Uncomfortable in the post "Lesson 7: Drawing Vehicles"

2018-09-09 23:53

Here's a bunch of notes.

There are a few major overarching issues that need to be addressed:

• You're viewing construction and your "final drawing" as two separate things. It's extremely important to understand that there should be no such distinction when doing these exercises. That's what they are - you're not drawing horses, you're studying how horses are composed of simple forms combined in a specific fashion. So when you draw the construction lightly and sparsely, obviously skipping a number of steps, you're taking away a good chunk of the value from the exercise itself.

• Every single mark you put down should be drawn confidently. You don't give any thought to which ones are better off hidden, or which ones constitute your "final drawing". You only weigh whether or not a mark you're putting down is going to contribute to the overall process, and what it is meant to bring to the table. If it contributes in a meaningful way - be it through construction or communicating a specific aspect of its surface textures or other details, then you draw it. If it doesn't contribute, or if it attempts to accomplish something that another mark already does, then you don't draw it. Simple as that. Afterwards, once the full drawing is fleshed out, you can go back to add line weight to specific key places. That doesn't mean covering the entirety of your drawing with fresh lines, it means adding a little extra thickness to local segments of existing lines to clarify how forms overlap. I talk about the idea of "local line weight" in the video for lesson 2's form intersections, so I suggest you take a look at it.

• You are very distracted by detail, and it is distracting you from working through the spatial and constructional problems. It comes back to the whole exercise vs. final drawing deal. There are plenty of opportunities to draw clean things outside of drawabox, but that is not what these exercises of critiques are targeted towards.

If there is one overarching goal for all of drawabox, it is as follows: to teach a student to truly believe that what they are drawing is three dimensional - that they are crafting solid, unyielding, 3D forms within a 3D space to which the page is just a window, rather than simply drawing 2D lines on a flat piece of paper to make people think it's 3D. To put it simply, when someone starts learning to draw, they still understand the difference between an actual 3D object they can see, and the marks they're making on the page, and that comes through.

Conversely, as a student really starts to internalize the material, the border between "i'm really just drawing 2D lines and fooling my audience" and "i'm constructing solid forms in a three dimensional space and I firmly believe it" gets thinner and thinner, and these exercises - pushing you to draw through your forms, reinforce them with contour lines where necessary, and so on are designed to whittle it down. It all comes down to the idea that the best way to convince someone else of something is to already believe in the lie yourself.

That is why we don't strive to limit our reliance on construction in these exercises, because our intent is not related to the results we produce. It's all about how it impacts and influences the way we think. We're rewiring our brains.

Now, I noticed you had some issues in adhering as closely to construction with your horses as you should, in a number of places. There's a few newer demos I've done for students that may help in this area, as long as you take them to heart:

• for head construction

• for general construction

Notice how explicit I am with every single constructional line I draw. I'm not cutting corners, or trying to hide things. I'm constructing all of my forms to completion, and then working out how they relate to one another as I go, then compare that to your own process. It's not so much about me having more experience - the process is something anyone can apply, and that's the first step. And with experience, the results and the general spatial understanding improves.

You are certainly continually improving, but that's what holds you back the most. The fact that you have a tough time internalizing the lessons however comes down to whether or not you are regularly applying the techniques and instructions as they're explained. So you'll learn the stuff, and then slack off a little in terms of applying them, doing so half-heartedly instead. You're still benefitting from them, but you need to push yourself to be a lot more direct in your application of the concepts.

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

2018-09-09 01:35

This is a critique for /u/phoenixboatshoes' homework submission.

I definitely see improvement over the set, and while there are definitely still issues, your homework shows a progression from focusing very much on the end result (being distracted by texture and detail, drawing marks less confidently, attempting to hide construction so it doesn't clutter the outcome) to being much more mindful of your underlying forms and construction. I also see you applying specific approaches and techniques I've outlined in various demos more and more as you push through, especially in regards to how you approach the legs.

At the beginning, your insects' legs start out constructed with ellipses that have been stretched, being noticeably wider in the middle and feeling rather stiff throughout as a result. I see you waffle back and forth on this throughout the set, but by the end you commit quite strongly to what I've demonstrated a number of times - using simple sausage forms to capture the flow and rhythm of those leg segments. The only thing I feel is missing is that I often reinforce the intersection between the sausage segments with a single contour curve, right where they touch each other. This helps reinforce their solidity overall. I demonstrate that in a few of these doodles I've made for other students:

• https://i.imgur.com/9kAp6JZ.png

• https://i.imgur.com/rQvn6kV.png

• https://i.imgur.com/pPyrBgB.png

Now, it isn't until your last page where you very firmly stick to this sausage approach - so I do feel that it's worth underlining that constructing with a series of stretched ellipses usually isn't the best approach. It has a tendency to stiffen things up, because there isn't a lot of leeway for those ellipses to then bend one way or the other. Sausages on the other hand, due to their essentially being two balls connected by a tube of consistent width, can bend as needed, resulting in a lot less rigidity. I'm under the assumption that you came to that conclusion through the set, but I wanted to mention it anyway.

Looking over your work as I write this critique, I've changed my mind a bit. Initially I was thinking I'd have you do a few more insect drawings, limited only to construction (with no texture or detail). The more I look through them though, the more I feel you've essentially already done that on your own. I had decided that was going to be what I'd assign because I was focusing a lot on your early drawings, which were quite weak - but your improvement over the set definitely suggests that you've grown considerably, and in the right direction.

So, I will mark this lesson as complete. There is more room for growth, and I want to leave you with one more thing to focus on - your observational skills. I believe that's what still lingers as a problem by the end, though you show varying degrees of success with this throughout your lesson. When you're drawing, make sure you're continually looking back at your reference, rather than looking long and hard and then drawing for an extended period of time. Don't let yourself work from memory - always ensure that each mark you put down directly reflects something in your reference - whether it's capturing some major form you've identified, or a particular feature or detail.

Looking at this last page, the heads very much suggest that you didn't pay too much attention to what the heads actually looked like. The fly at the bottom is considerably better as a whole, and the layered segmentation along the abdomen of the top is lovely, but the top one's proportions are completely of whack, and the fly's head shows eyes that are certainly too small.

Always keep in mind that we're to spend the vast majority of our time observing, rather than actually drawing. It's like an 80-20 separation.

As I said, you may consider this lesson complete. Feel free to move onto the next one, but keep what I've said here in mind, as it applies just as strongly to the next lesson.

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

2018-09-09 01:19

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

Uncomfortable in the post "Lesson 3: Drawing Plants"

2018-09-07 02:27

Yeah, that's correct - you want the connecting ellipse to conform to the surface of the trunk, so the base of the branch is properly grounded and connected to it.

Uncomfortable in the post "Lesson 3: Drawing Plants"

2018-09-06 20:17

Much better! Your linework is a lot more confident here, and your leaf constructions flow a lot better because of it. You definitely seem to be following the spirit of the leaf construction method much more closely.

I have one very minor thing to mention that isn't actually related to the plants, but rather to the dirt itself. When you're drawing those little pebbles and particles, rather than trying to enclose each one, it's a lot more effective to focus on capturing the shadows they cast instead. Because of how cast shadows work (and how they can be grouped together to form larger shadow shapes depending on the lighting conditions), it can be vastly more effective to convey this kind of minor detail in this way, as it keeps you from adding a lot of distracting detail and visual noise.

Similarly, rather than using hatching as you had there to transition from dark to light, you'd be using a texture/pattern made up of these "cast shadows" from the little particles instead. Hatching lines of course don't correspond to any feature or detail present in that surface, so it wouldn't be an appropriate transition. I expand on this in the texture challenge notes.

Uncomfortable in the post "Lesson 3: Drawing Plants"

2018-09-06 20:15

Great stuff! You're definitely demonstrating a really strong grasp of form and 3D space, and are applying it wonderfully to the concept of construction. There are a few very specific things that stand out to me as being particularly characteristic of this understanding, and it brings me great pleasure to see them:

• When you add detail to a basic leaf construction (for example the serrated edges on the venus fly trap), you're very clearly building off an already defined, simpler edge, ensuring that your detail is grounded on this simpler, established flow (so you don't have to figure out over again).

• You are not afraid to draw through all of your forms, and draw them each to completion regardless of whether or not they are obscured or occluded by other objects. You draw everything, and then sort them out afterwards with line weight.

• When it comes to really small elements (like the top of the waratah flower), you still do what you can to regard them as forms - at least in your mind (since the scale isn't always that conducive to it). You don't get overwhelmed and regress to thinking of your drawing as being a bunch of flat lines and shapes on a two dimensional page.

That's really where the focus of the constructional method as a whole, and drawabox's overall goal, comes in - to get people to truly believe that what they are drawing is not just a series of flat marks, but rather that we are constructing solid, tangible forms in a boundless three dimensional space to which our piece of paper is simply a window. And you're nailing that.

I do have a couple suggestions moving forward, but they're minor things:

• When you have two branches connecting to one another, at the moment the actual connection point does need work. You're drawing the end of the "branch" mostly considering how it would flow with the branch, resulting it feeling disjointed from the "trunk". Instead, place an actual ellipse on the trunk's surface, and have your branch connect to it. Alternatively and perhaps more realistically, you can try creating a ball there that serves as the sort of knot that is often seen at these kinds of connections (though this isn't always present).

• When you've got a form that you won't be drawing in its entirety for whatever reason (like the flower pot of the venus fly trap), it's better to actually cap it off (like you've physically cut the object resulting in a clear face and end to the form) than leaving the lines to stop suddenly. This capping-off will help reinforce the illusion of form and three dimensionality, whereas leaving it undefined risks flattening things out.

• You're definitely making pretty considerable use of your contour lines at the moment - for the most part you're using them well, but there are some areas where you're perhaps taking their density and number a little too far. Always remember what the purpose of each contour line is, and what it contributes to the overall drawing. If you find that this job (establishing how the surface itself deforms through 3D space) is already handled by the contour lines present, then there's no need to add another one. It's pretty easy to get carried away with these, so sometimes it's necessary to rein one's self in.

Anyway, you're doing a great job. 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"

2018-09-06 02:23

Well one thing that jumps out as incorrect is that you mentioned the major axis. The points at which the ellipse contacts the enclosing plane's upper and lower edges is not the same as the major axis. The major axis actually doesn't play any sort of a useful role, so it's best to ignore it.

Uncomfortable in the post "250 Cylinder Challenge"

2018-09-06 00:56

There is definitely a great deal of improvement over this set! You start off pretty rough and uncertain of what you're doing, but you pick up steam before long. By the end, your cylinders feel considerably more solid, and though you may be a little too loose and relaxed when drawing your minor axes (they waver a little), your ellipses' alignments are solid. I'm also pleased to see that you did a great deal of work starting them off in boxes. You do have plenty of room to grow in that area however - especially when it comes to getting your ellipses to sit correctly in those planes. If you haven't already, I strongly recommend you check out this video, which was included on the challenge page.

Anyway, keep up the good work and consider this challenge complete.

Uncomfortable in the post "Lesson 7: Drawing Vehicles"

2018-09-06 00:53

Honestly this shows considerable improvement over your previous lesson, especially when it comes to the enclosing boxes and other major forms you employ. Being able to use a ruler probably helped, but the reason it would have is that it allowed you to separate the process into two distinct areas - demonstrating your knowledge of space (which appears to be pretty strong), and executing your marks.

I think as you get into it, you definitely get a lot bolder with your mark making, and it helps a great deal. This tank, for instance, is pretty fantastic. I also think throughout this lesson, you allowed yourself to really get into the intricacies of your subject matter without necessarily forgetting the major forms and how everything sits in 3D space. I'd say this boat did skip some steps, but at the same time you demonstrated that you still held the principle forms in your mind as you worked, and that you understood how the details you drew existed in space. It's actually quite a tricky thing to balance, and you did a great job of it.

Now, you definitely did struggle with the ellipses. In regards to your question, the Measuring in Perspective: Constructing to Scale video demonstrates how you might apply it. That is, using an ellipse with a semi-formed plane to establish a "square" in space, and then repeating that square in perspective several times. While this means you'll have planes that are equal in height and width (and therefore can contain circles), you still have to be able to draw an ellipse within that plane. That's where it gets difficult.

If you remember the box challenge, you'd basically give it a shot, then analyze it to see where things went wrong by extending your lines. You can do something similar with ellipses, and it's something I plan on explaining more specifically in the cylinder challenge when I get around to rewriting it (during my multi-phase drawabox rebuild process). Just like you extend the lines of a box, you can take a cylinder drawn in a box, or an ellipse drawn in a plane, and you can identify the vanishing points the plane's edges converge towards, and then compare them towards two vanishing points defined by the ellipse (one by the minor axis, the other by how the vertical contact points to the plane are aligned). This gives you a way to test the two criteria. Of course, in order to really work, you have to do it quite a bit, and over time your internal sense of how to execute that ellipse improves.

That is ultimately the most beneficial way of approaching it, and it is important to have experience with that. In this exercise, you are however allowed to use an ellipse guide if you can get your hands on one, and it can definitely make things a little easier (in the way the ruler did for your straight lines).

The other area you do need some work on is with your cars. It's a pretty broad topic, but the reason for this is that cars tend to have a very specific set of relationships and proportions that define them, and it's very easy to get them wrong. I can't tell you how much I've struggled with cars - I probably did dozens of studies of a single model just to come vaguely close to getting it right. They're tricky little shits, and they've all got their own character and personality. But in that, they're a very interesting thing to practice.

Instead of jumping back into cars however, I want you to try something else - it's a mini exercise I assigned to another student who struggled with the same thing, and it seemed to be quite helpful there. I want you to draw 30 wheels.

The funny thing about wheels is that they're a lot like cars, in that they tend to have their own unique character, their own little features that set them apart from one another. From the beveling of the tire (they're not just simple cylinders after all, there's a lot more going on!) to the tread in the rubber, the intricacies of the hubcaps, etc. It'll also be a great opportunity to help you work with those ellipses.

Give that a shot, and we'll decide what to do from there. Overall you are making great progress, so you should be quite pleased with yourself. Keep up the great work.

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

2018-09-05 18:32

You're doing a pretty solid job with your arrows - they're flowing well across the page, and explore all three dimensions of 3D space (including the depth of the scene), so that's great to see. You're not limiting yourself to the space defined by the flat page you're drawing on, which is one of the things I look out for here.

Your organic forms with contour lines are coming along well too, and I'm pleased to see you applying the overshooting method to your contour curves, which helps you maintain the correct curvature as they hook around at the edges to continue along the other side.

Your dissections are a good start, but they're definitely a little simplistic at times. A few of them are better, but overall it shows that you'll want to keep pushing yourself to observe your reference not only more carefully, but also more frequently. It's easy to get caught up in studying it for a whole and then drawing for an extended period of time, relying on what you remember. Our memory isn't that reliable, especially early on - we have a tendency to oversimplify things in our heads and to throw away important details about what kinds of elements are present, and how they're arranged on the surface of the form. Getting in the habit of continually looking back at our reference so as to refresh our memory and ensure that every mark we put down reflects something present in that reference is a good idea. Try to only put down a couple marks at a time, and look back at your reference in between.

Your form intersections are coming along, but that's definitely an area you'll want to continue practicing. Specifically, I get the feeling while looking at your work that your understanding of how the forms you've drawn actually relate to each other in space is not quite there yet. This comes through in your constructions being a little less confident and self-assured.

It comes down to thinking more about what you're doing at a given moment. It seems that you might be getting a little more distracted, trying to process the full scope of what is in front of you at every moment. Instead, think only about the form you're adding to the scene, draw it to be solid, confident and complete - then sort out (using line weight, the actual intersectional cuts, etc) how it relates to all the surrounding forms. While at times we're forced to make assertions or guesses, don't draw anything you don't feel committed to - and when you do draw a mark, regardless of whether it's right or wrong, impose it onto the drawing. The act of making a mark should not be seen as an exploration or a question - asking "is this right". It is a statement that this is the case.

This may result in a page with many contradictory truths, but while that has many of its own problems, it is still better than a page full of hypotheses.

Your organic intersections have their weaknesses, but altogether they're not too badly done. A few questionable decisions (like the one towards the upper left seemingly existing on an entirely different ground plane than the others and even casting a shadow on seemingly nothing), and overall you should stick to simpler sausage forms (avoiding wavy forms which can be considerably more difficult to give the impression of solidity), but many of the interactions between the forms convey a grasp of how they relate to each other, how they sag on top of one another and so on.

Just keep in mind the idea that you're piling up actual solid forms inside of a 3D space. Once you establish where the ground is, you need to respect that and try not to contradict it (as you did in the upper left). Consider the fact that these sausages are flexible and will droop along either side of the one beneath them, and that the shadows each one casts is to be wrapped around the form underneath.

Like the form intersections, this is certainly something you'll want to continue focusing on as you move forwards, but you're making headway as it is. I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete, so you're free to move onto lesson 3. Make sure you continue practicing the exercises from lesson 1 and 2 as warmups however, and for the time being, focus more on the exercises and issues I've raised here when doing so.

Uncomfortable in the post "250 Cylinder Challenge"

2018-09-04 23:46

You definitely show a fair bit of improvement over the course of the set - especially when it comes to the confidence of your linework. For a good deal of these cylinders, your ellipses tend to be quite shaky. While these are much better towards the end, the importance of drawing your marks with a confident, persistent pace really cannot be overstated. Slowing down out of a fear of making a mistake inevitably makes your marks wobbly and stiff, and undermines the solidity of the forms you draw. This applies across the board - straight lines, ellipses, and even when you're applying additional line weight. Each stroke needs to be drawn confidently.

That's really what the ghosting method focuses on - it allows you to separate the processes of planning and preparing, which tends to take more time and conscious thought, from the actual act of drawing the marks. Once your pen touches the page, you basically have to commit to it, and accept that while you may make a mistake, there's nothing you can do to avoid it now.

Moving on from that, generally you're doing a good job of aligning your ellipses to the minor axis, though I do want to recommend that you place your ellipses such that they sit entirely on the minor axis line, rather than being drawn around the line's end points. This allows us to focus more easily on that alignment.

Your cylinders in boxes are definitely a weak point, though this is largely because the boxes themselves are still an area that needs a fair bit of work. It's possible that since the focus of this exercise was on the cylinders, you didn't think as much about how you were approaching the boxes as you would have in the box challenge. Always remember that in no exercise are there steps that don't require your full attention and focus, and in general, the earlier the step in a constructional process, the more integral they are to the overall result.

Anyway, I'll go ahead and mark this challenge as complete, so be sure to keep what I've mentioned here in mind as you move forwards.

Uncomfortable in the post "Lesson 3: Drawing Plants"

2018-09-03 05:49

I think you're misunderstanding what's written there. If you're referring to the images of the faber castell and staedtler pens, those are two different examples of fineliners from different brands. You should be doing all of the work for drawabox using black pens, all of the same weight/thickness.

Uncomfortable in the post "Lesson 3: Drawing Plants"

2018-09-03 03:34

You can post it as a new comment on this thread or as a reply, as long as it's a reply to one of my messages so I get notified. As for the lighter pen thing, can you point me to where I wrote that in the homework description?

Uncomfortable in the post "250 Cylinder Challenge"

2018-09-02 20:59

Really nice work! Your cylinder constructions are looking very solid and confident, and you're doing a great job of aligning the ellipses to their shared minor axis. Your degree-shift from the closer to farther ellipses is also present, but nice and subtle. Fantastic.

The only thing I want to recommend is that by the time you hit lesson 6, it'd be great to have some more experience with drawing cylinders with a box as a starting point, as covered in the video. This becomes particularly useful when you need to position a cylinder in a specific manner within a scene, as it's easier to do this with boxes than it is with an arbitrary minor axis.

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

Uncomfortable in the post "Lesson 3: Drawing Plants"

2018-09-02 20:31

Overall you're doing decently, but there are a couple things that I want to mention.

• Your leaves exercises and branches are coming along fairly well. In the leaves, there is a slight issue that I will explain a little later, because it occurs to a greater extent in some of your actual plant drawings, but overall they're still pretty solid.

• On this page, one major issue comes to light - you're not drawing each petal/form/element to completion. You're only drawing them in so far as they are visible and not occluded by something else. When it comes to construction, it's very important that we draw everything in its entirety, so we can fully understand how they exist in 3D space, and how they relate to the forms around them. Especially in the context of leaves/petals, being able to establish the entire flow from start to end is important when it comes to making them flow in a natural, organic fashion.

• This page shows that you do have a ways to go in terms of applying observation effectively to your approach. You need to get used to looking at your reference not only a lot, but frequently - that means studying your reference, drawing a couple lines that reflect specific things you saw, then looking back to refresh your memory. Our memory escapes us very quickly and we need to continually remind ourselves of what we're attempting to draw, so as to fight against our brain's constant campaign to oversimplify things. This particular page does show the major components that would have been present in your reference, but the relationships between those components aren't reflected - that's where observing more carefully and more frequently comes into play.

• In this page, I'm seeing that issue I referred to in regards to your leaves exercise to a much greater extent. That is, they tend to be much stiffer than they ought to be. When we draw our leaves, we start out with those central flow lines to define just how they move through space. It's easy to see those lines as having a start and end point, and occupying a specific static space. As a result, when drawing them as part of a plant, we tend to focus too much on that idea, rather than thinking about what that flow line really represents. The flow line is meant to be fluid, capturing basically the movement of the wind and air around the leaf - it's not something that inherently starts and ends, it flows continuously, and the line itself just reflects that motion. So when drawing this initial line, try and think about all the forces that influence the leaf itself. Sometimes I'll draw it with a little arrowhead to remind myself that there's a specific directional motion, and that this line does not necessarily end where my own line has stopped. Then, the leaf we draw around it echoes this fluidity, resulting in a more organic, flowing construction.

• Lastly, here it looks like you did your underdrawing in pencil, or something equally faint. Obviously that's contrary to the instructions, so I don't want to see that in future work. More than that though, this does show an approach that some people apply when working in regular pen. That is, drawing the underlying construction faintly, and then going back over it to "clean things up" with a darker, richer line. This is something I addressed in the video for the form intersections in lesson 2, and is also something I am firmly against. A 'clean-up' pass replaces linework with a more carefully drawn stroke, which generally results in things stiffening up, losing the confidence of the original mark. This is not what I mean when I refer to adding line weight to a drawing. Mentioned in that same video, line weight should only be applied to specific localities - parts of existing lines where you want to clarify an overlap of some sort. Never the entire line, and certainly ever around a whole ellipse. The weight should be added with the same kind of confidence with which we would have drawn the original strokes.

It's worth mentioning that some of the mistakes I've outlined above reflect a desire to create a nicer, cleaner drawing as a final result. Only drawing lines where they're not hidden by other forms, clean-up passes, etc all align with this sort of a goal. That is not the purpose of these exercises. Lessons 3-7 explore two things. First, how to apply the constructional method to a variety of different kinds of objects (each lesson tackling a different one), and secondly to improve and develop your understanding of how to draw solid forms and manipulate them in 3D space. Each drawing is an exercise that teaches you how forms relate to one another, and how to not only sell the illusion that they are all three dimensional, but rather to really convince YOURSELF that it is all 3D, and that you're not simply drawing flat lines on a flat page. After all, the best way to convince someone else of something is to believe in the lie yourself. So don't approach any of this as though you want to have something you can show off for being pretty and clean at the end - you can do that for other drawings, but that is not what we're after here. So, for example, your rose is definitely out.

Now you've shown enough here to move onto the next lesson, but it's very important that you keep in mind the points that I've outlined here, and that you work to apply them to the next lesson. So, I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete.

Uncomfortable in the post "250 Cylinder Challenge"

2018-09-01 18:01

The challenge of drawing an ellipse inside of a plane such that its minor axis and degree are correct is very similar to the challenge of drawing a box such that each of its sets of parallel lines converge consistently towards their vanishing point. That is to say, in the box challenge we make a page's worth of attempts, then go over them to extend the lines and identify where we've made mistakes. We then continue onto the next page, applying what we learned and shift our approach, before going over to find the mistakes once again.

As I work through my multi-phase rebuild of the website, followed by some editing of the lessons and new videos, I'm actually going to be introducing this concept more explicitly to the cylinder challenge - that is, at the end of each page, going over with a pen to specifically identify the minor axis as well as the alignment of those contact points, and identifying where things have gone wrong.

For every plane (that is, a space enclosed by two sets of lines that are parallel in 3D space) that can be reasonably estimated as a square (so obvious rectangles like 244 are out), it is possible to come close enough to satisfying both criteria, but it's still rather tricky because they work in concert. For this reason, the challenge focuses more on speaking to muscle memory and instinct through repetition (followed by that correction phase and adjustments in the next page) rather than explicit rules of how to plan out your ellipse. It's one of those problems that the human brain is very good at on a subconscious level.

Anyway- you definitely did a great deal of solid practice here on this front, and your rate of success in constructing ellipses within their planes that feel approximately correct is pretty high. What still does stand out however is your line quality - individual examples show that you are entirely capable of drawing straight, smooth, confident lines (for example the lengthwise edges of your enclosing box in 112, 107, and many others are very well done), but I believe that when you are faced with a massive number of lines that need to be drawn, your patience and general conscientiousness is what suffers the most. In addition to this, your lines tend to be very uniform - a sign that you're perhaps pressing a little too hard with your pen as well as drawing a little too slowly, which diminishes any nuance and can make lines look clunkier. Finally, make sure you're continually rotating your page to find a comfortable angle of approach - this may also be what causes some of your lines to come out weaker than others. This goes for ellipses as well - there's not much to be done about ellipses with wide degrees, but those that are narrower will benefit from being rotated to suit your angle of approach.

Anyway! I'll go ahead and mark this challenge as complete. Keep up the good work, and feel free to move onto lesson 6.

Uncomfortable in the post "Lesson 7: Drawing Vehicles"

2018-08-30 19:24

The vans are alright, and definitely show an overall developing grasp of the content, but that model T is something entirely different. You've got a number of complex forms that are meant to play against each other with very specific relationships, and you've really nailed them. More than the drawing being pretty, you've captured the impression of the model T down to, well.. a tee. This speaks to an understanding of its form language - the kind of thing you can pull out from a study like this and apply to a completely fresh design (the kind of thing I want to tackle in future lessons). Stunning work.

You certainly did struggle with that porsche, though I think you started to nail the front in this drawing (despite the back still falling out of whack). The troubles were definitely grounded in proportion, and may have been exacerbated a little by tackling such a challenging subject in particularly extreme perspective. You'll notice that your first couple attempts at this one had a lot of convergence towards the vanishing point, which would have made it even more difficult to deal with nail your proportions. Overall I think you had a tendency to stretch the cab too much, and perhaps didn't slope the windshield down enough (at least in that last page). One key element that stands out to me is that the car door on the last one feels enormous if you try and imagine a human in the scene.

Now, none of that is worrying in the least. As I mentioned in my very first critique of this lesson, some vehicles have such a specific character to them that it can be very difficult to pick up on their nuances - it really just takes extended practicing to familiarize yourself with that specific car. I had to draw my favourite, the 1967 Shelby Mustang GT500 a couple dozen times before I really developed a half decent grasp of it, and even then it was rather shoddy. That was years ago though, so I bet if I drew one now it'd be a mess.

What is important though is that your wheels are looking fantastic, and your vehicles carry a sort of solidity that they didn't when you first started tackling this subject matter. You've developed a much keener eye for the little things that impact your construction, and have pushed your overall confidence with vehicles to a new level. I'm sure the ellipse guide helped, but the improvement speaks to a much deeper shift in how you approach the topic.

So, I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete. Congratulations on completing the dynamic sketching curriculum! I certainly hope you feel these lessons have helped develop your sense of form and space, as from where I'm sitting, you've improved by considerable leaps and bounds over the course of the last few months (though admittedly you did enter with a solid grasp of many of the mechanics).

Uncomfortable in the post "Lesson 5: Drawing Animals"

2018-08-30 00:04

There's a couple things to mention here:

• Aside from that first one, you're still drawing the initial cranial ball way too big, and it's making your head constructions weirdly bloated, like you're compensating by making everything else relatively small.

• The teeth on that first page are completely flat and don't actually take 3D space into consideration, and you haven't even drawn the mouth opening onto the side plane of that boxy muzzle. You can do much better than this, you're just not really thinking about it.

• Your puzzle-sections seem to be pretty arbitrary, like you're not really paying attention to where the animal's eye socket would sit.

• Your eyelids don't wrap around the eyeballs like they're 3D objects - you're drawing flat lines.

You're letting that belief in the fact that the forms you're drawing are 3D dimensional slip away from you, and so while parts of your constructions do feel 3D, you're still leaving major areas flat and formless.

I know you're going to cry your little chicken tears, but I want you to do 25 head constructions. I want the 1st, 10th and 20th to all be attempts at replicating the tiger head demo I showed you earlier.

Do not submit any sooner than September 8th. I don't want you to rush and try to get this over with, because the more you try and get to lesson 6, the sloppier you get. You can do this, you just need to focus on what you're trying to accomplish, rather than trying to get things done.

Uncomfortable in the post "Lesson 5: Drawing Animals"

2018-08-26 21:39

Nooooope. You're not following my instructions. The bit about the 3D puzzle is super important - you've got to make the pieces fit together, and think about how the eye socket, which is not just a simple ellipse, fits against the cheek bone and how this all sets against the initial cranial ball.

This one was your best from this set, so I did my redlining on it. Try another three. I ain't lettin' you go til you show an understanding of all the major points of head construction. I don't expect perfect work, but I need to see that you understand the concepts.

Uncomfortable in the post "250 Cylinder Challenge"

2018-08-26 21:33

I'm still loving that confidence, but always keep in mind what I mentioned in regards to your first lesson 3 submission - don't let it get away from you. You've got some cylinders here that are really well drawn, and generally quite solid. But it comes in waves - sometimes you're more loose, and the solidity of your forms suffers due to gaps between lines, or a general lack of tightness to ellipses. Always remember to apply the ghosting method to each and every mark you put down - planning, preparing, and considering what exactly you are attempting to contribute to your drawing with each given stroke. Don't automatically reinforce marks that have just been put down (as some people do instinctively at times, I noticed this a little in the earlier part of your set).

I really want to hammer that home - take your time, and apply that confidence strategically only once you've planned and prepared fully. Other than that, you are doing very well. Your constructions are good, you're mostly nailing the alignments of your ellipses, and I'm pleased to see you playing with constructing your cylinders in boxes as well.

I'll go ahead and mark this challenge as complete.

Uncomfortable in the post "Lesson 3: Drawing Plants"

2018-08-26 21:23

Responding to /u/0700u's homework revisions:

Much better. Your drawings look considerably more conscientious and solid, and you're clearly slowing down and putting more thought into each mark you put down. 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"

2018-08-26 21:20

Responding to /u/phoenixboatshoes's homework submssion:

Overall you've done a really good job. Most of your constructions are looking very solid, and you've managed to achieve a good sense of flow with your leaf constructions. For the most part, you're really bold and eager to delve into construction, and are doing exactly what you need to do - weighing each and every mark you put down, figuring out what it contributes to the overall construction. If it adds something meaningful to either communicating the elements of your subject matter, or conveying aspects of how its forms sit in space, then you draw it. If not, you don't. You're showing a great deal of efficiency.

The only place where you neglected to do this was in your india red moon cactus. As I show here, the big bulb reads as being quite flat, due to how you delved too quickly into detail, and didn't spend enough time properly reinforcing the forms that were present. I didn't actually realize that there were ridges on this object until I went and looked at an actual photograph.

So what I would have done here (which I did on the top left), is to draw a sphere and reinforce it in two ways. A single contour curve around its midsection, but most importantly, a contour ellipse near its top, kind of like the "pole" of a globe. This marks the top point from which all these ridges would radiate. I then draw contour curves coming down like how one would slice an orange, and then built out my ridges using those. Lastly, I added a few contour lines showing how those ridges come off the surface. It is a lot of additional line work, but as this is a rather complex form, they're an important part of first convincing yourself that what you've drawn is 3D, so you'll be well equipped to convey that to your viewer. Ultimately we're doing these exercises to help convince ourselves that what we're drawing is 3D.

The other point I wanted to mention is shown on the right side of my redlinig there - when you've placed a ball into a scene, and you want to place some additional silhouette edge detail along it, you need to remember that the ball form is solid. You can build on top of it, but your subsequent lines should not slip into the established silhouette, as this will severely undermine the solidity of the overall construction.

Anyway, I definitely nitpicked on that one drawing as it stood out from the rest of the set's general high level of quality. I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete, so feel free to move onto the next lesson.

Uncomfortable in the post "Lesson 3: Drawing Plants"

2018-08-26 20:46

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

Uncomfortable in the post "Check out this YouTuber as he goes through the Drawabox exercises - he's got a lot of great advice to offer as he details his own experiences. This is exactly the kind of content I want to encourage and spread!"

2018-08-26 19:55

My pleasure. You're doing a lot of great work there, and when it comes to youtube videos we all have to start somewhere. What's important is that the information you're sharing is extremely important. Best of luck, and I hope your channel continues to grow.

Uncomfortable in the post "Check out this YouTuber as he goes through the Drawabox exercises - he's got a lot of great advice to offer as he details his own experiences. This is exactly the kind of content I want to encourage and spread!"

2018-08-24 23:16

Rick Bonilla's got a bit of a cheesy intro to his videos, and not the most refined recording setup but he's got a lot of value to offer. He's steadily working through the first lesson, documenting all of his work - the good, the bad, and the ugly. Along the way, he's got voice over with a lot of useful information about what he experienced, how he modified his approach to respond to the mistakes he was making. It's all important stuff everyone can implement.

A big thanks to /u/proce55or for sharing this with me after he stumbled upon it. If you like Rick's stuff, be sure to let him know - it's an important part of encouraging folks like this to keep producing content.

Uncomfortable in the post "Lesson 5: Drawing Animals"

2018-08-24 00:04

Nice work! I think you're demonstrating a well developing grasp of form and construction with these drawings. This is demonstrated best of all by the fact that your last drawing - the hybrid - did not devolve into a horrible mess. It's actually an excellent test for whether or not a student has understood how to use forms as described in the lesson, because you're forced to piece things together from different reference images. It can be quite overwhelming, and it forces one to go beyond just drawing what they see. It requires them to draw what they understand. And while there's plenty of room for growth, you demonstrated that you absolutely understand how to break these different references down into their principle forms, and then rebuild them as you please.

There were issues in the set here and there - largely with proportions, as well as your approach to drawing legs (which I could see you experimenting with, which is always great). Proportions are obviously something that will improve as you continue to train your observational skills, but for the legs I want you to focus on constructing the segments of the legs using simple sausage forms. As shown in this wolf demo, you can see how I use sausages (basically two balls connected by a tube) to construct each segment, reinforcing them with a single contour curve right at the point where they intersect. These kinds of forms are great for showing the back-and-forth rhythm legs often have, and can capture a good sense of gesture and flow. In your experimentation, you were gradually moving towards this, but still had a tendency to flatten out the ends of your segments, or making them more complex in other ways. At their core, they're just sausages. You can then go on to add additional forms on top of this sausage structure afterwards, but that's effectively how you should start.

When it comes to heads, I think you're absolutely moving in the right direction. You're paying attention to how the various parts of the head fit together, and that is definitely paying off. I really try and encourage students to think of the head as a sort of three dimensional puzzle - with many different pieces that all interlock as shown here.

As for your question about feathers, I'd handle it the same way I'd tackle any texture (which I elaborate on in the texture challenge): I'd focus not on outlining the elements of the texture themselves, but rather on the shadows they cast. The beauty of shadows is that they're affected by light - if light shines directly on a shadow, it'll be obliterated. Similarly, if many shadows come together, they will merge into a single continuous shape. This allows us to imply that forms exist without ending up with all of the visual noise that comes from drawing each and every one of them. Here's a quick example of how I would approach feathers.

In addition to the shadow thing, I'd also pay attention to the silhouette of the form on which I'm adding a feathery texture. The silhouette is the first thing the eye registers, so any of the irregular bumpiness that comes from layered feathers will immediately be picked up if it's present there.

Anyway, I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete. Keep up the good work and feel free to move onto lesson 6.

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

2018-08-23 23:38

Hot damn, nice work! You did a pretty great job across the board. There are a few minor things worth mentioning here, but overall it's really well done.

Your arrows show a solid exploration of all three dimensions of space - by playing with the scale of either end, you show penetration into the depth of the scene, rather than being limited to the two dimensions defined by the page you're drawing on. Your organic forms with contour lines show both a good grasp of how the degrees of your contour ellipses shift over the length of a form, as well as of the purpose of the contour lines themselves - that is, having features that run directly along the surface of the form, describing it as they do so. I'm pleased to see that you kept your contour lines quite snugly within the shape, helping push the illusion that they run along its surface rather than floating inside or outside of the form.

The only thing I wanted to mention in regards to that was specifically for your contour curves - watch their alignment relative to the minor axis. In some places, you had them slanted slightly. Still, you're clearly showing that you understand the goal of the exercise, and the use of the technique.

Your dissections - especially that first page - show a lot of attention to detail, and careful consideration of your reference images. Overall I don't see a whole lot of cases where you ignored the underlying form, but in some cases it could just be luck that you didn't accidentally flatten things out. Your second page of dissections are a bit weaker than the first - largely that it seems you got a little lazy, relied more on hatching, and perhaps didn't observe your reference as closely.

Your form intersections show a good grasp of space and the relationships between your primitives. I did notice a few things however:

• In the instructions, I mentioned that you should stick to equilateral forms and avoid things like long tubes, to keep overly complex foreshortening out of the exercise.

• I can see places where you've added additional weight with the purpose of replacing whole lines. In the video for this exercise, I mention that line weight should only be used in specific local areas (emphasizing parts of lines, not replacing them entirely) to clarify overlaps. Straight up replacing lines results in drawing a secondary pass that is usually a lot more stiff and less confident, which diminishes your results.

• For your cylinders, watch how you draw the ends. The ellipse closer to us should have a narrower degree than the one farther away.

Lastly, you did a pretty good job of capturing how the organic forms interact with one another in the organic intersections. Towards the bottom you did end up going more for flattened balls, which can feel a little stiff, but the sausages on top look nice and flexible, while maintaining their solidity quite well.

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

Uncomfortable in the post "Lesson 5: Drawing Animals"

2018-08-23 23:20

It's definitely a step in the right direction, and this one is the best of the lot, both in head and body. Overall though your linework is still pretty hesitant and uncertain, especially with the head. When you're not sure of how to approach something, you have a tendency to panic, and that's where your linework gets sketchier and more stiff. You need to get used to thinking through every mark you put down and considering what each one is going to contribute to your drawing, regardless of how sure you are that it's the right mark to put down.

As for heads, watch how big you make that initial cranial ball. On your last two pages, you drew it way too big, and it didn't leave a whole lot of room for the rest of the forms you went on to attach.

While I think you're probably okay to move on, I want you to draw a few heads each day for a few days, and then do two more for me. Don't rush on this - give yourself a chance to learn from each attempt, and don't try and do them all at once. The time in between attempts can be as valuable as the time actually spent drawing them.

Uncomfortable in the post "Lesson 3: Drawing Plants"

2018-08-23 00:08

As far as form and construction goes, you are definitely demonstrating an understanding of what the lesson strives to convey. You're able to think through spatial problems, and break your subject matter down into simpler forms and reconstruct them.

That said, one thing I'm noticing a great deal of is that you're quite loose with your linework. You're still very much in the mindset of trying to explore things on the page before committing to them - drawing with lighter marks to rough things out as a first step. While there is nothing wrong with this in the grand scheme of things, it does go against the principles drawabox espouses.

Rather than thinking through your actions before putting marks down, you rush to get everything on your brain onto the page. Instead of ensuring that your marks are efficient and effective, you tend more towards putting something vaguely implying what you were ultimately trying to achieve with each stroke.

Now, looking at your work I can tell that you already know what you're doing - but I can also see that you're impatient, and inclined to rush.

A good example is this page. You capture a lot of good form with the full drawing towards the bottom right - but you've got a great many gaps between your lines, the sort of thing that can really undermine the solidity of the objects you're drawing. On the bottom left, we can see that you've pieced together a single form with a number of loose, almost chicken-scratchy (but not really) lines with visible holes throughout.

The drawings I ask you to do in these lessons aren't about drawing pretty plants, insects, animals, etc. Each drawing is an exercise, and an opportunity to develop your patience, your understanding of 3D space and the relationships between forms, and your belief that what you're drawing is three dimensional. It's the kind of knowledge that is internalized that ultimately allows you to draw more organically. But to get to that point, you need to get used to thinking consciously about every mark you put down, and weighing what you wish to achieve with that stroke, and whether it really contributes your overall goal.

So, I'd like you to do three more pages of plant drawings, taking what I've said above into consideration. Basically, do what you've been doing, but think more before each mark you put down. Also, don't apply any shading/rendering to your drawings (as you did here). We want to focus on conveying the illusion of form without relying on shading, which is all too often used as a crutch. Ultimately shading should mostly be treated as decoration, with the convincing construction already existing underneath.

Uncomfortable in the post "Lesson 3: Drawing Plants"

2018-08-22 23:54

These are definitely looking considerably better. Your drawings look a lot more conscientious, and you're definitely putting a lot more thought into your constructions. As for your question - yes, you absolutely should draw each leaf in its entirety - this means drawing them back to their stem, especially in the case of this kind of plant. I know it looks like there are a lot of leaves, but it's still entirely possible to identify each one and draw them distinctly and completely without ending up with too big a mess. This becomes considerably more ill-advised with a regular tree with its thousands of leaves, where we are effectively forced to look at them as clumps and groupings, but that's a whole different story.

This page is really well done. You've drawn everything in its entirety, and have used line weight to organize your lines after the fact.

This one is moving in the right direction, but there are a couple issues mostly relating to the base of the plant. You didn't draw through your forms down there, and you left the pot open-ended, which has a tendency to flatten things out. You always want to cap off your truncated forms (usually with an ellipse), and make sure you draw through everything. For example, we don't see how this tree connects to the inside of the pot.

The only other thing I want to mention is that I noticed you drawing many of your ellipses in one go. Make sure you're drawing through each and every ellipse you draw for my lessons a full two times before lifting your pen. You did this some of the time, but you need to be more consistent about it.

You should definitely be ready to tackle that full tree. I look forward to seeing it.

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

2018-08-22 01:37

You've actually done a pretty good job here, especially as far as construction goes. I can see a variety of signs that you're demonstrating a much better grasp of 3D space than you had previously, as well as a keener eye when it comes to observation of specific features and details that you may not have picked up on previously. There is also considerable growth over the set (assuming the pages are in chronological order) - even when you drew smaller, you showed a much better ability to manipulate your forms in your later pages.

There are a few things that I want to point out that are areas where you can improve on things the most.

• Your linework at times still retains a certain stiffness to it, where your lines feel hesitant. This results in a bit of wavering here and there, as well as a tendency to get a little scratchy with your lines. For example, looking at the ladybug page, on the bottom right you've got a nice construction of the adult, though the lines do detract from it due to how the lines feel like they're hairy. In the central in-flight drawing, the open shell is drawn more cleanly, though the hesitation results in a little but of wobbling. It's still much better there, but can definitely be improved as you focus on executing your marks with more confidence.

• When it comes to filling in areas with solid black, a brush pen can be an invaluable tool - but no matter what you use, it's important that those spaces be filled in completely (rather than leaving little slivers of white, which tend to diminish the overall drawing. Also on the same topic, even if something has the colour black in your drawing, that doesn't necessarily mean you should be filling it in - solid blacks are best saved for the areas where cast shadows are added strategically to help separate your forms. It's also used in more advanced approaches to texture, as explored in the texture challenge notes. Different areas on an object will have a "local colour" - this is best ignored, and treated as though the whole object is a single flat colour. That way we can focus more on bringing out the major forms, as well as the subtler textural forms.

• Proportion in places is a little weak, but you noticed that yourself (especially on that wasp).

• Speaking of the wasp, when it comes to texture and detail, you've got a great combination here of taking your time with the abdomen, and rushing way too much on the thorax. Don't scribble, don't let the urge to let your hand "figure things out" take over (because it won't - our muscle memory is great for executing simple commands like drawing smooth, confident lines, but detail and texture requires careful observation and forethought). Texture is really about spending 90% of your time observing, and 10% actually drawing. I think in the majority of these drawings, your detail work comes mostly from what you remember after either giving cursory glances at your reference image, or what's more likely - studying them closely all at once, then settling in to draw for an extended period of time. Our memories are pretty bad, so we need to get used to making only a couple marks before looking back. You've improved, as I mentioned before, on this note when it comes to your overall construction - but there's a ways to go on the more minute details.

I definitely do get the desire for smaller chunks of homework with more feedback, but there's really no way around that. This is the only way I can balance this many students, and keep the pay wall low enough to be accessible to most. What you save in terms of the cost of a structured lesson plan with feedback, you pay with your own fortitude - which itself isn't a bad thing, as I've found those who push on through find themselves in a much better place relative to their drawing-related anxieties.

Anyway, I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete. Congrats on heading back to North America!

Uncomfortable in the post "Lesson 5: Drawing Animals"

2018-08-20 17:00

So you definitely start out with some struggles. That pelican looks like it's been addicted to heroin for a decade and doesn't know how it's still alive. You continue to struggle through a number of these, but once you hit your second attempt at the pig, I start to see some real improvement. You're showing a greater awareness of the various sections of the animal's legs (for example you neglected the pelican's thigh altogether), and it overall feels considerably more solid. It's not perfect, but it feels like it's actually three dimensional, and you're no longer getting so caught up in detail and texture, and are instead focusing on your actual forms and construction.

The following horse is... interesting. I'm seriously curious about what the original reference is, and what the hell is going on with that back leg. Overall though, this is the peak of one issue I see also present in the previous pig - how you're approaching drawing the segments of the legs.

Right now you're drawing them each as stretched ovals. This results in them being very bulgy, as well as rather stiff. Instead of stretching ovals or balls, I want you to apply the same methodology we used for insects - constructing the legs using sausage forms. These are basically just two balls connected by a single tube of consistent width. These can be much more flexible and gestural, and show a much greater sense of flow. The segments of animals' legs generally have a rhythm to them - one segment will flow in one direction, and the next segment will double back, and so on. This allows us to capture that in a much smoother manner.

When drawing this oryx, you definitely show a considerable improvement with how you're dealing with legs. You're not quite using sausages, but you are showing a serious decrease in the michelin-man style bulginess, and once again your use of form feels very solid, like it did with that pig.

Now, obviously heads are a weak point - though the oryx isn't too bad. The main issue is that you're meant to connect these forms together. You've got a starting point - the cranial ball, which can also be considered as the "nub" at the end of the neck. And you actually attach forms to it, with an awareness of where they intersect.

The head is a lot like a 3D puzzle - it gets cut up into pieces, but they all fit very snugly together. So rather than thinking of things like eyes as being stickers that just float somewhere on this loosely defined form, you want to make that eye socket "snap" into place, amongst all the other forms around it. For example, the cheek bone, the brow ridge. You want that eye socket to be carved into the skull, not as a random circle, but as a series of lines that each individually cut in one clear direction along the surface of the form.

Looking at your head constructions does suggest that you didn't pay much attention to the head construction video in the lesson (maybe you forgot it was there). It is clear that you were struggling with a lot throughout this lesson though, so I don't mind that so much - because you did improve considerably on how you were approaching the bodies as a whole, and have shown a great deal of growth.

So you're doing a good job, but you're not quite there yet. I'd like you to rewatch that head construction video, and I'd also like you to take a look at these two demonstrations:

• Tiger Head Construction - look at how everything fits together, how we start with a ball and attach other forms to it, and how the eye socket is carved before popping an eyeball in there and wrapping eyelids around it.

• Wolf Construction - a more general demo that shows how to use sausages for the legs, a bit about head construction, and other useful general information.

I want you to do 4 more animal drawings, and I don't want you to go into any detail or texture whatsoever. One bird and three quadrupeds. Make sure you review any relevant information in the lesson before starting them, and ensure that when you do start, that the information is fresh in your mind.

Uncomfortable in the post "Lesson 5: Drawing Animals"

2018-08-20 16:38

It's true that fur has a tendency to make things more difficult, and this is a challenge we all face when drawing animals. That doesn't entirely account for the issues I was seeing however. As we practice, we learn to hone our observational skills, and we pick up on features that are present, but perhaps harder to notice. Ultimately what you need to understand about the body is present - and you need to trust and accept that it is, so you do not give up on identifying it early, and fall back to loose guesswork. This comes back to what I was suggesting in terms of size being a problem, in that it has a tendency to make students panic and lose focus, relying instead of guessing rather than observing carefully. They are different things that lead to the same kind of reaction in the student.

One valuable piece of advice is to make sure that the reference you use is as high resolution as possible. Less experienced students will struggle more when faced with low-res images, because the obfuscation of detail is even greater.

Also worth mentioning, your head constructions were still small, you just crammed a bunch into the same page. That's worth keeping in mind - with those constructions, you did not benefit from extra space to think through the spatial problems, as you did not give yourself any more.

That said, I think the advice about thinking of these constructions as 3D puzzles did help, as I do see considerable improvement on your heads. Your level of success varies from head to head, but I can see a better grasp of space and form (and how you're dealing with individual solid forms) as you piece them together. I especially liked the middle one on the top row, it felt very solid.

There is also an issue that is pretty consistent across all the heads. You have a tendency to draw the initial starting sphere way too big. As a result, you don't actually really treat it as though it's a part of the head construction, and instead seem to be stamping your heads on top of it and largely ignoring it.

The "cranial ball" as we call it is always the starting point for the head, and you can think of it as constituting a part of the skull. It does not contain the head, or wrap around it in any way. It is a basis on which the rest of the head is attached, as seen in the tiger head demo.

Another way to think about it is that if the neck were a sausage form (where sausages are two balls connected by a tube of consistent width), the cranial ball is the ball that sits at the end of the neck, like a nub. Keeping this in mind should help you really bring down its size relative to the overall head. If however you happen to draw it to be larger (especially when doing these isolated head studies), make sure you scale everything else to it as well. Don't feel like you HAVE to draw your heads small.

One of the things I noticed when it comes to how scale impacted your drawings was that when you work small, you can't really put as much focus or attention into the nature and design of the individual lines you're drawing. For example, take a look at your eye sockets. In the tiger demo, I show how the lines are to be drawn as though you are carving them into the ball with a knife. You think about each segment of this shape. You then go on to pop a nice, solid ball inside of the socket to constitute the eye, and build the lids around it.

Because you've drawn so small, it's orders of magnitude harder to be quite so intentional with such tiny lines. As a result, they end up being less "designed" and more approximate.

This is the same kind of thing that happens when dealing with feet. They're so small, so it's much harder - especially as a beginner - to even draw the forms you see in your reference with any kind of purposefulness or intent. So sure, it may be a little harder to identify which forms are present due to fur and other elements, but once you're able to make out the features that suggest where these forms connect to one another, it is still very difficult to draw them without your lines feeling clunky and unwieldy.

That isn't to say it's impossible - but rather that it's something you first need to get used to doing at a larger scale, and then gradually doing it at smaller sizes will get easier (as your pen control and pressure control also improves).

I did notice that in your legs, you still were hesitant when it comes to applying the segments-as-sausages thing that I've been raising time and time again. I can see what appears to be attempts, but I really want to emphasize that a sausage is just two balls connected by a tube. Your ends tend to round out more shallowly, and end up looking more like regular tubes.

That said, your legs are improving in certain ways, and are becoming more fluid and solid - but your feet are still mostly showing a need to work on your observational skills more than anything else.

Now, I am going to mark this lesson as complete. You've been grinding away at this for quite some time, and you have shown improvement, though you have a long way to go. I think that the next lesson will actually help quite a bit, despite being an entirely different subject matter.

It'll help because it is both unforgiving when it comes to construction and drawing each form completely and with intent, and also because the features present in these "everyday objects" are not obscured in the way that animal parts tend to be - but they are as minute and can be just as overwhelming.

I often see students being put through the ringer by lesson 6, but coming out with a much better grasp of form and construction (which you are already working towards with some of those head constructions). It is likely the best decision in the interest of your improvement to have you move forward.

Remember that before tackling lesson 6 however, you should complete the cylinder challenge.

Also worth mentioning is that while I am asking you to move forwards, once you've completed lessons 6 and 7, you will be welcome to submit more animals for us to see how you'll have been able to apply what you'll have learned.

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

2018-08-18 21:52

Overall nice work! I do have a few suggestions however that will help you iron out some of the challenges you may be facing, or otherwise help you get more out of these exercises as you continue to move forwards.

You've done some great stuff with your arrows - they flow quite nicely, and explore a great deal of the depth of the scene, pushing past the dimensions defined by the page.

For your organic forms with contour lines, my biggest suggestion is to stick to simple sausage forms rather than having your forms swell and taper all over the place. Adding more complexity here serves more to distract you from the core of the exercise (capturing the illusion that these contour lines run along the surface of each form), and don't contribute a whole lot. A simple sausage form with a consistent width throughout its length will be considerably more helpful. Other than that however, you are wrapping the curves around quite well.

Your dissections are looking good, and you're showing a good grasp of how we need to be able to transition from dense detail to sparse rest areas. I did notice however that you're using a lot of simple hatching in places to achieve that transition, and I want to encourage you to try and play with different kinds of patterns, more informed by what you see in your reference images. Hatching is rarely present, and is usually more found when an artist is trying to achieve shading for shading's sake, rather than to convey a specific texture. The textures themselves in your reference image will often have much subtler patterns that you can find if you look more closely - but if you use hatching instinctively, you'll be more likely to ignore them. So I recommend that you set hatching aside for now.

Your form intersections demonstrate a solid grasp of form and how they relate to one another - the only thing I want to underline here is that I did mention in this instructions that you should not draw individual sets of a few forms intersecting at a time, but rather to fill each page with a single expansive network of forms. This forces you to think a lot harder about how they all relate to one another. Also try to stick to more equilateral forms (rather than having long cylinders for example), as keeping foreshortening as limited as possible can be very helpful towards focusing on the core of this exercise.

For your organic intersections, they're generally done well, though as I mentioned above, sticking to simpler sausage forms would definitely have been beneficial.

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

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

2018-08-18 21:27

Nice work overall. As you mentioned, your organic form-based exercises were pretty solidly done, and generally captured a good sense of volume. The only thing I want to mention on that front is that with the contour curves, you waffle back and forth between showing a good grasp of how those curves need to wrap around the form convincingly (to give the impression that they run along the surface of the form), and failing to quite hook around at the edges. You've got a number of these that are very successful, but the fact that there are as many that don't quite make it suggests that you're still riding the cusp of grasping this. I recommend that you apply the overshooting method described here. Also, pay a little more mind to the alignment of your curves - I find that you tend to struggle more with the issue of wrapping them around convincingly when your alignment is a little off.

For your arrows, you've got them flowing quite nicely - I do want to recommend however that you play a little more with the sense of depth. Try and figure out which end of the arrow is going to sit closer to the viewer and which is farther away, and exaggerate their scale to match (closer end being much larger and farther being smaller). This will help you establish the depth of the scene, and play with dimensions beyond just those defined by the paper on which you are drawing.

Your dissections show a good deal of improvement over the set, though they start out pretty nicely to begin with. Your last page there shows a lot of fantastic use of texture and detail, and a good sense of how to transition from dense to sparse while retaining the essence of each texture.

Now, I definitely agree that your form intersections are your weakest point. They're not horribly done or anything, you're just not taking them quite far enough. You're only attempting the intersections themselves (which help us to start understanding how the forms relate to one another in 3D space - the main thing you're missing right now). When you actually do the intersections, you're rather timid about it.

As I mention in the instructions, the intersections are hard, and I don't expect you to be able to nail them just yet. They require a well developed understanding of how everything sits in space - but we develop that by jumping in and trying it out boldly and confidently. If you approach it timidly, you're not going to learn quite as much. You've got to be much more willing to fail - so when you do these in the future (and I insist that you do as part of your warmup routine), make sure you focus on how these forms actually relate to one another in space. Don't be afraid to get them to overlap more frequently, and to give yourself more spatial problems to solve.

Aside from that, fantastic work. I will go ahead and mark this lesson as complete, as I trust you'll continue working on those weak points yourself. Feel free to move onto the next lesson.

Uncomfortable in the post "250 Cylinder Challenge"

2018-08-17 16:39

Nice work completing the challenge! Overall you're showing progress, but I do have a few things to recommend as you continue moving forwards:

• Overall, your ellipses are okay, but they do have a bit of stiffness to them. This comes from you hesitating as you make the stroke. Always push yourself to draw with a confident, persistent pace, and don't let your brain interfere. Once your pen touches the page, your brain needs to fuck right off and mind its own business - your arm owns the show and will see it through so you have to trust in its ability to do so.

• I saw a tendency in waves where you'd have a bunch of cylinders where the alignment of your ellipses were coming along great, followed by a bunch where things tended to be a little slanted. It may be that you were more focused on it during some sessions, and less so during others. Remember that the alignment of those ellipses to the minor axis is super important, so it should be a high priority. (I'm assuming this is what you meant by lining up the ellipses with your minor ellipses :P)

• Keep an eye on the relationship between the two ends of the cylinders. The closer end should be an ellipse with a slightly smaller degree than the farther end. The fact that it's a subtle shift does make it hard to pin down, but I did see a bunch where you were more or less repeating the same ellipse on either end, so try and adjust that a little bit.

• Lastly, I recommend that when you get a chance, you play with the process of constructing a cylinder inside of a box as well. This is a very useful technique to get a hang of, because it allows you to construct a very specific minor axis/alignment for your cylinder, using a form that is much easier to construct relate to other objects.

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

Uncomfortable in the post "250 Box Challenge"

2018-08-16 17:50

Nice work! You've shown a great deal of patience, conscientiousness and progress over this set, and I'm very pleased to see that you applied the line extension method across the board. It also stands out that you focused particularly on boxes with farther vanishing points and shallower foreshortening - this was a good call, as this is what we see in the majority of smaller, more relatably-scaled objects we end up drawing. They also present some considerable challenges, like keeping the convergence of your boxes consistent.

While you've got some real great ones (228 stood out to me for example), you'll still want to keep an eye on how you think about all four lines of a given set and how they converge together. A common problem is to focus on lines in pairs (because out of the set of 4 lines, two will belong to one plane, and two will belong to another. This results in situations where you end up with something more akin to two vanishing points, and those planes on either side of a box not actually running parallel to one another (like 147).

Anyway, keep up the great work. You're showing a lot of growth and your constructions are looking quite solid. I'll go ahead and mark this challenge as complete.

Uncomfortable in the post "Lesson 3: Drawing Plants"

2018-08-15 02:42

While overall it's not bad, there are a number of things I raised in my last critique that you don't seem to have heeded so much.

• On the top left of this page, I explain how you should approach complex multi-sectional leaves by applying the steps to each section separately. You didn't do that here, and ended up jumping into a leaf shape that was definitely too complicated. Remember that construction is all about starting simple and building up complexity.

• On the same page of your leaves (this one), you also failed to apply the point I raised in this page, going both above and under the initial construction line. Also worth mentioning, try not to draw a continuous line zigzagging back and forth - draw each individual bump or feature of edge detail separately, coming off the initial construction line and returning to it.

• I quite like these mushrooms, but you ignored the recommendations in regards to drawing through your forms I made in my initial critique. Don't draw things only in so far as they are not hidden by other forms. You need to draw everything in its entirety so you can understand how the forms intersect and interact with one another. So, for example, how do the stalks of those mushrooms connect to their caps?

Your branches exercises were decent, though I think there are definitely places where you gave up a little on constructing things in segments (which the exercise is focused on). You did do them here and there, (and while they need more work, that's pretty normal), but my thought is that you may have gotten a bit frustrated with them and started drawing more of the branches in one go. Always remember what each exercise is meant to focus on.

Additionally, try not to have your branches swell in places - keep their widths relatively consistent, as this will allow you to maintain the illusion of solidity best. If a branch needs to have a part that gets thicker, or as is more common some kind of a knot where another branch may come out, you can tack those on as additional forms afterwards. So things like #14 would not be great, because you're jumping into a further level of complexity rather than starting out as simple as possible.

Another major issue I'm seeing is that you have a tendency to draw things quite small. You're not expanding your drawings to take up the whole page, and are instead trying to fit many things onto the same sheet, or have a lot of blank space around. Construction is inherently a spatial problem, and spatial problems benefit greatly from having a lot of room to work and think.

The last point I want to make is that there is still a great deal of.. for lack of a better word, laziness, in your constructions. I actually get the sense that aside from the few points you ignored from my last critique, you know what you're doing - but in a lot of cases, you're getting impatient, and rushing through certain things. You're not consistently thinking in terms of form and construction. When things get complicated, you get overwhelmed and the parts of you that know better shut down.

We see that especially on the Dracaena Draco. There are a number of things you jump through too quickly:

• You construct these long, complex branches with single strokes for each edge. This reduces your overall control, which undermines the illusion of solidity.

• Your leaves are random - they don't actually reflect what you saw in your reference image. You saw the idea of leaves, and figured, I'll draw a bunch of leaves here and that will match. Lots of leaves there, lots of leaves here, done deal. But it's not that simple - it's not just a matter of drawing a ton of them, you have to consider what each one reflects from the reference image, how they're organized and distributed, how each individual one flows.

• The leaves have a tendency to be quite stiff. Remember that the flow line there is not just capturing where the leaf ends to where it starts - it's a lot more than that. It's a representation of the forces (mostly the air currents) that impact each leaf. I often draw these with little arrow heads to remind me of this - they're meant to be fluid, not static or stiff. Every single leaf you draw should take this into account, and apply the leaf construction steps you've been shown, and that you've used elsewhere. You can see that kind of thing in my potato plant demonstration from the lesson.

So, what I want you to do is make another attempt at that same Dracaena Draco drawing. Take everything I've said here into consideration, and you may want to warm up with some branch exercises beforehand, especially since you're going to be constructing your tree's limbs in segments in order to maintain control, and need to be able to get the segments to flow into one another seamlessly.

You'll also want to absolutely take your time, and take advantage of all the space afforded to you by the page. There are clearly a LOT of leaves there. I don't necessarily care if you draw each and every one (as we're not in the business of simple reproduction of photos). We're communicating the idea of the tree - and that means the leaves you DO draw, must communicate how those leaves behave. They're not stiff, they're not spikes, they're each fluid and imbued by the motion of the wind that blows past them. So don't rush.

Uncomfortable in the post "Lesson 5: Drawing Animals"

2018-08-13 22:30

Your proportions are getting better, but you're really hitting the nail on the head when you say you're basically doing a lot of glorified symbol drawing. That is, you have this continuous tendency to, when you have to deal with anything smaller than a certain limit, stop paying attention to your reference and start drawing from your imagination. This happens in the heads, where you're struggling, and it also happens on the feet.

In addition to this, I see clear areas where you're forgetting things you've been told previously, failing to apply techniques that have been covered, and so on. A couple examples include:

• Drawing leg segments as sausages. You did this when following along with the wolf demo, but otherwise you reverted back to your own way of doing it, which tends to come out stiff.

• The deer antlers should have applied some form of the branch exercise from lesson 3. You drew the silhouette of the antlers in one go, approaching an extremely complex shape all in one go rather than applying the basic principles of construction (start simple and build up from there).

You are however handling things like torsos, and the general relationships between these larger forms very well - they're feeling considerably more three dimensional. So, it seems like once things get smaller, you revert to ignoring your reference, ignoring the techniques in your toolbox.

It's not entirely abnormal, but it's something you need to really beat out of yourself. Like, put a rock in a sock and just start beating yourself whenever you do it (don't do that. please, i don't want to get sued). We tend to have this mental block that arises when we try to work really tiny, and it causes us to ignore everything we consciously know. We panic, and this causes us to revert. Every beginner faces it to some extent.

One solution is to draw even bigger, but that depends on whether or not it's sustainable. Or, you could even try doing focused studies on legs alone - I'm not sure how much I recommend this, as having the full context of the body is good, but you definitely have a block against really thinking through the forms involved in feet and toes.

A last point about the heads - as I mention in this tiger head demo, the head is like a puzzle. There's a lot of pieces that all need to fit together. When you construct your heads, you tend to focus only on the specific pieces you're trying to draw, and you ignore the spaces between. Don't leave your eye socket floating separate from your muzzle, cheekbone, etc. Find how they all fit together.

So, to summarize:

• Your body/torso constructions are actually quite good.

• Your brain shuts down when you deal with small things, like legs, feet especially, and heads.

• Heads are puzzles. Don't rush in without all the pieces.

• Throughout these lessons, you've been taught a number of techniques for tackling different kinds of problems - don't forget them. They're not specific to any one particular kind of object, but rather are ways one can try and handle certain kinds of constructional problems that can be found in all kinds of places. Keep them in your toolbox, and pull them out wherever appropriate.

As for your question, the problem doesn't have to do with your understanding of the skull, it's about observation. Studying the skull separately isn't necessarily going to help you pay attention to your reference where you aren't currently, so I wouldn't recommend that as a solution to this particular problem. It can be helpful, sure, but tackle one problem at a time.

Taking what I've said here into consideration, try your hand at however many pages you see fit, and try and work in some of those isolated studies of the areas that are giving you the most mental blocks.

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

2018-08-13 18:10

Really nice work! You're showing a good grasp of each exercise, and are taking each one in the right direction. In your arrows, they flow nicely through space and explore all three dimensions of it (depth included) rather than sticking to those defined by the page itself. Your organic forms with contour lines establish a good sense of volume, with your contour curves wrapping around the form confidently in a way that conveys how each line continues on along the opposite side.

Your dissections were generally pretty good (with some variance). I do want to stress the importance of generally not falling into the hatching-trap. Sticking to other textures to convey the transition from light to dark is a lot more meaningful, and will teach you a great deal more about how to render long term, while hatching tends to be an easier fallback.

Overall though you did a good job, aside from the snake skin, where you didn't allow your texture to just go to full black. This resulted in the texture coming out quite noisy and distracting, and also flattened it out a great deal. Don't be afraid to let your texture get swallowed by by large, expansive shadow shapes.

Your form and organic intersections are both well done. You've demonstrated a good grasp of both 3D space, how those forms exist within it, and how they interact with one another.

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

Uncomfortable in the post "Lesson 3: Drawing Plants"

2018-08-11 20:48

There's a lot of fantastic stuff here. I'm actually really pleased with your pages upon pages of leaves exercises. There are some issues, but overall you're achieving a lot of fantastic results here and I'm quite pleased with how you're approaching detail in a number of these pages. It balances well communicates the visual information present on each object and doesn't become overwhelming.

Things that can be improved:

• When adding complex edge detail on top of the simpler edge from the previous stage of construction, don't draw a single continuous line going all along the length of the edge. Instead, draw each bump separately, coming off the original construction line and returning to it, and lift your pen. Design each deviation carefully - zigzagging in a more continuous fashion generally causes one to drop into autopilot, and results in fewer conscious design choices being made.

• The initial flow line - the first step of the leaf drawing process - is extremely important, and relates quite a bit to the arrows exercise from lesson 2. When drawing leaves, it's easy to get caught up in the idea that the leaf starts at a point and ends at a point, and exists statically between those two bounds. When drawing this flow line, I want you to think of it more as an arrow (adding a little arrowhead to the end of the line is something I often do which reminds me of this). Think about the flow line as being, rather than an explicit part of the leaf, think of it as representing the actual motion of all the forces being applied to the leaf. This mostly means how air is moving around it, as the leaf itself is carried by this, and reflects it. Focus on pushing the energy and force, and push beyond the static bounds of the leaf itself. The flow line is going to line up with the spine of the leaf, but it's much more than just that.

• The leaf construction method can actually be applied to sub-components of a larger leaf. For example, when you've got a maple leaf, it consists of various arms which are then combined to create the whole object. In this case, I would apply the steps to each section and then merge them together when I'm done. Remember that construction is all about starting things off as simply as possible, and building up from there. The steps I offer for constructing a leaf are an example of how to approach that with a simpler leaf - but don't get so caught up in following them so closely that you forget why.

Overall you're doing a pretty good job with the branches. I can see a few places where you've got the segments of your lines bending slightly to one side as you lift your pen (and going off track from aiming at the next point), so that's something you're going to want to continue working on - but you're headed in the right direction, so keep it up.

Your actual plant drawings are a mixed bunch. The hibiscus and cactus are pretty solid in terms of their construction. The smaller details on the cactus do feel a tad rushed though - like the spines, i wouldn't generally try and represent those kinds of details with individual lines as the lack of width to the form doesn't quite convey the impression of the spines correctly. Also, you didn't really put a lot of consideration into how each spine was placed and oriented - it goes back to what I mentioned in regards to the edge detail on the leaves. You've got to design every mark you put down.

I really liked the ficus elastica. The plant itself - branches and leaves both - was constructed very well. Your use of line weight may have been a bit too much, not in the sense that the weights were too heavy, but rather that you seem to have applied them everywhere. As I mentioned back in lesson 2, in the form intersection video, line weights are to be applied only to specific localities where you want to clarify overlaps. Don't go treating it as though you're cleaning up or finalizing your linework, or making a clear distinction between construction and "final" lines. There should be no such thing.

Worth mentioning though is that when drawing that flower pot, you should be applying the constructional method there too. That means constructing it like a cylinder, or rather a series of cylinders, around a minor axis to keep all your ellipses properly aligned.

Your tomato drawing definitely felt quite stiff, and I think a major part of this was how you applied your lineweights. Because you attempted to apply it to the entirety of each ball, you did so with a much slower, belaboured stroke - which inevitably lacked the confidence we want to achieve with our mark making. Every mark you put down should be applied with the ghosting method, even line weight. This means breaking it into preparing beforehand and executing with confidence. It also helps if you stick to just adding line weight to certain sections rather than the whole circle.

Take a look at these notes - they're a series of common pitfalls I've seen from students in this lesson. I show how I handle ball-like fruits as well, which should apply to your tomatoes.

Jumping forward a little more quickly, your mushrooms are lovely, and your pitcher plant was definitely drawn too small (which causes people to stiffen up a lot, since our brains benefit from being given a lot of room when thinking through spatial problems).

The last thing I wanted to talk about was your potato plant. From what I can see in the drawing, you may have jumped into this with the intent and expectation to go pretty heavy on detail here. As a result, I think your construction actually suffered - what I'm seeing lines up with students' tendency to, when having a detailed finish on their minds, spend less time and less effort on the earlier (and frankly VASTLY more important) constructional phase. To follow this up, those students will tend to try and fix the resulting problems with detail (which doesn't generally work), so things end up looking awkward, despite all the effort and time invested into the drawing. It's a matter of where you invest that time that matters.

Always remember that construction is the most important part of a drawing. A good construction with no detail can always stand on its own, while a weak construction covered in detail is still going to look wrong.

Anyway, overall you're definitely moving in the right direction. I've mentioned a lot of points to keep in mind, but that's pretty normal. I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete, so feel free to move onto the next one.

Uncomfortable in the post "Lesson 7: Drawing Vehicles"

2018-08-10 22:33

This is fantastic. I got your submission while I was travelling between cities (I'm on vacation with family at the moment), and I was so pleased by your results that I showed them to my grandmother. She was quite pleased too (though she doesn't know a whole lot about drawing).

Here you've demonstrated an exceptional grasp of how these wheels both exist as cylinders in 3D space, as well as how to approach the finer, smaller points of their details as form rather than sticker-like throwaway features. Personally, I'm also very pleased with your tire treads (despite your own assessment), and found that while you're right that the ellipse guide ones were considerably cleaner and better, those you constructed freehand were still reasonably solid all things considered.

I think this will serve as an excellent exercise to add to this lesson - and I particularly liked how you played with connecting some with an axel. I think I'll be stealing that, if you don't mind!

So, to round this off, I'd like you to do 3 more vehicle drawings, taking what you've learned here and applying them. Obviously stick to vehicles with wheels, as you've already proved yourself with helicopters and such. I'm keen on seeing these new pages, and I expect you'll see a considerable bump up.

The exercise aside, your brief break from drawabox may also have helped in a number of ways.

Uncomfortable in the post "250 Box Challenge"

2018-08-10 22:25

Nice work! I can see considerable improvement in the overall construction and the solidity of your constructions over the set. There is one thing that caught my eye while looking over the work though, and I paid special attention to whether or not you were picking up on it. At times it seemed you were, but perhaps not enough, so I want to mention it here.

You have a tendency to focus on each plane of the box as a separate entity, and less on each set of parallel lines as a whole. That is, we know that each plane has another plane that matches it on the opposite side of the box - these both have lines that belong to the same "set" of parallel edges. The top and bottom edges of these given planes are, for example, going to be parallel.

When you're drawing them, you're focusing a lot on how the top and bottom edges of each plane converges, rather than how the top and bottom edges of BOTH planes converge towards the same far off point. For example, the blue extensions of #226.

This does get better over the set, and I see it less and less towards the end, but it's still a big enough issue, and one worth pointing out.

In addition to this, I want to show you these notes. They relate to a tendency I see later on, in boxes like #247, where parallel lines that are very close to each other have a tendency to converge too quickly. When lines are very similar (in angle as shown in those notes), they'll run virtually parallel to one another.

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

Uncomfortable in the post "250 Box Challenge"

2018-08-10 03:08

Overall youre doing great, and are showing a good grasp of 3D space as well as line weight and general construction. Those line extensions are definitely something youll benefit from doing though - and i recommend you take your last page of boxes and apply them there, as itll show you exactly where youre making mistakes and what kind of patterns they follow. Its an important part of being able to look back, identify your weaknesses and learn from them.

Aside from that though, very nice work. Ill go ahead and mark this challenge as complete, so feel free to move onto lesson 2.

Uncomfortable in the post "250 Box Challenge"

2018-08-09 21:20

So far so good (aside from not applying the line extension method so far) but Im only seeing your first page. Did you perhaps accidentally not link to a full album?

Uncomfortable in the post "250 Box Challenge"

2018-08-09 21:00

Theres definitely a good bit of improvement over the set! I do have a couple things to recommend however:

• Draw your boxes bigger - I get that you were trying to cram as many as you could into the page, but these are spatial problem, and our brains benefit immensely when given more room to think through those kinds of things.

• There was some variety in the orientations of your boxes, but not a whole lot - a lot of the boxes felt like repetitions of each others, so try and shake that up a little more.

• When extending your lines, extend them more. Remember what those extensions are meant to tell us about this boxes - they show us how those lines are converging towards their implied vanishing points. The more you extend it, the more you learn about where your lines are off.

Aside from that, keep up the great work! Ill go ahead and mark this challenge as complete, so feel free to move onto lesson 2.

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

2018-08-06 22:17

Theres a lot of good demonstration here of how your understanding of space and form is improving. Your general approach to how these things are made up of simpler forms, and how they fit together is coming along great.

The use of those techniques is fine. What is causing you trouble is the simple stuff. Drawing boxes with sets of parallel lines that converge consistently towards each ones vanishing point, so they feel properly solid and rectilinear - and more importantly, placing and aligning features within those boxes so they line up correctly. These fundamental components really impact the overall believability of your constructions.

For example, in your microwave youve got two smaller details like either the panel of buttons, or the ventilation on the side. Each of these have estimated edges that dont run consistently towards the same vanishing points suggested by the primary box you started it off with.

If you jump back to the 250 box challenge, theres a video on there that you may or may not have watched yet, about Advanced Techniques. Its basically about freehand subdividing boxes, and I think this kind of exercise would be particularly valuable for you. Youd effectively apply then the same line-extension techniques covered in the main box challenge video to test how far off you were.

The only other thing I wanted to mention was about the water bottle you drew, specifically the ellipses on either end of it. Youve got a pretty significant shift between the degrees of either end. The magnitude of this shift is very similar to how dramatic the foreshortening between regular perspective lines is, and specifically what that represents. The same way a very dramatic foreshortening tells us an object is very large or very close to the viewers eye, a significant shift between the degrees of the ellipses on either end of a cylinder tells us that the cylinder is extremely large.

Long story short, for an object like a water bottle, you probably want to keep that transition fairly subtle.

So, I am going to mark this lesson as complete, as you clearly understand the principles, but you should work those advanced box exercises into your routine (and as always, be sure to continue practicing the simpler construction of boxes to continue honing your ability to draw lines to converge consistently towards the same point.

In the next lesson, youll be more free to draw with a ruler and so on. I actually didnt see any significant issues with your linework (in terms of what you mentioned about arcing and such), but it may help you focus more on how those lines are going to converge consistently. As the subject matter in the next lesson tends to be much more challenging, I find that it can help students from getting distracted by these more mundane struggles and focus more on the forms theyre drawing. So I definitely recommend that you take advantage of it.

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

2018-08-06 17:38

I think you were expecting a response for the organic forms with contour lines so much that you misunderstood what I said. Your work there was fine, it was just that your ellipses were a little stiff and wobbly. Its not about how you drew the contour line, its just that your execution was hesitant (rather than confident and smooth). So you just need to work on those ellipses, thats all. The lines are wrapping around the rounded form just fine.

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

2018-08-06 01:32

Overall youre doing a pretty solid job! I especially loved your organic intersections. Your form intersections are also looking great.

There were really only two areas where I wanted to offer some feedback. With your arrows exercise, youve got a lot of great flow to them, but as it stands theyre mostly doing their movement through a limited slice of space - mostly the one defined by the two dimensions of the page youre drawing on. When doing this exercise, its important to really push through the bounds of depth. We do that by thinking of one end of our arrow as being situated physically farther from our viewer, and the other end being placed closer - and exaggerating the scale of those ends. This means really pushing the closer end to be very large and the farther end to be much smaller.

Secondly, a more minor point - I noticed that youre not really drawing through the ellipses you drew for your organic forms with contour ellipses, or even in your dissections. Make sure you draw through all of the ellipses you draw for my lessons, as I dont want you getting too caught up in keeping them extremely neat to the detriment of their smoothness, flow and general confidence.

Your dissections are definitely a great start though. I noticed a lot of interesting textures that you were experimenting with, along with a variety of different approaches to suit each texture.

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

Uncomfortable in the post "250 Box Challenge"

2018-08-06 01:26

Youre showing considerable growth over the set, and have definitely put the techniques covered in the lesson to good use. I definitely did notice that as you pushed through into the 200s, you were less and less inclined to apply the line extension method. Always remember that these exercises are learning opportunities rather than a demonstration of skill - so leaving out that which will allow you to learn from each and every box (even the latest ones) is robbing yourself of additional chances to identify and learn from your mistakes.

Also, that very first page - i understand that it was more of a presentation thing, but keep in mind that when it comes to drawing 3D forms, and especially within the scope of these lessons, drawing each form to its entirety (rather than letting them cut off where they are overlapped by some other form) is a very important part of understanding how each form sits in 3D space and relates to the forms around it.

Not that you did a bad job of it - in fact, those boxes were constructed very well. Its just something to keep in mind as you continue to move forwards, especially on things like the form intersections in lesson 2. Wouldnt want to be half drawing forms there.

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