are also very stiff. I think it may be likely that you are drawing things too small on the page, as it's a common cause for students' linework coming out stiffly in this manner. The other thing I noticed was that you added your complex edge detail with a considerably heavier stroke. I strongly recommend drawing everything without consideration for being overly dark or overly faint - just focus on drawing the marks confidently. Once everything is down, you can come back to add further line weight to key areas to clarify overlaps. In this case, your results end up feeling very disjointed, because the back edge of each leaf (which is much simpler and smoother) is very faint in comparison, and so it doesn't feel like they're all part of a single object.

Not to any specific point, but I think taking a look at these common pitfalls may help as well.

I'd like you to try another 3 pages. You're getting there, but the issues I've outlined here are very important, so try to focus on them in particular.

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

2018-10-02 18:23

Very nice work! I have a couple points to raise, but overall you're doing a great job and are capturing the main focus of each exercise quite well.

To start with, your arrows flow very nicely through space, and come out quite fluidly. One thing I want you to focus on a little more however is how the scale of either end of the arrow can be exaggerated to convey a greater sense of depth in the overall scene. Right now your arrows do feel more like they're flowing within a space that clings to the plane defined by the page you're drawing on - try and think about arrows going from very far away to way up close instead.

Your organic forms with contour lines are coming along great, and you're capturing a strong sense of form and volume. With the ellipses, I noticed that at times you fell outside of the bounds of your form's edges, so that's one area you'll want to continue to work on. That said, it wasn't that big of a problem, and you did a much better job with your contour curves, so all in all you're doing fine.

Your dissections' texture work shows a couple great things - that you've got a good sense for observational drawing and don't get caught up in trying to draw strictly from our flawed human memory, as well as that you are mindful of how you're organizing those details in a manner that avoids making things overly noisy or distracting. You're focusing on communicating the surface quality of each form, and don't go beyond that goal. Great stuff.

Overall your form intersections show a well developing understanding of both how forms sit in 3D space and how they relate to one another within it. I noticed that as you progressed through the exercise, you started using the minor axis of your cones, pyramids and eventually cylinders more frequently, which is great to see. I did however notice that when you were drawing the minor axis of your cylinders, you had a tendency to stop early - make sure that minor axis goes all the way through the entirety of the form, so as to help you with aligning the ellipses at either end.

Lastly, really nice work with your organic intersections. You're showing a fair bit of consideration for how these forms interact with one another, how they slump and sag against each other where their weight is no longer supported. Overall it is very much in line with the grasp of 3D space and form that you've established throughout this lesson.

I'll 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"

2018-10-01 23:35

You're largely doing a pretty good job, but there are a couple things I want to point out to you. Before that however, I do want to mention that overall you're demonstrating a good understanding of 3D space and construction - you're being quite mindful about combining simple forms and I don't really see you skipping a lot of steps through the constructional process.

The issues I'm noticing are as follows:

• What jumps out at me the most is just how thick and bold your lines tend to be. This can be caused by a number of things - the most obvious one is that your pen may simply be thicker than the recommended 0.5mm tip. Alternatively, you may be applying a great deal of pressure to your average strokes. Or, lastly, you may be drawing things quite small on the page (so the relative thickness of your lines ends up looking larger). If any of these things describe you or someone you know, please call your situation, then try to adjust those parts of your approach.

• Overall your linework does feel a little stiff in a lot of cases. Not always - your branches were quite fluid and your leaves weren't too bad on this front, but your actual plant constructions definitely had lines that wavered a lot more and showed a great deal more hesitation. It suggested to me that you were drawing slower, and (as mentioned in the previous point) perhaps applying too much pressure by default. This is a very common issue, and it's a problem for a couple reasons. There's the stiffness, but there's also the fact that it'll damage the tips of your pens and their flow of ink, which in turn will force you to press even harder. A new fineliner really only needs enough pressure to contact the page in order to make a rich mark, so try and hold yourself back a bit.

• For your leaves, I did notice in a few places that when you add further edge detail to the simple leaf shape you've constructed, you do it with a bit of a zigzag, back-and-forth stroke that doesn't quite adhere to the simple edge. Instead, I want you to actually build right off that first edge, drawing individual strokes that come off that edge and return to it. I demonstrate this concept here.

• A last point, not that important since it's not related to construction, but it's about how you tackled the texture at the center of your sunflower. You drew little circles, with each little bud or whatever they are enclosed individually. The lines you're drawing to enclose them don't actually exist in real life. Instead of attempting to draw each bud, we generally try to draw the impact they have on their surroundings. A form's most apparent impact in this situation is the shadow it casts by occluding a light source - ie: its cast shadow. The great thing about cast shadows is that they're incredibly dynamic. They're not limited to a single thin line, and they're not forced to enclose the entirety of a form. They can be thick, they can create "shadow shapes", and these shapes can merge with the shadows cast by other forms to create large swathes of solid black whose contents are merely implied by the way the edges of this massive composite shape behave. Furthermore, the opposite can happen - if a light source were to bare right down on a surface, it'd blast away all the shadows creating a swath of solid white. It's a bit of a complicated thing, but I want you to think on that a bit. I explain it further on the texture challenge page's notes.

Anyway, there's a lot to digest here, but overall you're doing a good job. I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete, but I definitely want you to work on applying less pressure, and generally reducing the stiffness of your linework.

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

2018-10-01 23:17

I really appreciate you deciding to delay it to the turnover of the month. It doesn't actually make that much of a difference, but it's still a very considerate gesture.

Overall you're doing a great job. Your arrows flow very nicely through all three dimensions of space, and push through the depth of the scene to great effect. There's no sense that they're limited to the two dimensions of the page.

Your organic forms with contour lines are generally coming out quite well - your ellipses and curves are smooth and consistent, and the curves especially hook around in a way that really conveys the sense that these surfaces are nicely rounded. The only thing I'd mention is that you'll want to continue working on getting the curves to fit snugly between the edges of the form, so they always give the impression that they're running along its surface. Sometimes they slip out of that limited area, which can break or undermine that effect. You're still doing a great job, it's just the direction you should look to next.

Your dissections are... really impressive. For reasons that you mentioned yourself, they're not exactly what the exercise prescribed, but they do largely provide me with a clear sense that you've got strong observational skills and that there's no issue with you symbol-drawing, or drawing strictly from our basic, faulty, human memory.

You mention that you used a lot more grey - this is definitely true, and it is something I want you to avoid in the future. The lessons are meant to be drawn with fineliners/felt tip pens (though lessons 1 and 2 do allow for the use of ballpoint in a pinch, they're really meant to be done with fineliners specifically because of how they're full black or nothing with no in between).

When it comes to detail and texture, working with such a stark black/white contrast really forces the student to think more about all the forms that are present, and the little shadows that they cast, rather than getting caught up in more hatching-based rendering. In fact, hatching is generally something I discourage specifically in the context of these kinds of high-contrast tools.

Moving forward, you demonstrate a very solid grasp of 3D space with the form intersections. The intersections themselves are spot on, which is admittedly beyond the scope of this lesson (something I want students to try, but I fully expect them to stumble). I expect this will serve you very well in later lessons.

Lastly, your organic intersections are well done, although a couple minor issues were present. On the first page, I did get the impression that the forms themselves were a little stiff (there was less sagging and slumping than there could have been - that isn't inherently bad or wrong, depending on the intended tension in your forms, but it is a difference between my own example).

In the second page you actually do a much better job of showing that kind of interaction between the forms, where they hang limply over the edges of the forms beneath them. The issue I noticed here was really minor, but it was in the cast shadows and how they behave. Remember that these shadows are projected onto the surface of the form beneath them - if that surface changes in a dramatic fashion, then the shadow should replicate this as well. So, where you've got a shadow transitioning from being cast onto one of the lower organic forms to being cast onto the ground, you'd likely see a very sharp change in the shadow. As you've drawn it, it continues on as though it were still attached to the organic form.

Anyway, you're doing some really fantastic work here. 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"

2018-09-29 17:24

This is definitely better. Honestly I think you're vastly overthinking the issues you're encountering. None of this is meant to be some manner of creative training - treating it as such was probably what resulted in you straying so far from the core of the exercise. All this is, is a process of following the instructions and applying the techniques covered. You can think of it as though you're learning a language, and in a lot of ways, you are - a visual language. You seem to be worried that you can't compose sonnets, while still working through the first half of the alphabet.

You're meant to see how I approach it, and mimic it. That's how understanding begins. You're also meant to continue practicing these exercises as you move forwards, in order to slowly ingrain the concepts into your mind so you can start utilizing them and what they teach you in relation to other challenges.

Don't make the mistake of thinking that a single exposure to an exercise will unlock some creative energy in you. That's not how it works. What I see from your latest page of organic intersections is that you are developing your understanding of how forms might interact with one another. Your attempt is not a direct copy of any of my demos - you stacked form on top of form and established how they relate to each other.

Anyway, I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete. Don't overthink this stuff, and don't go applying your own expectations and standards. I am the judge and jury here, your only task is to follow the instructions and complete the exercises - nothing more. If I see any problems, I will point them out to you.

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

2018-09-28 23:24

Your first few sections are quite well done. Your arrows flow smoothly through space and explore all three dimensions including the depth of the scene, which is great to see. Your organic forms with contour lines are looking pretty good, though just a couple points to raise on that matter:

• Your contour ellipses are okay, though often a little bit stiff. Remember that you want to apply the ghosting method, which involves executing the mark with a confident, persistent pace rather than a slower one. While executing a mark, you are not to focus on its accuracy - that's all done in the preceding steps.

• Always keep your contour lines pinched between the edges of a given form - if they're floating outside of it, you'll break the illusion that the line is resting on the surface of the form, which is an integral part of the technique.

• Stick to simple sausage forms. You did actually for the most part, but later on in the set you started to work with more forms that are a little more complex, with midsections that are pinched, or odd swellings towards the ends. A simple sausage form - meaning the equivalent of two balls connected by a tube of consistent width - is really the best for practicing this exercise as it allows you to focus on the core of the exercise rather than getting distracted by less important features.

Your dissections are coming along well, though I agree that your alligator texture is really quite well done. It's the one of the lot that shows the best grasp of the fact that the lines we draw for our textures do not exist in reality - that they're actually shadows cast by the forms present on that object's surface, and therefore not limited to being uniform lines or even limited to having to enclose entire forms or shapes. I do think that you could have pushed your darks even further (plunging large areas into solid black towards either side) but i think this is a great start and shows a great deal of careful observation that many of the other textures don't quite demonstrate.

Your form intersections are alright, though similarly to your organic forms with contour ellipses, the ellipses still feel rather stiff. Additionally, your boxes could definitely continue to use some development - likely related to the fact that it's been a good four months since your last submission. If you apply the line extension method from the box challenge to some of these forms, you'll see that there's a lot of room for improvement in regards to keeping the convergences of your sets of parallel lines consistent.

I'm definitely pleased to see the ample use of minor axes for your cylinders and cones, and while your actual intersections aren't quite there yet, they're not really expected to be. I want students to start thinking about those intersections now in order to push them in that direction, but it's an extremely complex spatial problem that will develop gradually rather than as part of a single exercise. This one's more about your ability to construct forms within the same space such that they feel consistent and do not contradict one another, and you do seem to be doing decently there. Lots of room for improvement, but you're getting there.

Lastly, your organic intersections are... to be completely honest, not really what I asked for. You definitely got carried away with the exercise and drifted from my instructions a great deal, so I'm going to ask you to do this again. Watch the video again and read through the notes, and focus on the exercise as being the act of piling sausage forms on top of each other and getting your head around how they sag and slump around one another. Also, don't neglect to draw each form in its entirety - I don't want you to stop drawing a form where it is hidden by another. Draw through everything and then sort things out with line weight and cast shadows once all the sausages have been drawn.

Uncomfortable in the post "Lesson 3: Drawing Plants"

2018-09-28 18:09

Overall you're doing a pretty good job. You're demonstrating a well developing grasp of construction, and you're pretty fastidious in following through all of the steps, rather than rushing forward. There are a few little hiccups here and there - all of which are entirely normal of course.

The first thing that caught my eye was that when drawing your leaves, you're always rather careful about adhering to your previous step of construction. This is excellent, and I'm very pleased to see it. For example, when your leaves have serrated edges, or other kinds of complex edge detail, you always ensure that the edges return to the bounds of the previous stage of construction. The only issue I noticed was that you tend to construct in a subtractive manner - that is, you do your simple leaf, then when you want to add extra edge detail, you cut away from it. Instead, I find that wherever possible, try to work additively, attaching new components to an existing construction.

This quick demo was actually done for students who tend to ignore the bounds altogether, or treat them more as a suggestion or sketch - but if you look at the drawing on the right side, you'll see that I'm building out from that leaf's simpler edge. Even along its right side, it may look like i'm cutting back into it, but I'm actually just lifting the edge up (rather than actively carving back in). There will always be situations where you've no choice but to cut into a form, but I've found that in most cases it can be avoided and the results tend to come out better. It's merely a matter of getting used to starting smaller and building out, rather than starting bigger and digging back in.

I'm glad that in your branches, you really stuck to the concept of trying to construct the longer edges in components. It is definitely an area that you're going to want to continue practicing, as you are still ending up with the ends of previous sections flicking out slightly from under the next segment - but you're absolutely on the right track. Focus on drawing confidently (it's easy to stiffen up, and I see signs of this in your branches) and applying the ghosting method, and as you draw a segment and it passes the second ellipse, try and aim it towards the third as though you were going to draw all the way (but lifted your pen early). The goal is always to have lines that flow directly on top of one another, merging into one.

When it comes to your main plant drawings, you've got a lot of strengths, but the biggest thing that jumps out at me is that you tend to really dig into detail and texture, and as a result I feel that it distracts you somewhat during the earlier constructional phases. It's something I see pretty often - knowing that you're going to go into detail often causes one to change how they draw during the earlier phases, even though you're not yet tackling that problem. Looking ahead can often be distracting.

It's important that whenever you set out a task for yourself (like drawing a single leaf or branch or even a single line) that you focus on what you need to do in order to draw that line as it needs to be drawn. First we identify the parameters of this mark, based on the context in which it'll exist - but once those parameters have been defined, we focus entirely on ghosting through the motion to build up muscle memory, and then executing the mark with a confident, persistent stroke, fully committed rather than hesitating and worrying.

I definitely see stiffness across your work where I feel that knowing you're going to tackle detail, and perhaps getting a little caught up in the goal of creating something pretty at the end causes you to lose the confidence that is needed to draw lines that are as smooth as they ought to be.

So, I'd like you to do 3 more pages of plant drawings, but this time I want you to stick only to construction. Take that construction as far as you can, but don't delve into any extraneous detail, texture or rendering. Focus on keeping your strokes smooth and confident, and always push yourself to draw from your shoulder using the ghosting method.

Uncomfortable in the post "Lesson 5: Drawing Animals"

2018-09-28 17:49

You show a mix of a developing grasp of construction and a few bad habits or areas of weakness in your approach that are hindering you. None of them are uncommon issues, but they are important to be pointed out.

The first and most significant thing that I'm noticing is that when you lay down your early construction lines - blocking out your masses and so on, you are very clearly doing so with the intent to keep them fainter, to keep them hidden, and while you may not notice, this impacts how they are drawn. There's more hesitation there, and overall less consideration for what they represent in space. It's important that you get used to every act of construction as placing and manipulating forms within space - forms that are solid and concrete, that cannot be ignored or avoided. This means drawing all your lines with the same kind of confidence and not attempting to hide or mask them.

We organize the linework afterwards with line weight and other tricks, but none of that hierarchy is remotely considered until that point. Before then, we weigh every mark we put down - if it contributes to the drawing or its construction, then we put it down. If it is unnecessary to the act of visual communication (be it for detail, for conveying the solidity of our forms or how they relate to each other), or if its purpose is already being performed by another mark, then we don't.

Always remember that each and every drawing here is an exercise - it is not meant to result in a pretty drawing at the end (now you're clearly not aiming for that most of the time, as you do draw through your forms and go through construction, just not as confidently as you could), it is all about training the student in understanding how forms relate to one another in 3D space, how they can be combined to create solid forms, and most importantly, drilling into them the belief that everything they draw is solid and three dimensional. We all start out with the knowledge that we're drawing 2D lines on a flat page, and that what we're doing essentially amounts to trickery and illusion. The goal is to ultimately believe so strongly in the lie we are telling others that it simply becomes our reality. That it becomes impossible to draw a straight mark across a form we know to be a sphere without it curving along its surface, even though it's really just a circle on the page.

That's what all these extra steps we take, and all the exercises themselves, are about. We want to internalize that understanding and belief so that even when we don't go through all the steps directly on the page, we'll still understand what we're drawing in that manner.

That said, as I mentioned early on, there actually is a good deal of impressive stuff here. I loved the way you tackled the furry neck on this elk for example, and if your imgur gallery is in reverse order (which I believe it is, given that the hybrids come at the end), you definitely improve a great deal over the set.

That said, there are a couple pages of direct notes I've written which you'll find here. In addition to this, there are a few demos I want to point you to. You may or may not have seen these previously, but I really want to drill home the process applied in each construction, since you do seem to have a tendency to follow some steps more closely, and others a little more loosely.

• How I would generally approach drawing an elephant. You'll notice that I approach the legs differently from the sausage method I pointed out in my critiques above - I still want you to get used to the sausages moving forward.

• A full step by step how I'd approach drawing a wolf - this is one of the more details demos I've got, and you can see how I'm drawing everything out without skipping steps in order to keep things neat and clean

• How to draw a tiger's head. I noticed that you struggled somewhat with your head constructions. I did see improvement, but there are a few points here (like the eye sockets) that are definitely going to be of value.

I'd like you to do 4 more pages of animals drawings, focusing on applying all of what I've mentioned here.

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

2018-09-25 20:25

I'm not going to give this an in-depth review, as I have a bunch of other critiques to get to and this isn't really a full homework submission, but I do have a couple things to point out:

• On your first and last pages, you're really not drawing the forms themselves as confidently as you ought to be, and you're not establishing how those forms actually connect and intersect with one another. As a result, they feel more like a flat, 2D structure that you've laid down without any real understanding of how they're meant to exist in 3D space, before moving forwards. This in turn makes your drawings continue to feel flat throughout. You need to pay more attention to the earlier phases and ensure that at each and every stage you're doing everything you can to reinforce your own grasp of the illusion you're trying to create. The end result is the least important part, so don't hold back in the interest of keeping the final drawing clean.

• In the last page, a couple things - first when you've got that sort of segmented layering on the abdomen, it should be visibly breaking the silhouette of the form. The segmented layers wouldn't lay flush as you've got there. Secondly, for the thorax, you seem to have started out with a sphere, but then drew a differently shaped ball directly on top of it. This kind of replacement of forms gives contradictory information to the viewer, and becomes confusing. The marks you're putting down on the page are not exploratory sketches or anything of that sort. You're placing solid, concrete forms into a 3D space, and once they're there you need to deal with them. You can't simply act like the previous one isn't there anymore.

The spider on the second page however is looking quite well done, both in construction and with the little details you've added. The weaknesses are mostly prevalent in the first and last pieces, where you definitely make it clear that you're focusing too much on the end result. These drawings are exercises in understanding how complex objects can be constructed from simple forms, nothing more. The goal is not to create something pretty, but rather to reinforce and develop your own understanding of 3D space, and your own belief in the illusions you're trying to convey. If you don't believe what you're drawing is 3D, then there's no way you're going to convince others of that.

That belief isn't something that comes easily though, which is why we go through all of these lessons worth of exercises and practice to build it up.

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

2018-09-25 20:16

To start with, your arrows are looking great. Very smooth and fluid, and they explore all three dimensions of space with a great sense of how they plunge into the depths of a given scene.

In your organic forms with contour ellipses, one thing really stands out: you're not drawing through your ellipses. As a result, they're coming out quite stiff and uneven. Aside from that however, you're demonstrating good degree shifts, and are generally doing a good job. The uneven ellipses do have a pretty significant impact however. Also, continue to work on nailing the alignment of each ellipse (to the minor axis).

Your organic forms with contour curves are fairly well done, although the curves do feel a little shallow. The way they hook around is fine, it's just that the ellipses themselves feel a little squished rather than giving the form the sense of being fully voluminous. Also, I'd recommend getting used to drawing your lines so the tips taper slightly, especially when overshooting those curves - it's an important aspect of giving your lines a sense of liveliness, rather than having them be entirely uniform throughout. Usually that uniformity comes from drawing too slowly or applying too much pressure. A proper confident stroke will naturally taper as you lift the pen up.

Your dissections' textures definitely improve between the first page and the second, largely in that you use less hatching/randomness/scribbling. There definitely still is some there, and I highly recommend that you stay away from that sort of thing. Always try to capture your textures with a sense of intention as to what you're trying to achieve with each mark. Randomness can be an attractive notion, but it always comes out looking sloppy and haphazard. Every texture - even the ones that seem random - follow some manner of flow and rhythm, so it's your job to take your time and identify it.

You definitely achieved the central goal of the form intersection exercise - that is, drawing forms that feel solid within the same space in a manner that seems consistent. You did however make some questionable decisions - mainly in the fact that you applied straight hatching lines to your spheres. Hatching lines will essentially serve the same role as contour lines, in that they rest along the surface of a form and help describe how it deforms through space. If the lines are straight, that tells us that the surface itself is flat - and so your spheres end up reading more as circles.

By and large I wouldn't be so quick to apply hatching in general. There are cases where it's very useful (serving as a visual cue to show which side of a box we've drawn through is facing towards us), but when it comes to organizing the relationships between different forms, I'd sooner leverage line weight to clarify those overlaps.

Lastly, your organic intersections are moving in the right direction, and you're certainly showing a good sense for how these forms interact with one another. The only issue I noticed was that your contour curve lines do feel a little hesitant at times, so keep working on getting that confidence up.

I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete. Keep the points I've mentioned here in mind, but feel free to move onto lesson 3. Also, in case you finish in the next 5 days, hold onto your submission until October 1st at the earliest.

Uncomfortable in the post "Lesson 5: Drawing Animals"

2018-09-25 15:44

Old thread got locked, those of you eligible for private critiques can post your work here.

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

2018-09-24 19:19

These are much, much better. Just a couple things to note as you move forwards:

• Line weight is an important part of helping to organize your drawings afterwards. Since construction involves putting a lot of additional lines on the page, it's necessary to clarify overlaps. I mention in the form intersection video how line weight can be used (specifically being added to certain local areas rather than entire strokes or whole forms) to communicate to the viewer which lines pass in front of others. Looking back I guess you did do this in your last set, but here you seem to have skipped over. Just make sure you're applying the ghosting method even when adding additional weight - previously you were pretty sketchy about it.

• For your organic intersections' shadows, they weren't bad, but always remember that a shadow is projected onto the surface of a form below it. Similar to the contour lines, this means that the shadow shape is going to wrap around the surface of another form, and will be subject to it. Overall you do demonstrate that you understand this at least on some level, though you'll just need to continue to get more comfortable with it.

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

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

2018-09-24 19:14

Overall you're doing a pretty good job. For each exercise, while you're demonstrating some difficulties (which are normal and expected), you show improvement and overall demonstrate that you understand the concepts being taught.

There are a few issues I noticed however that I'd like to share. Some of them you touched on, or at least grazed, in your self-assessment, but in a way that suggests you may be misunderstanding the actual source of some of these problems.

To start with, your organic forms with contour ellipses and contour lines are done well, save for one thing - the degree of your ellipses and curves remain fairly consistent through the entire length of each form. Instead, the degree of the ellipses should be shifting to correspond with how the angle of sight (from the cross-section to the viewer's eye) would change depending on its position in the form. If you're looking straight down at something, it'll have a degree of virtually 0, allowing you to see only its edge. As that cross-section moves to either side, you'll see a little more of its face, and that degree will increase. Of course it's not usually a very large shift, but it is enough of one that it would impact how we draw. I explain this further in these notes.

Next, your dissections are showing a good start. As far as this exercise goes, I don't have any expectations for students, or any real standards for them to meet. It's more of an opportunity for me to see how you think about texture and detail, so I can provide you with a response that helps keep you moving in the right direction.

There are two points I want to raise here. The first is how you think about each element that is present on the surface of your form. It's clear to me that you're thinking of them as independent forms - which is absolutely correct. Texture is made up of smaller forms that exist along the surface of a bigger one. Currently however you are enclosing each form in its entirety with a line.

The lines we actually see when looking an object, or when analyzing the intricacies of its surface, don't actually exist. Instead what we're looking at are shadows - either those caused by ambient occlusion (where light finds it more difficult to penetrate cracks and corners, you can find this effect by looking at any corner in a room, it will be a little darker than the open face of a wall) or by some form of cast-shadow, where the form itself is occluding a light source. The reason this is important is because it means that our "lines" are much more dynamic. If a light source shines directly at them, it will blast them away, effectively eliminating them in places (often resulting in a sort of lost-and-found effect where they taper off to nothingness, and then resume later on). The opposite is also true - if these shadows are present on the opposite side of a form from the light source, then they can start merging together with other shadows to create massive swathes of flat black. In this case, the edges of the "shadow shape" are the only element that can suggest what might exist within the shadow, in how they carve and wrap around the forms that are still in the light.

I talk about this more in the texture challenge notes so check those out.

The other issue I found in your dissections is also present in your form intersections, and it relates to what you were saying about line weight. As a whole, I do not want you to see the process of drawing with line weight as being something involving an underdrawing that is then replaced with heavier lines. It's not a matter of sketching and then later committing to the lines you liked. Everything you put on the page is there to stay (such is the way of ink), and all of it is part of the drawing you're creating.

When you add line weight, don't think of it in terms of adding it to the entirety of a line - add it only to certain local areas, places where you want to clarify a specific overlap of lines. This will allow you to add weight with a more confident, ghosted stroke, since you won't have to worry about following along with the original mark for very long. Similarly, you should never be adding weight to the entirety of an ellipse, certainly not all at once.

Aside from that (and the fact that you neglected to draw through your ellipses as you should be doing for every ellipse you draw for my lessons), your form intersections came out very well. You demonstrated a really good grasp of space and the interaction of forms within it.

Your organic intersections were pretty good too, although some of your contour curves were off at times, in terms of their alignment and degree. Don't forget that overshooting your curves a little can be very helpful as well. I don't want you to get too caught up in needing things to be pretty and clean - presentation is important, but only insofar as we don't want you to be wasting lines thoughtlessly. Every mark should be preceded by considering what it contributes to the drawing or construction, and whether or not its contribution is already being covered by another mark. This also means that you should be drawing each and every organic form in that pile IN ITS ENTIRETY. Don't stop those lines where they get overlapped by another form, otherwise you won't develop a proper and full grasp of how each one sits in space.

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

Uncomfortable in the post "250 Cylinder Challenge"

2018-09-24 18:47

Nice work overall! You've definitely gotten a good hang of constructing cylinders around an arbitrary minor axis. It's certainly true that drawing ellipses in a plane rather than freefloating is a lot harder - but that's all the more reason that you need to practice it more. So, I agree with your assessment that you would have benefitted more from practicing a better balance between freestanding cylinders and those constructed in boxes.

Ultimately building them inside of boxes is really useful when it comes to constructing more complex objects, as it's a lot easier to orient a box in space in a way that it relates in an intentional manner to other forms already present. From there, you're free to find your minor axis and build out that cylinder so that it plays a very specific role in what could be a more complex construction.

This ends up playing a big role by lesson 6, so you do have time. I'll go ahead and mark this challenge as complete, just be sure to work on the point I raised as part of your warmups.

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

2018-09-24 14:51

Nothing wrong with taking other classes and following other lessons - just make sure that when you work on mine, you follow my instructions to the letter.

As for posting your stuff on tumblr/instagram, there's no real need to go out of your way to credit drawabox, but most people use the #drawabox hashtag.

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

2018-09-23 20:03

That is definitely a considerable improvement. Your forms feel considerably more consistent and better thought out. I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete, so feel free to move onto the next lesson.

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

2018-09-23 17:29

If you're interested in details, look at the texture challenge notes. Right now I wouldn't say you're really doing much in regards to details, and are instead focusing more on rendering for rendering's sake (using hatching lines as I mentioned before).

Proportions are going to be an ongoing issue that you will gradually improve on as you move forwards, though I haven't seen anything overwhelmingly egregious to suggest that it's any particular problem that needs to be addressed in a specific manner. As you continue to train your observational skills, your sense for proportion will improve.

The thing about flow in forms is that it is accentuated when you have both lengthwise edges of the given form working in concert with one another. So where you use a sausage form, the two edges are going to be copies of one another, reinforcing that same directional curve. Alternatively, if we look at the tarantula's legs at the end, you've drawn them there with what are effectively stretched ellipses. These have curves that oppose one another, and that contradiction is what results in a sense of stiffness.

We use heavy ink because it provides a number of benefits to the process of learning. We're not using it for its aesthetics or anything like that, just for what it teaches us as we use them. The tools we use here ultimately build up the skills and patience that can be applied to a number of other tools - pencils included.

That said, when and why would we use a pencil? If we're talking about what it is best at teaching us, I don't think there's a whole lot. Graphite is good at achieving value ranges, but charcoal is better so I'd sooner use charcoal to learn that specific quality, or at least charcoal pencils.

I'm distinguishing learning from actually producing results however - pencils are fantastic in that they provide fantastic control, complex value ranges, the ability to make a dynamic range of marks and strokes, and so on. It's a very balanced tool that can be good at accomplishing a number of tasks, but doesn't necessarily add a whole lot to the learning experience.

So when would we use a pencil? When you feel like doing a pencil drawing. Not much more to it than that.

(It is worth mentioning that I'm exaggerating here a little bit, personally I love using Conté à Paris pencils when practicing figure drawing, especially if you use a knife to expose more of the lead).

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

2018-09-22 21:53

These are looking a great deal better, especially the form intersections. A couple things to keep in mind:

• As mentioned in the form intersection video, don't seek to apply additional weight to the entirety of an existing line, as though you're "replacing" it. You should only be adding weight to certain local areas (so sections of an existing line, not the whole thing) to clarify specific overlaps. Since you're trying to apply it to entire lines, you have a tendency to slow down and stiffen up, especially with ellipses. Focusing weight only on specific portions will allow you to more easily add that weight with the same kind of confident pace with which you would have drawn the original stroke.

• There's definitely a noticeable wobbling to your organic intersections' edges. This is partially because of my previous point about line weight, but in general you seem to be drawing those lines more slowly and carefully. You need to execute all your marks with confidence.

• The organic form going up and to the right, towards the right side of the set, has nothing supporting its weight so it breaks the illusion. Always try and focus on how these forms rest against one another. You did a good job with the rest of them, it's just that one that stands out awkwardly.

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"

2018-09-21 22:17

So this is a bit of a mixed bag. In a lot of cases, you're demonstrating an okay grasp of the concepts, but overall I think your presentation, and the general approach (which seems to be a little less focused, and a little more intent on filling the page rather than thinking through each mark you put down) is shooting you in the foot a little bit.

To start with, your arrows flow nicely, but by and large you're not really thinking about how they sit within a three dimensional space. The arrows you've drawn across your few pages feel very restricted to the limited space defined by the flat page. You want to think of one end as being further away from you and the other as being closer, and then exaggerate them to match in perspective. Thinking about how the arrow flows through 3D space is really important - about how it flows from far away to closer to the viewer.

In a few of your organic forms with contour ellipses, you neglected to draw the central minor axis line - this suggests to me that you don't fully grasp how important it is to the alignment of your ellipses. The minor axis is like the spine of the form, defining the direction of its flow. Each ellipse is a cross-section that sits perfectly perpendicular to that flow. The minor axis of an ellipse (the line that cuts it into two equal, symmetrical halves down its narrower dimension) is what defines a line shooting right out of the ellipse, perpendicular to it. Long story short, you want the ellipses to use the organic form's "spine" as the ellipse's minor axis.

Secondly, you're a little haphazard with those ellipses and need to ghost/prepare more beforehand. Keep pushing yourself to get the ellipses to sit snugly between the two edges of the form - not outside of it, or floating inside. The contour lines are all about creating the illusion that it's a line that runs along the form's surface. The only one that won't be snugly between them is the one at the end facing the viewer, because this is where the surface of the form rounds off and we get a sort of "pole".

Lastly, keep to simple sausage forms - you generally are doing this, but I noticed a few that get pinchy towards the center. Better to avoid this, a simple form which maintains a consistent width throughout will allow you to focus on the core of the exercise much better.

Your organic forms with contour curves were pretty well done. You can use a little more work getting their positioning between the edges right, but all in all you're doing a good job and I'm glad that you're applying the overshooting method to ensure their curvature is correct.

In your dissections, they do seem pretty sloppy at times. Not a huge deal in terms of the completion of this exercise (since I haven't really taught much about texture yet, it's more of an assessment), but it does suggest to me that you need to get used to observing your reference much more carefully, and avoiding situations where you draw for a long time without looking back at your reference. Working from memory like this is bad, because your brain is going to oversimplify the things you think you remember, and you're going to end up drawing something more cartoony than you intended. I also see areas where you rely more on being random or sketchy or chaotic. Every texture has a very specific rhythm to it in how its various elements are arranged and spread out over the surface of the form - it's your job to identify what that rhythm is and to convey it in a precise, intentional manner. Never work randomly.

Lastly, always remember that you're wrapping texture around a rounded form. The brick, for example, has been drawn as though it's a flat object. Instead, you'd be seeing a good deal of compression of that texture as it comes upon either edge of the form, because that surface has turned to face away from the viewer.

Jumping forward to the form intersections, there are signs of a good start, but there's a definite lack of confidence here, and just overall sloppiness of presentation that is taking something that is fundamentally not badly done, and tearing it down a great deal. Your hatching - if you should choose to use it, which you don't necessarily have to - is haphazard and scratchy, your application of line weight is usually more in the form of automatic reinforcement of lines (rather than individual applications of the ghosting method), and your intersection lines tend to look pretty sketchy and indistinct.

This is a pattern I'm seeing across the board - you're grasping things, but you're not really taking the time to present it carefully and clearly. You don't have enough faith in what you're doing, so you're sabotaging it a little bit by rushing. Same thing goes for your organic intersections - you're showing a good grasp of how the forms relate to one another, but it's just very sloppy, and those shadows are very scratchy, with their edges getting very hairy (you may want to fill these in with a brush pen or something else to make them a little smoother, if you can't do it cleanly and consistently with your fineliner).

So, before I mark this lesson as complete, I want the following:

• 2 pages of form intersections (rewatch the video and see how I generally approach it, from how I draw each form individually, then start thinking about how the forms intersect and how I leverage my line weight in a planned, thought-out manner).

• 2 pages of organic intersections (again, rewatch the video and take a little more time with placing your linework in general, you're generally lacking a sense of cohesion overall and your forms feel more like a loose congregation of strokes rather than solid masses).

Uncomfortable in the post "Lesson 7: Drawing Vehicles"

2018-09-21 21:49

Honestly, this is REALLY well done. You're employing the concepts covered in the lesson really well, and are demonstrating a propensity for thinking through the process of construction and the manipulation of form in space.

Furthermore, despite your struggles with your ellipses, I think you did a pretty good job with them considering how you were limited, especially towards the end. The wheels on your mustang came out really well, as did those on the 14 wheeler and the DeLorean. Really, you were nailing them pretty well later in the lesson.

There certainly is room for improvement, but you show a great deal of it over the set, as well as a solid grasp of the foundational elements and more. Mostly it's a matter of observation, and an awareness of how - especially in vehicles - each one has its own very specific personality to it, in the way that the curves, and proportions and relationships all come together to give the extremely distinct sense of that specific model. The design of these vehicles is so particular that any one piece being off by more than a certain margin will throw us into that sort of uncanny valley, where we know something's wrong but can't put our finger on what.

That's all very normal, and it explains why, say, your mustang felt a little squat, and other vehicles may not have felt entirely right. It's the sort of thing that'll improve with continued study of a specific object (during one exercise I probably drew a 67 shelby mustang 20-30 times before I could even start to really get the personality right), but I have an exercise that should help you in regards to this particular challenge.

The kind of relationships and character that we find in a car can also be found in their wheels. From the shape of the tires and the extent they're bevelled (tires are not actually simple cylinders, they're more complex than that), the style of their tread, the complexity of their rims, and so on, tires have the same kind of personalities we see in the larger vehicle. So, I've lately been trying to have students try getting more familiar with the finer points of wheels in order to tweak how they see entire cars. And as such, I've been field-testing a "30 wheel challenge".

As it sounds - I'd like you to try drawing 30 wheels, all with as much attention to construction and detail as you can manage. Try all kinds - motorcycle wheels, standard sedan wheels, lawn mower wheels, the wheels on those giant industrial trucks you find in quarries... go nuts. Use it as an opportunity to continue refining your ellipses (which are already coming out really nicely), construction as a whole, and your observation of the finer points of these kinds of subjects.

Once you're done with the wheels, I want to see two car drawings.

As far as I'm concerned, you are done this lesson, and with it the whole lesson set, as you're demonstrating a strong grasp of all the concepts - strong enough to continue pushing them forwards on your own. But before I mark it as complete, I figured I'd give you a little something more to solidify these points.

So, keep up the great work, and I look forward to seeing your wheels.

Uncomfortable in the post "Lesson 3: Drawing Plants"

2018-09-20 16:59

These are definitely better, so I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete. One thing I want you to keep an eye on is largely on the first page there, that your leaves still feel kind of stiff. Always remember how important the initial flow line is, and how it's meant to capture and convey the flow of air and wind that governs each leaf. I often draw it with a little arrow head at the end to remind myself that it's not really something with a concrete start and end point - that it's a force that is merely being represented by this line that doubles as the spine of the leaf.

Feel free to move onto the next lesson.

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

2018-09-20 16:55

Overall, not bad, but there are a couple things I want to suggest or emphasize that will help you in the long run.

1. Whenever you've got two forms that intersect with each other, I want you to draw the line where that intersection actually happens. This will help you reinforce the illusion that these two forms are connecting with one another, and will help really solidify the illusion that they're three dimensional. This line exists on the surfaces of both forms simultaneously, and in the case of two rounded or sausage-like forms, is usually going to be a simple ellipse. I noticed in some places that you leveraged sausages to draw your legs - this is fantastic and is exactly what you should be doing for all your legs (as they convey a strong sense of flow). To add to this, establishing the intersection there really puts the icing on the cake, as demonstrated here: https://i.imgur.com/NQBBjvo.png

2. Later on in the set, you start to leverage a lot more hatching lines - I want to strongly discourage you from this. Hatching is really just a way to shade things without being mindful of the actual textures that are present. Shading isn't necessary to convey solid forms, and if you're not communicating something more (like the surface texture present on that form) then you're not actually adding anything to the image (at least not in terms of visual communication). So if you want to go down that route, take more time to observe more carefully.

3. Make sure you draw each and every form in its entirety. On this tarantula you only drew the portions of the leg segments where they were not overlapped by something else. The reason we want to draw these completely is because it allows us to understand fully how each segment exists in space, and how they all relate to one another. This is a key part to these exercises - after all, these drawings are all exercises, meant to help develop your sense of space and construction.

I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete - feel free to move onto the next one, but be sure to keep these points in mind.

Uncomfortable in the post "Lesson 3: Drawing Plants"

2018-09-20 16:46

Honestly you've done a pretty solid job. Your initial leaves are a little bit more focused on detail than construction, though it's really only an issue in certain more complex ones which I'll touch on more directly. Overall though, your actual plant constructions are looking really good. You've got a great balance of solid construction and a subtle, light-touch with detail that doesn't overwhelm or contradict the underlying structure.

There's only a couple things worth mentioning. Firstly, when you've got leaves that are made up of many smaller leaf-like forms (if they're actually leaves, or even just individual arms), they should be approached with the same individual leaf approach, then merged together where appropriate. So for example, the maple leaf you've got towards the upper right of your first page, it should have been constructed as several separate leaves, then fused together. The dead center of that same page also would have been a good candidate for this kind of process, since you ended up deviating a great deal from the original shape, enough that it wasn't quite enough structure to support what you ended up drawing.

Additionally, if you look at the big leaf with the serrated edges on the last page, just a minor thing - instead of cutting into your initial leaf construction, build the serrations/spikes out from it. Construct additively rather than subtractively wherever possible. There are cases where it's not always possible, but in most cases (and especially in leaves) it is.

I really liked your mushrooms, especially on the second last page, towards the left side. You used the stem/branch technique really well, and the texture was subtle but communicated exactly what you needed to get across.

Overall you're doing great. 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"

2018-09-19 17:11

You've presented a bit of a mixed bag here. Your organic-based exercises definitely could be better, but your form intersections are definitely looking quite strong. Your textural exercises are pretty decent - lots of room for improvement, but that's entirely normal and expected, as this is really more of an assessment of where you are rather than setting down a particular standard you're meant to reach.

Lets start with the organic forms with contour ellipses:

• One extremely important aspect of this exercise is that you keep your forms as simple as possible. A basic sausage form works best, with a consistent width throughout the length. There's no need to make things more complex with pinching through the middle or any kind of waviness, and this kind of thing can definitely undermine the solidity we're after.

• The next priority here is ensuring that your ellipses fit snugly between the two edges of the form, as we're giving the impression that the line wraps around the surface. If the ellipse were to fall outside of the edges, or float between them, then you'd break that illusion. Generally you did a good job of this here.

• Alignment is also key - you want to make sure that the ellipses sit perpendicular to the overall flow of the form. The flow is represented by the central minor axis line - obviously it's a little hard to draw that line perfectly through the center, but it does serve as a good visual aid when determining whether or not an ellipse's minor axis matches that of the overall form. You struggled a little bit here and there with this, but not overmuch.

• Lastly, you want the degree of your ellipses to represent the angle of each cross section's orientation relative to the viewer's eye. Usually this means that you're going to have a subtle shift over the course of the form - which you do have in most cases, but you've got some that stand out as being way wider or narrower than they ought to be at a given point. I further explain this concept in these notes.

As a whole you've not done too badly here with this exercise, but there are definitely areas where you can improve. Also, your ellipses aren't as strong as they could be. A number of them wobble and become quite uneven.

All of the same principles apply to the organic forms with contour curves. You want to stick to simple sausages, keep the curves snug between the edges, keep them aligned properly and mind the degree/width of your curve so it matches the position of that cross-section relative to the viewer's point of view. You also want to keep those curves smooth and confident - this is an area where you suffered a great deal, especially on that first page. It was a little better on the second.

All in all, I think there is lots of room for improvement, but rather than being overt misunderstandings or failures on specific points, you're doing okay on each, but the hiccups with each concept come together to drop you a little below the standard I'd like you to meet. So we'll work a little more on these before moving forwards.

Your dissections are demonstrating a lot of the things I'd hope. You're paying careful attention to your textures, you're not descending into chaos or randomness, you're paying careful attention to your textures, and you're even venturing so far as to break the silhouettes to further convey detail there. All in all, you're doing a good job. One thing that may help a little further is to think of the textures you're drawing as having all these little minute forms (which I'm sure you already realized) - but rather than trying to capture and enclose each individual form on its own, think about capturing them by drawing the impact they have on the space around them.

So for example, lets say you're drawing a sun dial - it's got a big spike sticking out, but what you would actually draw is the shadow that sundial casts. Actual objects in the real world are not enclosed by lines - the things we often perceive as lines are actually just shadows cast when those objects occlude a light source.

The beauty of a shadow is that it isn't statically bound to the object itself. It's cast onto another surface, so it can be a little distance away. It can also merge with other shadows to create larger shadow "shapes", which are filled with solid black and can only convey information about the forms that cast them through how the shadow shape's edges have been carved. Moreover, you can end up in a situation where the light source can hit part of the form so directly that it blasts out all of the shadows in that area - so where you've struggled to transition between where you'd draw parts of a texture to where you'd leave it to be a nice empty rest area, it's a lot easier to pull off if all you're drawing are shadows. I discuss this further in the notes of the texture challenge.

One last thing about your dissections - where you drew the watermelon/pumpkin textures, you got the degrees of the ellipses that establish this chunk wrong. That is, the end that faces the viewer should always be of a smaller degree than the farther end (which we covered in the cylinder challenge).

Your form intersections are well done. You're demonstrating a decent grasp of how the forms sit in the same scene consistently without contradicting each other. This was the main focus of this exercise, as the intersections themselves are meant to be a sort of challenge that you continue to develop on over the course of the later lessons. That said, you did a very good job with the intersections as well. There are some hiccups here and there, but you're showing that you're thinking about these spatial relationships a lot, and that you're making really good headway.

The one piece of simple advice you can chew on for now is that the line of an intersection sits on the surface of both forms simultaneously. So you can go back over your intersections (maybe after a bit of a break), and look at each intersection and ask yourself - does this line actually sit on both surfaces at the same time, or is it at any point plunging inside of the other form?

Lastly, your organic intersections are okay. Definitely some of the same weaknesses as the organic forms exercises, though all in all you are demonstrating a grasp of how the forms sag and slump against one another. One thing you'll also want to pay a little more attention to is how the casting of shadows works. You seem to demonstrate a partial grasp of it, where you are definitely projecting those shadows onto other surfaces, but wherever you have a sort of valley that a shadow should be plunging into, you're a bit too timid and tend to ignore it. Here's a comparison of how you did it across the top, and something a little more in line how i'd do it.

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

Uncomfortable in the post "Lesson 3: Drawing Plants"

2018-09-19 16:46

Your leaves and branches exercises are frankly looking really good, so congrats on that. Just one point on those: when you're adding more complex edge detail, you're doing a good job of keeping the individual bumps and waves separate (rather than zigzagging back and forth the whole length), and I'm glad that you're adhering to the previous step of construction's edge. In some cases however you'll add the complexity as an addition to the original leaf shape, and sometimes you add it inside in a sort of subtractive fashion. While it's not always clear which one you should use, generally I'd lean towards being additive rather than subtractive. For example, you've got one towards the bottom right of this page which was drawn subtractively and should have really been done additively. In general with construction, if you can at all help it, avoid cutting back into your forms.

On this page towards the middle at the top, you've got a great example where what seems to be subtractive is appropriate. Towards the right side there, you've got the waves going back into the silhouette you'd established - this isn't actually subtractive though. Because we understand this exists in 3D space, those ripples are actually still additive, but they happen to overlap back over the original silhouette. There are still places were proper subtraction is necessary, but it's virtually never in the context of leaves, and in most other cases should still be avoided altogether.

Now, you clearly know what you're doing in regards to these simpler exercises, but when it comes to actually drawing things you can see, you lose your grip on the core principles of construction a fair bit. You get a LOT more haphazard with your linework, a lot sketchier and tend to think a lot more on the page than in your head. You're exhibiting here a lot of bad habits that I want you to break sooner rather than later.

Remember that you are not sketching and exploring as you draw - you have to think through each and every mark you're about to put down and weigh what it's meant to contribute to the drawing and how it's going to help you develop it further. Some lines contribute to the underlying construction, others to communicate a specific aspect of texture. If however a line does not contribute anything, or if its purpose is already being served by another line, then you should not be drawing it at all. Following through the ghosting method for each and every mark is a big part of this, because it gives you the time to think and consider these important questions.

Constructionally you're generally doing okay, but a lot of it is getting lost in just how messy these drawings get. There are a few additional things I want you to keep your eye on however:

• When drawing flower pots, always remember that they are compound cylinders and must therefore be built around a central minor axis line.

• Always adhere to your previous levels of construction as though they're a scaffolding that helps support detail. For example, the petals/leaves/whatever of this plant have complex edge detail that strays a great deal from your simplified levels. This suggests that you're either not adhering to your construction enough, or that you should be placing some kind of an intermediary level of construction in there.

Before I mark this lesson as complete, I definitely want to get this sketchy behaviour under control. I'd like you to do 4 more pages of plant drawings, focusing entirely on construction with no texture or detail. Approach them exactly as you did with the leaf and branch exercises. You are definitely capable of doing it, I believe you just got overwhelmed by the prospect of actually drawing concrete objects you could see.

Uncomfortable in the post "Lesson 3: Drawing Plants"

2018-09-19 16:19

Overall you're doing okay - there's definitely a lot of room for improvement, but at this point it's expected due to how you're approaching things in a rushed manner, so I'll try not to touch on that aspect of things. I do however recommend that overall, if you're dead set on this kind of approach, that you strongly prioritize construction over detail and texture, so you at least come away with a good grasp of the main focus of the drawabox lessons.

So for example, in the leaves exercise, don't worry about the veins and such, or the texture of the surfaces - put all your attention towards capturing the flow of these flat forms. Right now I think you're getting a little distracted from the idea that each leaf is meant to capture and convey how outside forces (mostly wind and air currents) influence this simple form. Because you're more preoccupied with the detail of each piece, your leaves tend to come out a little bit more stiff.

Here are some thoughts on your leaves.

For your branches, one of the main focuses of the exercise is to learn how to create a longer line out of segments without it looking chicken-scratchy. So the issues you were running into were normal, but drawing the entire line with a single stroke isn't really a valid solution because you're inevitably going to run into a line that you won't be able to cover in that manner. You need to be able to get your strokes to flow together smoothly, and practicing this approach is how you're going to get there. You essentially have to ensure that when your previous stroke ends, it is aiming towards the next target - so the following stroke (which will start a little earlier and overlap the end of the previous one) will actually run directly on top of it and continue on as an extension of it. So the fact that you went with trying to pull things off with a single stroke through the whole length is something that does impact your later drawings a fair bit.

Your initial construction of those mushrooms is decent, and I'm pleased to see that you're minding how the different forms connect to one another. You do however have a bunch of lines along the caps that seem to be caught between serving as contour lines and texture. At this phase, you shouldn't be worrying about texture and detail at all, and if they are contour lines then you are definitely doing them too sloppily and compensating by drawing more of them. Always go for fewer contour lines that have been drawn more carefully, rather than a bunch that are poorly planned.

When you get to texturing them, I strongly recommend that you stay away from any cross hatching altogether. Cross-hatching is basically a lazy stand-in for actually observing your reference carefully to identify the textures that are present, and if you catch yourself using it, there's an extremely high chance that you're selling yourself short.

Jumping ahead, this page raises an important issue. You've drawn the leaves, for the most part, so that when one leaf overlaps another, the second is drawn only partially. It's very important that you get used to drawing each and every form present to completion. Similar to the form intersections, you need to understand how each and every form exists in space before worrying about how it's interacting with the forms around it. We're not here to create a pretty, clean result - each and every drawing is an exercise to further develop your understanding of 3D space as well as your own belief that what you're drawing actually consists of solid forms.

In this cactus, it ended up coming out quite flat - as though the cactus itself were just simple cardboard cutouts. This is because you didn't go to any steps to actually give the cactus any illusion of volume or being three dimensional. That said, if it was actually intentional, then you did a pretty good job - because it really does look like a cardboard cactus in a three dimensional pot.

For the bumps along the outside of the cactus, two things:

• Draw each bump individually, rather than with a single zigzagging line going back and forth. The continual, unbroken flow undermines the impression that these bumps are created by different elements, and as a whole helps further flatten out the form, kind of like when you want to cut a wavy edge out of construction paper, and you do so by continually going back and forth with your scissors. It feels more like construction paper pasted onto the page.

• Your flower pot is decent, and I like that you drew the inset ellipse to give it some thickness. Don't forget to draw through all your ellipses, and most importantly, to draw the whole thing around a minor axis line. Generally you've done a better job with this on this page, though in that one your the end of the cylinders facing the viewer should have a narrower degree than the end facing away - you did this backwards.

I'd like you to do one more page of leaves, two more pages of branches (done correctly with segments) and two more pages of plant drawings with construction only and no detail or texture.

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

2018-09-18 15:19

Ah, I see it now. Looks like you did respond to my message, but didn't mention your reddit username. I'll note it down and give you the appropriate flair - you should be clear to post your lesson 1 homework.

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

2018-09-17 23:38

Your constructions, and your general use of the construction is pretty much on point. You're starting out simple, keeping things within the bounds of their previous constructional phase, you're mindful of each individual component and you're not really skipping any major steps. I can say with confidence that you have a good grasp of 3D space, and how forms can be combined within it.

Construction-wise, the only issue I can really see is with the stapler, where the back of it seems to have collapsed somewhat - may have been useful to create a cross-section towards that back area to help bridge the transition. So basically to have constructed a few slices along the length of that top part, and then connected them.

Now, what is an issue is what I've mentioned many times - it's the basic stuff. Your lines aren't terribly confident or stable, and your boxes tend to be skewed more often than not. Your understanding of the material is on point, but your execution of the basics - the kinds of things we learned in lessons 1 and 2 and the box challenge, the things we practice continually as part of our regular warmup routines, simply aren't there.

That's what needs to receive the bulk of your time and focus. I cannot claim that you're not working your ass off at this - you clearly are internalizing these later concepts of construction, but all the technical aspects that are meant to support their use are lacking.

Now, the next lesson - which you are absolutely cleared to move onto, since these lessons are about understanding construction, and you certainly do - allows you to use a ruler and an ellipse guide. I strongly encourage you to do so. You're also allowed to work with a ballpoint pen.

I have had a few other students who've struggled in this manner, and they felt that being able to separate the process of executing the line from the rest of it helped immensely. They still did have to work on their basic skills separately, but there is something to be said about at least being able to pull it all off with the appropriate tools, even if your ability to freehand it all isn't there yet.

So, as I said - I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete, so feel free to move onto lesson 7. If you're at all allowing the basic exercises to fall by the wayside, make sure you pick them up again in a meaningful way. If you have been doing them diligently however, then submit some of those to me and we can find out if you're approaching them incorrectly somehow, or focusing on the wrong thing.

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

2018-09-17 23:10

The yellow area would be marked as red - there'd be no "partial" dominance for a specific location. Either one form is dominant, or the other. Don't stress too much about it though - I'm not looking for the intersections to necessarily be correct every time. I'm more interested in your ability to draw forms that feel like they exist within the same space and same scene, and generally feel consistent with one another.

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

2018-09-17 22:42

Hey! I'm glad you saw the response to the other student, though I think you may still have misunderstood based on you saying "I'll finish Lesson 2 and repost for feedback then". New students must start at lesson 1, get that critique and then move onto the next only once it's been marked as complete - so your first submission should be lesson 1, and then I'll let you know what to do afterwards.

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

2018-09-17 16:03

Hey, a couple that you should be aware of:

• Private critiques from me are only available to those who support drawabox on patreon - it doesn't seem that you're currently eligible, so you can post your homework directly to the subreddit for a free critique for the community instead.

• My students (those who are patrons and help support drawabox) are required to start from lesson 1 and to submit the entirety of each lesson together (all sections of the given lesson, rather than one at a time), and must wait for the lesson to be marked as complete before moving onto the next step. This is necessary so I can point out any underlying issues before the student moves onwards to lessons that may not reveal those problems as clearly.

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

2018-09-17 15:54

Of course, ask away.

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

2018-09-16 22:08

I guess that works too. There was one thing I think I forgot to mention - in regards to the form intersections, one good idea would be to practice doing some pages of these with only boxes, to help get a sense of how they can relate to each other in space. This can often help as a stepping stone to doing the exercise with all of the forms.

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

2018-09-16 21:56

Definitely a good start, though there's a few things to address before you move forwards.

Your arrows are looking good, and both flow quite smoothly and also explore all three dimensions of space - depth included. That's great to see.

Your organic forms with contour ellipses and contour curves are pretty good, though I want you to pay more attention to how the degree of each ellipse/curve might shift over the length of the form. I explain this concept a little further here.

Your dissections are pretty good, but there's a couple things to keep an eye on. Firstly, I can see some definite attempts at wrapping the textures around the rounded forms. Some of these come out well, but often times you're not quite accelerating that curvature as you reach the edges. The turtle shell for example is still quite flat as it reaches the edge - each hexagon should not be maintaining its own straight lines, the lines themselves should be curving as they come over that threshold.

Additionally, think more about how your textures are made up of three dimensional forms of their own, and how that's going to break and alter the silhouette of the sausage. For the turtle shell again, if you were wrapping a turtle shell around a sausage, there would be visible bumps along the sides where the shell rises and falls.

Your form intersections (the ones with the boxes and pyramids) are generally pretty good, albeit you don't really fill up the pages. Once you get into cylinders and cones however, things start to go awry. Keep in mind that in the instructions, I did mention to avoid drawing overly stretched forms (some of your cylinders fall into the territory of being much longer than they are wide, which brings a lot of unnecessary complexity into play from additional perspective foreshortening). Also, you should be drawing your cylinders (as well as your cones) around a minor axis. To learn more about that, you can check out the 250 cylinder challenge notes. Also for pyramids in particular, take a look at this.

While your organic intersections do show some good qualities, they look a little.... sad. Fundamentally, the issue is that a lot of the shapes you've drawn have very weak, wobbly edges, which vastly undermines the solidity of those forms. You generally want to stick to simple sausage forms with smooth, consistent edges, and focus on how they slump and sag around the forms that support their weight. Think filled waterballoons being stacked, rather than used condoms.

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

• 2 more pages of form intersections including cones and cylinders, with pages filled.

• 2 more pages of organic intersections

Uncomfortable in the post "Lesson 3: Drawing Plants"

2018-09-16 21:43

Overall, your work is fantastic. You're demonstrating a well developed understanding of 3D space and construction. Your forms feel solid, tangible and entirely believable. I honestly don't have a lot to elaborate on, you're more than ready to move onto the next lesson. I have only one piece of advice to offer, and for that I've drawn a quick demo.

As shown here, when you're drawing your leaves (or really following any kind of construction where you've laid down an earlier), it's important that you don't treat the previous stage as being something loose and approximate. You need to treat it like a scaffolding - something you have to adhere to as the structure that supports any further forms or details.

So if you draw a basic leaf shape, use it as the foundation for the wavier edge details, having them rise from and fall back to that initial shape. If you've got a flower with petals that radiate outwards and you establish that range with an ellipse, use the ellipse as the absolute bounds, the furthest those petals will extend.

Oh, also, with leaves that have many major arms or sections (like the top left leaf on the first page), it's best to break that down into many sub-leaves and then merge them together afterwards.

Side from that, you're really doing great. Keep up the good work and feel free to move onto the next lesson.

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

2018-09-15 18:31

Definitely an improvement, especially with the organic exercises. The form intersections are getting better, but they do need work. As you draw each form, you'll want to think continually about how the line you're drawing at a given moment relates to the other lines present, especially with those it's meant to be parallel to. This is essentially what I mentioned at the end of your box challenge, and as long as you continue to consciously think about it as you draw, you will improve on this front.

Another thing I noticed was that you're quite timid when it comes to the overlaps of your forms. You only ever had them overlap a little, which suggests to me that you were thinking about how the forms were going to intersect while you were drawing them. Don't. Only focus on putting another form in the scene, and figure out the intersection later.

Lastly, your cylinders, cones and even pyramids would benefit from being drawn around a minor axis line. Give the cylinder challenge notes a read, as they cover this concept. Also, if you look in the subreddit side bar, there's a link to a large demo dump where I've got some demos covering cones and pyramids.

I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete. Make sure you continue practicing all the exercises you've encountered this far as part of a regular warmup routine, picking 2 or 3 to do for 10-20 minutes at the start of each sitting.

Also, based on your current pledge, I feel that you've hit your submission limit for this month.

Uncomfortable in the post "25 Texture Challenge"

2018-09-15 18:22

I'll be completely honest - you raised your pledge to become eligible for a critique, and I think you should lower it back down. Not for any negative reason - quite the opposite.

This work is phenomenal. You're doing exactly what was asked of you, and conveying an extremely strong grasp of how to convey all the little forms present on a texture through the shadows they cast, rather than attempting to establish each form on its own.

You've analyzed each texture carefully, and have distilled them into a tool that can be used in any drawing, in any lighting scenario. The dense-sparse transitions are fantastic.

So, I have nothing to offer in terms of critique, in return for your increased pledge. You may consider this challenge complete, and with flying colours. You should be proud of yourself, because I certainly am.

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

2018-09-12 20:29

I price my tiers based on one critique a month, and accept that people will likely fall between one and two submissions. It's a balance between determining a valuation of my time, against how low I'd like to keep the price barrier. For the most part, I lean in favour of keeping prices low, expecting that it'll balance out overall with students who don't submit at all some months. On that basis, you're pledged higher so where it stands currently it's not a big deal. I have however in the past cut people off if they made too many submissions within a month relative to their pledge, so it is something I keep track of.

All that aside, there are more important problems with attempting to rush through the material quite so quickly. You don't only learn during the time spent actually practicing - a good deal of the processing and internalization of the concepts you've been exposed to happens in the time between. So if you're going full throttle during every waking hour, you aren't going to necessarily be learning as efficiently as you could.

This also means that while you'll end up spending more time on the inevitable revisions, you'll also end up putting me in a position to have to reexplain concepts you may have understood better, had you given yourself a little more time to actually let it ruminate, which would inevitably decrease the number of homework submissions I'm willing to critique before telling you to hold onto your stuff until the next month.

Above all, I want to make it clear that with pledges and critiques aside, working at this pace is not a good idea. It might be better for you to take your time and participate in Inktober 2018 in a way that is more in line with its original intent. Inktober isn't about drawing cool things and impressing people. It's about breaking out of one's comfort zone and learning to be proud of the fact that you drew anything at all, and fighting back the blank canvas. The quality of the results isn't supposed to matter.

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

2018-09-12 17:47

Now, I will critique this, but I want to make one thing very clear: Don't treat my instructions or assignments as suggestions. You've shown a number of signs of this, and it's not working to your benefit. You're paying for the structure of receiving reviews and being told when to move forwards, and for me to identify what you need next - so stick to that. It's pretty obvious that you completed this stuff prior to pledging and submitting for critique, so I'll let it slide, but I hope you haven't done more than that.

To start with, your arrows are alright - they're a bit stiff in how they flow (the lines wobble a little), so that needs a bit of work, but all in all they do demonstrate convincing movement through 3D space. To better convey how they explore the depth of the scene however, I recommend that you exaggerate the scale of either end - pick an end that is farther from the viewer and an end that is closer, and push the scale of the closer side.

Your organic forms exercises were considerably... distracted. You added a lot of your own flair, and in doing so, demonstrated exactly why at the beginning of lesson 1 I make a pretty strong point of not doing that. If you look at lesson 1 again, you'll see at the bottom of the introductory text, a red box with this message. As described there, in taking your own path with this exercise, you neglected a number of instructions:

• You should be keeping the forms you draw simple - basic sausage forms are really the best way to focus on practicing the use of contour lines. You did keep things relatively simple in the contour ellipses section, but went off the rails with your contour curves.

• Similarly, the minor axis line is extremely important when it comes to learning how to align your ellipses and curves. Again, you used them for the ellipses but not the curves.

• The contour ellipses tend to be very loosely drawn, so those definitely need work. Apply the ghosting method so as to improve your control without sacrificing the confidence of execution.

• Your contour curves are hit and miss - you've got some that are okay, and others that feel very stiff and don't really convey the illusion that they're resting along the surface of the form.

• You'll notice that I don't cover shading at all, unlike a lot of other drawing courses. There's a reason for this - I see it as a crutch. When it comes to conveying the illusion of 3D form, a lot of beginners will try to fix a form that feels flat by piling on more and more shading, without consideration for the other elements that can make a form feel solid and believable. As such, they neglect the importance of contour lines, of silhouette, and of drawing through one's forms, relying only on this singular technique. I push the idea that shading should not be used as a tool to convey form - that before you ever apply it, that form should already feel completely solid. For that reason, I don't want students to shade their forms, so as to keep them from being distracted from these core techniques.

Your dissections are coming along decently. What I'm mainly looking for here are signs that you're picking up on how to draw from observation, and whether or not there are any visible tendencies to work from memory (due to either not observing enough, or spending long periods drawing between glances at your reference). Some of your textures here show that you're coming along well on this front - the avocado for instance, and the green toad, as well as the lemon. The watermelon does look decidedly more haphazard however.

One thing that might help, especially in situations with dense collections fo smaller forms (like the snake scales) is instead of enclosing each scale individually with an outline, try and focus more on the impact that scale has on its surroundings. There are two main impacts a form can have - it can occlude a light source and cast a shadow (which is actually what we really see when we observe the presence of lines on an object), and it can break and cause irregularities in its silhouette. Keep in mind that when I'm talking about cast shadows, this is different from the kinds of form shadows I said to avoid above. The beauty of cast shadows is that unlike what we know lines to be, they can vary considerably in thickness, going from simple line-like marks to full on shadow shapes. They can also merge with others to create larger swathes of solid black, or they can be blasted away (as if a light source were shining directly on the surface) - both situations that create nice areas of rest with minimal contrast or visual noise, which are important to balance against the areas of "interest".

Moving onto your form intersections, they are definitely weak. This comes from the fact that your mental model of 3D space simply isn't there yet - on account of you skipping past my recommendation of completing the 250 box challenge first. The box challenge is very much about pushing yourself to think more in terms of how each object sits in space, which is the predecessor to this particular exercise, which in turn focuses on how different forms can relate to one another in space.

The intersections themselves are intentionally challenging, and I don't expect students to nail them just yet. I do want them to attempt them, but it's the sort of thing that takes a lot more development to really nail. What I am interested in however is whether or not a student is able to convey the sense that these forms exist consistently within the same space, without conveying contradictory information about the space they occupy. For example, having a box that foreshortens quickly and dramatically next to a box that is much shallower in its convergence towards its vanishing points would immediately set off alarm bells without additional information being provided as to why this would be the case.

That said, you're not there yet. Your forms still aren't really solid, your linework is rather shaky and uncertain, and there's a visible lack of confidence overall. Funnily enough, the intersections themselves actually are coming along well - the few that you've got there are generally correct. But it's the underlying ability to draw those forms and capture their solidity that is sorely lacking.

You did mention that you've already completed almost half of the challenge, which is a start - given that you undoubtedly started on them before receiving my critique for lesson 1, I do hope that you read the notes and watched the video before starting. You are obviously drawing through your forms, which is good - but applying the techniques of extending your lines upon the completion of a page to identify where you've got issues in your convergences is very important.

Your organic intersections are alright, in that you are conveying a good sense of how the forms rest and slump against one another. The contour lines do seem a little half-hearted though, and some of your shadows don't really feel as though they're being properly projected onto the surfaces beneath them. Rather, it feels more like the shadows are glued to the forms casting them, like you've just gone overboard with thickening their outlines instead.

First, obviously, I'd like you to complete the 250 box challenge. Once that is done, and I've given you the OK to move onto lesson 2, I'd like you to redo the following:

• 1 full page of organic forms with contour ellipses

• 1 full page of organic forms with contour curves

• 4 pages of form intersections

• 1 page of organic intersections

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

2018-09-12 17:13

Great work! There are a few little hiccups - most of which you identified - though overall I do think you may be a little tough on yourself. The issues you mentioned are merely the kinds of things you keep in the back of your mind as you continue to move forwards, so don't dwell on them much.

For your arrows, I do agree that exaggerating the scale (specifically making the closer end much larger) would have really helped sell the depth, but overall you did a pretty good job of it as is, and conveyed a good sense of how the arrows flowed through space. Your organic forms with contour ellipses are solid, and the contour curves are coming along well - you'll want to work on your ability to place the curves directly in between the two edges of the form to make them fit more "snugly" (remember that the curve is meant to give the illusion that it is a mark running along the surface of the form, so that snugness is important), but you're making excellent headway and are almost there.

You definitely knocked it out of the park with your dissections, and I disagree that even your first attempt was poor. You definitely did improve over the set, but you've gone well beyond what I expect to see for this exercise, as it's largely an opportunity to demonstrate to me how you deal with detail and observational drawing, rather than actually than a challenge with a set standard needing to be met. You've shown an excellent eye for detail, both in identifying the complexities present in your reference image as well as identifying how they can be organized across the surface to give the same impression. I'm also pleased to see that you're not making much use of hatching lines, and instead study your reference more closely to find more suitable patterns of linework that reflect the texture more closely.

You'er right to be confident in your form intersections - they're fantastic. What I'm primarily testing here is your ability to draw solid forms that feel as though they exist consistently within the same space. The intersections themselves are something students will generally be weaker at, especially now, and is the sort of thing that is expected to improve over time. You're doing a good job with keeping the forms consistent within the space (I do agree a little with your assessment - they're not far off, but they do sometimes feel a little more foreshortened than the surrounding forms), and your intersections show a very well developing understanding of how the forms relate to one another.

Lastly, your organic intersections are entirely clear and well organized already - there's no need to push the line weight further, and to do so might risk going overboard. At a glance, I can fully grasp each individual form and understand (as well as believe) in their solidity. You also convey their sense of weight very well, in how they sag and slump against one another. The subtle line weights you've applied there, as well as the shadows work marvellously towards organizing the details without outright replacing things with a "clean up pass" (which is something I discourage).

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

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

2018-09-12 01:35

Overall, nice works! A few areas are better than others, but all in all you're demonstrating a really well developing grasp of 3D space, and the relationships between your various forms. Your arrows flow well, and demonstrate a full grasp of all three dimensions, with the exaggeration of scale delving nicely into the depth of your scene.

Your organic forms with contour ellipses are generally decent, though on a couple your alignment is a little slanted relative to the minor axis, and the degrees of those ellipses often seem a bit wide, especially through the middle of the forms. Doesn't really give a good sense of how those cross-sections shift relative to the viewer's eye. This is an issue that carries quite strongly into the organic forms with contour curves. In addition to this, I don't think this was your best page of the contour curves - you've got some better ones in your warmups, largely since you didn't really apply the overshooting method here, resulting in your curves hitting the edge at too sharp of an angle.

All that said, jumping ahead to your organic intersections shows that your capacity in all of these areas has improved considerably. The forms feel much more believable (better degree choices, contour alignment AND curvature along the edges), so it does look like you've grown a fair bit since doing these pages.

Moving forwards, your dissections are fantastic. A lot of very refined observation and consideration for the complexities of each texture. I don't see you descending into chaos or randomness at all, and at the same time you're balancing the visual noise quite nicely, establishing areas of rest alongside the areas of interest.

One thing that I want to mention that may help moving forwards is about how to think about the elements you're drawing. You're visibly on the cusp of this, so I'm just going to give you a little bit of a nudge. It's normal to be in the mindset that you've got these forms present on a surface, so you want to establish each one individually with some kind of enclosing line. For example, your squid nipples. You've drawn each one in its entirety, a neat little cylinder upon the surface. You did a pretty good job at that, taking their orientation into consideration, breaking the silhouette and all.

Instead of drawing each one so completely however, when detail gets this numerous and especially when it gets small, we stop drawing the form itself, and instead start drawing how it impacts the area around it. When a form is present, one of the biggest impacts it has is the shadow that it casts by occluding a light source. These cast shadows are extremely versatile, and can be used to imply the presence of forms without having to draw each and every one to completion. In addition to this, those shadows by their very nature can merge together, creating larger more complex shadow shapes whose interior is flat, but whose edges can convey a great deal regarding the forms present there. This very concept is why the polar bear fur texture came out so well - you were drawing the shadows cast by each clump of fur rather than the hairs themselves, and where the texture went more or less empty towards the center, it gave the impression that the light source was being pointed directly at it, effectively blasting away all the shadows.

Your form intersections, despite your struggles, were really well done. Lots of very solid, confident forms, and for the most part your intersections are correct or close to it- which is better than I ask for at this stage. There were a couple mistakes, mostly not too egregious, though I did see places where you rounded off some transitions that should have been much sharper. I marked out some mistakes here.

And of course as I mentioned before, you really nailed the organic intersections. Your contour lines there are considerably better, and you also convey a strong grasp of how these forms relate to one another in space, how they sag where their weight is not supported, and so on. Your shadows are also quite nice, except for the one towards the upper right, where it doesn't quite look like the shadow being cast there is actually projected onto the surface of the form underneath. The shadow looks like it's kind of floating.

So, I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete. Keep up the good work, and please stop bothering me or Scylla will turn into a feral raccoon and claw up your eucalyptus-eating, chlamydia-riddled, koala ass.