Uncomfortable in the post "250 Cylinder Challenge"

2018-07-16 15:37

Old thread got locked, those eligible for private critiques can post their work here. I look forward to the day I don't have to repost these damn threads anymore...

Uncomfortable in the post "Lesson 5: Drawing Animals"

2018-07-15 23:34

I'm glad you asked. Everything we draw represents a solid 3D form, and it's extremely important that you believe in the illusion you're creating in regards to that. No part of the drawing should ever be a flat approximation or plan of things. We're going full 3D from the very beginning, and trying to maintain that through the entire process.

Uncomfortable in the post "Lesson 5: Drawing Animals"

2018-07-15 22:13

So it's definitely clear that this lesson was a struggle for you, but I can see some areas where you're demonstrating a grasp of at least some of the lesson material, so that's a good sign.

the first thing I want to say is that you need to put that brush pen away. When it comes to doing these lessons, the only situation where I recommend using a brush pen is when you need to fill in large shadow shapes (which is not an issue here). When it comes to line weight, it's extremely important that you add it using the same pen you've used to draw all the other lines. The reason is that this keeps you from accidentally adding incredibly thick lines that seem entirely out of place. Line weight is meant to be subtle, just enough for your subconscious to pick up on. The incredibly thick lines you've used in a number of these drawings only serves to flatten out your forms.

With that out of the way, some of the biggest issues lie with observation. In a number of these drawings there is the tell-tale sign that you're drawing a lot more from memory than from actually looking continuously at your reference image. A lot of students will make the mistake of mainly focusing their observation at the beginning - studying their reference carefully, then going off to draw what it is that they saw. This doesn't work out well as the moment you look away from your reference, your brain starts throwing away massive amounts of information, distilling it to that which is important to it. Keep in mind that your brain isn't interested in drawing an animal - it's interested in the fact that it saw an animal, that the animal was a predator. None of that has anything to do with proportion, construction, or really anything that is useful when drawing.

Now while drawings like the foxes, hen, goat, etc. demonstrate this to varying degrees (with some of those having fewer major observational errors and others having some more significant ones), the wolves are in another class of their own. It's entirely possible that you included the wrong reference images for those, but the drawings definitely don't match the ones you provided.

There are some features in your drawings that I do like, so it's worth mentioning them. In the eagle, I really appreciate the fact that you defined the contour ellipse where the eagle's neck connects to its body. This goes a long way to make its neck and torso relate to one another in a way that reinforces the solidity and believability of each form.

While you struggle with aspects of constructing heads (most people do, it's quite challenging), it's often very clear in most of your drawings that you understand that the muzzle is a separate and distinct connected form, in relation to the cranial ball.

There are of course a number of issues as well that are holding you back in a big way. A couple of them are as follows:

• You often draw ribcages as a ball that don't occupy enough of the torso. Ribcages generally occupy about half the length of an animal's torso - that's pretty consistent, and even applies to humans. When laying in those forms, you need to always think how they relate to the masses they're representing in the reference image. You can't just be making these things up.

• You have a tendency to draw legs as a single continuous and complex form. This contradicts the principle of constructional drawing (break things down into simple forms, then build them up step by step rather than jumping into complexity early). At the end of my critique for your lesson 4 work, I gave you a bunch of demos in how you can construct legs from sausage forms. I want you to apply that here.

There are other issues, but it's difficult to point them out directly on final images. What I ask you to do next will allow me to point out issues with greater precision. I will be asking you to redo this lesson, but not just yet. What I want you to do next is a single drawing.

Draw this wolf (I found a more complete, higher resolution version of one you included in your homework set). I want you to take photos at the end of each constructional step, and include them all in your next submission so I can see exactly how you're thinking through this problem.

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

2018-07-15 21:16

Overall you've done a pretty great job! Your lines and ellipses sections are fantastic - you're demonstrating a good deal of confidence with your linework, and this helps keep each line smooth and each ellipse evenly shaped. At the same time you're showing a lot of refined control, which can be quite tricky to manage without resulting in a wobbly line. Very well done.

Jumping ahead to your boxes, I have a very minor point to raise about the rough perspective boxes. When adding hatching to a surface, it's always best to ensure that the lines stretch all the way from edge to edge, rather than falling short and floating somewhat arbitrarily. It really is a matter of aesthetics, but it keeps things from looking sloppy. As far as the meat of this exercise however, you've done quite well and I'm glad that you applied the additional error-checking step to identify how your estimation of perspective tends to drift.

Your rotated boxes is definitely one of the better ones. You've taken great care and patience with this, and I'm really pleased with how you kept all of the gaps between the boxes narrow and consistent, keeping the whole system nicely structured and ensuring that neighbouring edges remain more or less parallel. The only issue I noticed was that you're not quite pushing your rotation enough. It's actually a very common problem - our brains prefer things to all be arranged on tidy little grids, and we tend to become quite uncomfortable with rotation and deviation from that. As a result, our brains trick us into thinking that we're rotating things much more than we actually are. As you can see here, in order to fill the full range of rotation, it's necessary to push and exaggerate it more. What actually happened in your boxes was that rather than rotating them more, you were stretching them instead.

Now, it is important to understand that both this exercise and the organic perspective boxes are intentionally way more challenging than students at this stage are expected to be able to handle. I've dumped you in the deep end of the pool without teaching you how to swim, and all things considered, you appear to be treading water quite comfortably, though perhaps not swimming laps like a pro.

The organic perspective boxes definitely posed a challenge to you, and we will continue to work on the challenge of rotating boxes freely in 3D space. That said, I like that you pushed the scale of your boxes to show depth, and that you maintained fairly confident linework throughout. The only thing there that I'd wish to point out is that when you make a mistake, it's best just to leave it alone. Otherwise you end up adding more ink and drawing more attention to the areas that you'd honestly prefer the viewer to ignore.

I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete. I'd like you to move onto the 250 box challenge next. That'll let you get some more practice "swimming" so to speak. Be sure to read through all of the notes and watch the video on that page before starting the work.

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

2018-07-15 20:42

Overall you've done a pretty good job. I did notice a couple things I'd like to bring to your attention however:

• In your super imposed lines, while you generally did well, I noticed a bit of wobbling in your lines. The first priority of this exercise is to achieve marks that are smooth and consistent - we want to focus more on flow and leave accuracy second to that. This can result in our lines diverging a little towards the far end, but as long as our marks follow a consistent trajectory with no bumps or wobbling, then I'd consider it to be successful, as that accuracy improves with practice, as well as the application of the ghosting method (which usually hasn't been introduced at this point). This exercise, and the principle of focusing on the confidence of one's stroke comes into play a lot when getting into adding line weight. If we jump ahead, we can see that in your organic perspective boxes, you added some additional weight, but you did so in a manner that resulted in wobbly lines. You put accuracy over flow, and the result suffered a little for it. When it comes to linework, confidence is most important.

• The rest of the lines section was solid, and when applying the ghosting method your linework demonstrated exactly the kind of confidence I'm looking for.

• Your ellipses section was also spot on - each shape is even and there's no signs of wobbling or stiffness among them. At the same time you're demonstrating a pretty fantastic degree of control.

• Jumping ahead to your rough perspective boxes, you're mostly demonstrating a good grasp of the exercise, but there's a few points worth mentioning. Firstly, your line quality here looks far below what you showed with the ghosting exercises earlier on. The lines tend to arc, and lack that same confidence (and as a result, don't appear to be entirely smooth). Secondly, you'll want to keep an eye on your horizontals and verticals. The horizontals should run parallel to the horizon line, and the verticals should run perpendicularly to it. Thirdly, the hatching lines were a bit sloppy. Be sure to keep the consistent and parallel, and stretch them all the way across from edge to edge, rather than having them fall short and float inside the plane. Lastly, don't forget to go over your completed work as described here to identify where your estimation of perspective tends to drift. All in all, I get the impression that you could do far better at this exercise, and that you may have simply rushed through it rather than giving it all the time it required of you.

• For your rotated boxes, you technically didn't complete the exercise. I do see students leaving out those corner boxes here and there, and it's usually out of a fear that tackling those (which tend to be the more challenging ones) is going to "ruin" their attempt. A complete attempt gone badly however is infinitely better than one that was never truly attempted. That said, there is something I can offer in terms of critique. Currently rather than rotating the boxes to the side (ignoring the center one), your boxes are actually more or less parallel to one another. As you can see here, their lines converge towards the same vanishing point, meaning that they are parallel. As shown in this diagram, the vanishing point slides as the box rotates - with one VP moving towards the box itself, and the other VP sliding away from it.

• Your organic perspective, save from the line quality being somewhat wobbly, is pretty good. You're showing an awareness of how the boxes sit in 3D space, and while there are issues in the convergences of the sets of parallel lines, that's something that will improve with practice over a long period of time. One recommendation I do have though is to watch the newer version of the how to draw a box video. It has been updated since you last did the challenge, and includes a useful tip on how to test a box for problems (which can help you to gradually resolve them through more targeted practice). That said, I won't be asking you to redo the challenge, as you have already done it, and you're demonstrating a good grasp of the benefits of drawing through boxes.

Before I mark this lesson as complete, I'd like you to do one more page of rough perspective boxes, and one page of rotated boxes.

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

2018-07-15 20:23

Your lines section is really solid. Super imposed lines are looking pretty confident, you're clearly focusing on keeping the lines smooth rather than fussing too much over accuracy. This carries over into your ghosted lines and planes, where the ghosting method is helping take your already confident execution and adding some preplanning to achieve greater control.

Your ellipses are generally looking good as it is, though you'll definitely want to continue working on tightening them up and maintaining their even shapes (while maintaining the same confidence). This largely comes from getting used to drawing ellipses from the shoulder. While your ellipses in planes do suffer in terms of maintaining even, elliptical shapes (due to the way drawing them in the planes poses a somewhat distracting challenge), these are already looking better in terms of tightness over the previous pages.

Your funnels are okay, but they do feel a touch haphazard. Don't leave gaps between the ellipses, as it's a wasted opportunity to get more mileage.

Jumping ahead to your rough perspective boxes, you look to be doing a good job. Just be sure to go over your completed work on these exercises as described here. It helps to get a sense for where your estimation of perspective tends to drift.

You made a solid attempt at the rotated boxes. The rotations do need work (pay attention to how the vanishing points slide as a box rotates, as demonstrated here from the lesson and as I explain here in regards to your own work. I do like that you generally kept the gaps between your boxes fairly narrow and kept the edges on either side of a gap fairly parallel and consistent. This helped keep things structured.

Your organic perspective boxes were definitely a challenge, but you made some headway here. We are going to continue working on this however to further solidify your grasp of 3D space and to get you more familiar with how those sets of parallel lines that make up each box converge in a consistent manner.

I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete. I'd like you to move onto the 250 box challenge next. Be sure to read through all of the notes and watch (or perhaps rewatch) the video on that page before starting the work.

Uncomfortable in the post "Lesson 7: Drawing Vehicles"

2018-07-15 15:51

Sounds good! Nothing wrong with taking a little break. This stuff, especially the hard surface constructions with the vehicles being the most challenging among them, can definitely wear a person down. Some time away can definitely be beneficial, but I'm glad to hear that you're back at it now.

Uncomfortable in the post "Lesson 7: Drawing Vehicles"

2018-07-14 00:52

These are definitely headed in the right direction. Your sense of perspective is continuing to improve, but more importantly I get a general sense that your overall understanding of 3D space, and your own belief that what you're drawing is actually 3D (rather than just a flat drawing on a flat page) is jumping forward significantly.

There is of course things to work on:

• Try to avoid the kind of guesswork you did for the top half of the car here. Admittedly you did a pretty okay job of it (it was a little off, but not bad), but it's best to avoid those kinds of situations altogether.

• I'm not a big fan of how you rounded off your corners - it's kind of like you covered the car in a big blanket. You don't want to stray away from the edges of your forms as much as you did at the far end of the hood/windshield.

• I quite like the form you constructed here, but it does feel like the farther side of the car is a little higher up. So things feel like they're tilting/twisting upwards. You may have guessed more than you ought to have there.

• This one's a bit of a mess. The box you started out with seemed off, and the ellipses for the wheels aren't correct (rather than laying flat against the box, they seem to be set at an angle).

• Avoid hatching, you tend to be pretty scribbly with it, and usually it's better just to focus on line weight to clarify your forms instead.

As I said, you're headed down the right path. All I can prescribe at this point is more practice. What I'd recommend is to spread your practice out over all the subjects from lesson 3-7, and to submit them in chunks once a month. I'll give you what advice I can, and point out anything particularly egregious.

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

2018-07-14 00:39

Your super imposed lines are looking great. Lots of confidence in your execution, so your lines come out pretty smoothly, which is definitely our primary focus. Your ghosted lines are good, though the fact that the lines start trailing off pretty early on is pretty noticeable - you'll want to work on keeping those marks strong throughout the stroke.

I think you may have noticed this when you started working on the planes, and as a result you started drawing multiple marks per line - whatever the reason, it's important that you get used to executing only one mark per line to ensure that you're executing the technique correctly. In addition to this, getting in the habit of reinforcing your marks automatically and by reflex is a bad idea that will result in unnecessarily hairy linework down the line.

Your ellipses are coming along pretty well. In some places the shapes come out a little uneven, but I think it's largely a matter of getting used to drawing them from your shoulder, and maintaining an even shape throughout. You're headed in the right direction, so continuing to practice these exercises as part of a warmup routine should be enough to keep you improving on this front.

Jumping ahead to your rough perspective boxes, you're mostly doing pretty well, but watch your horizontal and vertical lines. Remember that your horizontals should be running parallel to the horizon line, and your verticals should be running perpendicular to it. You seem to have some lines that slant a little here and there.

Also, make sure that your hatching lines stretch all the way from edge to edge rather than floating in the middle of a plane.

Your rotated boxes, though kind of stretched on one side, is actually pretty good. Along the horizontal axis you've achieved a solid range of rotation. Watch out for the boxes above and below however - you'll notice that if you compare the vanishing points for those boxes that they're actually pretty close to being parallel to one another.

When trying this exercise in the future, I'd recommend trying to make the boxes somewhat less deep. You don't need to fuss too much over exact proportions, but aiming for something that seems vaguely cube-like is a good bet.

Lastly, your organic perspective boxes certainly are coming along well, and are about where I'd hope for them to be. This means that there's definitely room for improvement, but that you're working your head around this complex task quite well. I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete, but I'd like you to move onto the 250 box challenge next. This should give you an opportunity to continue solidifying your grasp of 3D space.

By the way, your plant drawing demonstrates a great start with construction. Nice work.

Uncomfortable in the post "Lesson 3: Drawing Plants"

2018-07-12 23:18

This is definitely a lot better, especially with your leaves and plant constructions. Your branches have plenty of room for improvement, but they're a step up from before. Just be sure to continue practicing them. I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete. I do have one thing to point out though:

On this page, you drew these pointless little lines along the planter. I'm not sure what they're supposed to be, but it looks to me like an attempt at detail that had nothing to do with your reference. Don't do that - you either observe and study your reference as carefully as possible to capture the detail accurately and ensure that each mark you put down relates directly to some feature from your source object, or you don't put detail at all. Don't half ass it. It's something I often see from students who don't yet know how to tackle detail, though you've done a decent job when it comes to the complexity on your leaves, so I figured it was a lesson worth hammering home.

Anyway, feel free to move onto the next lesson.

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

2018-07-12 14:29

It doesn't seem like I have you in my records as being eligible for private homework critiques. If you're a patron, be sure to check your patreon inbox as I'll have sent you a message asking for your reddit username. If not, you're welcome to submit your work directly to the subreddit for a critique from the community.

Uncomfortable in the post "Lesson 3: Drawing Plants"

2018-07-12 03:31

I'm referring to the bit at step 3 on this page, where you draw a segment from one ellipse, past the second and towards the third, then draw another segment from the second ellipse past the third and towards the forth, etc. The intent is for all these segments to flow together seamlessly. It's hard to do, hence the need to practice it.

Uncomfortable in the post "Lesson 3: Drawing Plants"

2018-07-11 23:54

Overall your drawings are looking pretty good. There are a few things I'd like to mention:

• For your leaves, try to avoid adding wavy edges with a single continuous line that goes back and forth. It's better to build each bump separately, and to do so coming off the previous stage of construction (as demonstrated here). Also don't skip steps - each stage of construction is a decision being made (for example, the earlier stages determine how a form flows through space). If you end up trying to make too many decisions at once, your results will suffer for it, due to your focus being split between several tasks instead of being dedicated to just one at a time.

• For your branches, it looks like you didn't make too many attempts at playing with the idea of building up a single complex line with multiple overlapping strokes that flow into each other seamlessly. It's definitely a useful technique, so I'd recommend looking over the branches instructions and continuing to work on that as part of a regular warmup routine. Ultimately all of these techniques are tools for your toolbox - we want to be sure that when a problem comes up that requires a given tool, that you're familiar enough with it.

• Your plant drawings are generally looking pretty good. When drawing more geometric forms (like flower pots, vases, planters, etc.) remember to apply the methodology covered in previous lessons and challenges - for example, build your cylinders around a minor axis line to help you keep the alignment of your ellipses consistent, and draw through your boxes so you understand how it sits in 3D space as you work with it.

• Also worth mentioning - when you've got a lot of leaves that overlap each other, it's important that you still draw each one completely (regardless of where it is hidden by other forms). All of these drawings are essentially exercises on learning to work within 3D space, and to understand how the things you draw sit within it. Drawing each leaf completely forces you to build a more complete mental model of your construction in three dimensions, whereas only drawing them where they are visible makes you think of your drawings more as being a collection of lines on a flat page. That's why we focus so much on construction, and why texture and detail isn't really that important to us right now.

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

Uncomfortable in the post "Lesson 5: Drawing Animals"

2018-07-11 23:27

I will be marking this lesson as complete. You are showing improvement in several areas (I especially liked this llama and this booby), but there are still a lot of areas that are going to require you to continue practicing this material. For the most part, it comes down to your proportions and your observational skills.

Moving onto the next lesson for now is probably the best road to take, as it will force you to sink or swim. Where the last three lessons have been a little more relaxed as far as observation and construction goes, the subject matter covered in lessons 6 and 7 really force you to pay careful attention to what you're drawing and punish you if you rely on memory over direct observation.

In addition to this, tackling the issues using a fresh subject matter may help you see the problems you're encountering from a new angle.

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

2018-07-11 23:21

The form intersections are a big step up. Your organic forms with contour curves have improved too, though I want you to watch how you curve your contour lines as they wrap around. Some of these are done well (usually those where you overshoot your curves as they hook around, as described here), while others don't quite hook around enough as they reach the edge. Definitely keep an eye on that.

I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete. Feel free to move onto the next one, but make sure you continue practicing exercises from lessons 1 and 2 as part of a regular warmup routine (usually picking 2-3 exercises at the beginning of each sitting to do for 10-15 minutes).

Uncomfortable in the post "250 Cylinder Challenge"

2018-07-11 00:13

Nice work! I can definitely see the confidence and control of your linework and especially your ellipses improve by leaps and bounds over the course of this set. By the end, your constructions feel considerably more solid and cohesive.

One area where I think you'll want to focus on as you continue to move forwards is constructing your cylinders in boxes - specifically the matter of building ellipses in planes. You may or may not have seen the video included on the challenge page that go into these matters specifically (perfect circles and cubes in 3D space) but it's definitely worth watching. It goes into some of the more technical considerations when it comes to whether or not an ellipse you've drawn actually represents a circle.

All in all though, great work. I'm really loving the keen eye you have for keeping your ellipses aligned. I'll go ahead and mark this challenge as complete.

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

2018-07-11 00:08

There's a number of things I noticed in your submission that we can work on. I'll list them out individually:

• In your super imposed lines exercise (and it continues on through the rest), one thing that jumped out at me was that you have a tendency to draw slow and steady, with a definite focus on the accuracy of your marks. You allow your brain to guide your hand as you draw, and whenever you see your pen going off track, you course-correct. This results in a line full of wobbles (as explained in this comic. You want to instead focus on achieving smooth lines that flow well first, leaving accuracy as a secondary priority. We can achieve this by drawing with a confident, persistent pace. That's what the ghosting method, introduced early on in this lesson, is all about. We break the process of drawing into several stages, first building up muscle memory and getting a feel for the mark we want to produce, then finally executing with a confident, persistent pace, trusting in our arms rather than our brain to drive the motion.

• With your planes exercise, I noticed that you drew more or less drew the same plane (in terms of size, orientation, etc.) over and over. You left a great deal of blank space in between as well. Try to go for more variation, draw some that are bigger, and fill up the space you've got.

• You appear to have skipped the tables of ellipses exercise, as well as the funnels.

• Be sure to apply the ghosting method everywhere, to every mark you put down. In the context of your ellipses in planes exercise, this will help you control your marks more, and improve how well you get them to fit within each plane without sacrificing the confidence with which you draw them.

• Your plotted perspective is looking pretty good. The only issue I can notice here is minor - it looks like your verticals slant slightly at times. This exercise is done in 2 point perspective, so your verticals should run perpendicular to the horizon line.

• You've got a good start to your rough perspective boxes. Make sure you go over your completed work as described here however to help identify where your estimation of perspective tends to drift.

• Your attempt at the rotated boxes is looking pretty good in terms of structure and consistency. The line quality is also spot on (though looking at the rest of your work, I'm thinking you may have done this with a ruler, even though the instructions were to do it freehand - if you did freehand it though, then it's done very well). As you continue to work on this however, I want you to really push the rotation of these boxes. You've achieved a range of rotation of maybe 90-100 degrees, whereas the full range we want to fill is closer to 180. Remember, as shown in this animated diagram, the vanishing points will slide along the horizon line, and by the end one of them will be extremely close to the box itself resulting in a very dramatic turn. Our brains like to keep things in nice, parallel grids, so they'll actively fool us into thinking that we've drawn larger rotations than we actually have - so when in doubt, always push and exaggerate those turns.

• A few things to mention for your organic perspective boxes. Your box constructions are about where I'd expect them to be - meaning, they do need work (and we'll get to that), but you've tackled this challenging exercise admirably, considering that I haven't yet taught you how to deal with this kind of challenge. I dumped you into the deep end of the pool without teaching you how to swim, so to speak. One issue I did notice however was that your line quality tells me you completely stopped trying to apply the ghosting method, and went back to chicken scratch. No matter how difficult the challenge in front of you, you must always draw each mark with planning and forethought, using this technique. Don't chicken scratch, ever. I can see that you did a much better job with your lines in the one with black ink, but all of the blue ones were rather rough. The other thing is a more minor issue - when doing this exercise in the future, try playing with the scale of your boxes more to show depth. That is, draw the boxes that ought to be closer to the viewer to be MUUUCH bigger, and those farther away to be much smaller. It's a matter of exaggeration.

Before I mark this lesson as complete, I'd like you to redo the lines and ellipses sections. While you definitely did a pretty good job with the boxes section, it seems like you were still getting in the swing of things early on, and didn't follow the instructions or even complete all of those exercises. It's best that you redo them just to be sure that you've got it all down firmly before moving on.

Be sure to read through the instructions for a given exercise and watching the video for it immediately before starting the work on it, so it's all fresh in your mind.

Once you resubmit those two sections, I'll go ahead and mark the lesson as complete. At that point, I'll want you to move onto the 250 box challenge.

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

2018-07-09 23:18

You start off pretty well with some arrows that flow nicely through space. Through the rest of this submission however, your work feels somewhat haphazard and rather sloppy. You've got a lot of great confidence to your linework, but the issue lies with your control. It suggests that you didn't necessarily put enough focus on the use of the ghosting method for each and every mark you put down.

This hit in a number of ways.

Your contour lines definitely hook around well, but more often than not they fall outside of the edges of the form. As the technique is all about giving the impression that the line runs along the surface of this rounded form, the illusion is quickly lost if the line doesn't fit snugly between the edges. The alignment of the ellipses and curves to the central minor axis line was frequently off as well, which also undermined the illusion we're trying to produce.

Your dissections are a good start, but there are two things that jump out at me. Firstly, keep pushing yourself to observe your reference more closely and more frequently. It's normal to start out relying quite heavily on one's memory - that means spending a good long while studying your reference at first, and then spending a good long while drawing what you saw. The problem is that humans aren't great at remembering a lot of information. We tend to throw out the bulk of that information, so it's important to keep looking back and trying to ensure that every mark we put down captures a specific feature present in our reference. When looking at a reference, focus on things like how certain details are grouped or spread out over a surface (is it an even coverage, or do they cluster in certain ways), and always ask yourself questions about what makes a surface appear to be rough, smooth, wet, sticky, etc.

Secondly, you do tend to get a little scratchy at times, and often let your brain go a little bit on auto-pilot when tackling things with a lot of complexity, or high detail density. Auto-pilot can seem rather attractive, but it causes us to draw in highly predictable patterns that make a drawing feel stiff and unrealistic. It's true that there are always rhythms and patterns to the way textures work (and that chaos/scribbling is never the answer) - but the patterns present on a reference usually have a great deal of nuance to them that quickly get lost if we don't continually go back to study them. This really comes back to the first point, of not trusting your memory.

There are a few things that jump out at me with your form intersections. First and foremost, your individual forms lack solidity. This comes from the little gaps you sometimes leave near the corners, where a line has failed to reach all the way to the point you laid down before ghosting. Your ellipses also contribute to this, especially where you fail to draw through them (remember, you need to be drawing through all the ellipses you draw for these lessons, ideally two full times around the shape before lifting the pen) or where you don't keep them tight resulting in all kinds of holes and gaps). The lack of line weight also tends to make the forms feel more like loosely related collections of lines, which is something I mentioned when critiquing your 250 box challenge.

In the instructions, I do mention that you should focus on drawing a single contiguous network of forms, and that upon finishing the addition of a new form, all those present should feel solid and cohesive. Don't move onto a subsequent form until you've achieved this, and don't focus on individual groupings of forms.

Overall I don't get the impression that you yourself are buying into the illusion you're trying to create - that's one of the most important things we work towards, buying into our own lie that these two dimensional drawings are actually solid, three dimensional forms. If you believe this to be the case, then it becomes considerably more difficult to draw loosely, to leave gaps that result in forms that feel flimsy or uncommitted. Remember that we're not loosely sketching or exploring - we're constructing individual forms within that space.

All in all, I feel that you can do far better than this. All you need to do is put more time towards each exercise, and really push yourself to buy into the illusion you're selling. I'd like you to do the following:

• 1 page of organic forms with contour ellipses

• 1 page of organic forms with contour curves

• 1 page of dissections

• 1 page of form intersections

• 1 page of organic intersections

Before tackling each exercise, I want you to go back and reread that exercise's instructions and watch its video. Pay special attention to how I execute my linework - I'm not being loose or careless with my marks. I'm not always 100% accurate, but I am putting in as much time as I require to be as accurate as I can be.

Uncomfortable in the post "Lesson 3: Drawing Plants"

2018-07-09 00:44

You submitted this just as I was starting to whittle down a pretty big list of critiques (great way to end a weekend, right?) so I was immediately worried that things were turning somewhat hydra-esque. Luckily you've actually done a pretty great job, so it isn't adding too much to the pile!

Overall, I think you're really taking the core of these lessons to heart. You're extremely meticulous, have a pretty solid and subtle control of line weight, and despite your own claims, I think you're demonstrating a pretty good grasp of how to black out certain areas to create a strong negative/positive space juxtaposition and bring the important forms forward.

I'm especially pleased with how you're approaching most of your leaves, in that you're really taking the principle of the arrow exercise (the concept of capturing the idea of motion and force, rather than a solid, static object) and applying it to these concrete constructions. Your leaves, as a result, feel representational of the flow of air around them - like they themselves are a physical manifestation of it, less limited by where the leaf itself starts and ends. This gives your drawings a sense of dynamism and life that pushes your drawings to a whole new level.

I'm also very pleased that you're not at all shy about drawing each and every leaf individually and completely. You're not hiding leaves where they're overlapped by others, or trying to use shortcuts like loose sketching or scribbling. Whatever you choose to draw, you draw in a complete manner that suggests a strong grasp of how all the components relate to one another in 3D space.

When it comes to texture, I certainly can see some areas where you get a little scribbly (like page 9). I can certainly see why, and it didn't altogether come out poorly, but when tackling texture any kind of scribbling should be avoided. Whenever you get that urge, take a step back and try and find the little patterns and weed out the core of the details you're trying to capture. Deliberate, controlled marks will always look more successful (given that they are informed by the visual information present in your reference image).

The only other thing I want to mention is that when dealing with pots and planters, remember that they deserve as much of your focus and patience as the leaves and stems. Construct them as solid, geometric forms. Draw through them, apply minor axes for the cylindrical ones, etc. In page 12 the base of the pot ended up coming out a little shallow - having drawn it as a full ellipse, and better yet, aligning all the pot's ellipses along the same straight minor axis would have definitely made the form feel a lot more believable.

Anyway! You're doing great. Keep those few points I raised in mind, and consider this lesson complete. Feel free to move onto lesson 4.

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

2018-07-09 00:34

Pretty nice work! Overall you did a solid job. You're conveying a good sense of form, and I especially liked your form intersections and organic intersections. Your linework tends to be very confident and bold, which helps keep everything nice and smooth.

There were a few things that I noticed that I'd like to mention:

• Your organic forms with contour lines tended to be a little bit loose. This comes down to that confidence which I like, though it can be a bit of a double edged sword. While execution needs to be confident in order to maintain that smooth flow, it's important that you exert control over it by applying the ghosting method before executing the mark. This hit you particularly hard with the contour curves, where the majority of your curves tended to sit outside of the form. Since we're trying to sell the illusion that these lines run along the surface of a three dimensional form, it's really important that the curves stay snug between the edges - not falling outside or floating inside.

• You've got a lot of great experimentation with different kinds of textures in your dissections. The only issue I wanted to remark upon was with how you struggle to achieve transition from areas of dense texture to rest areas where that texture is relatively sparse. I recommend that you take a look at the 25 texture challenge, and try doing it in parallel with the other lessons. It's the sort of exercise that is meant to be stretched over a fairly long period of time, and it drills a lot with the ability to control density and transition from one end of the spectrum to the other.

• Overall your form intersections were really solid. Just two points that can help here - firstly, your foreshortening on these forms tended to be a little dramatic at times. This can throw the sense of scale off and lead to some general inconsistencies which a viewer will pick up on, even though they can't entirely express what's wrong. Secondly, a bit of line weight around the silhouettes of your forms will definitely help to pump up the illusion of solidity by quite a bit. It doesn't need to be heavy - in fact, it should be quite subtle, but ensuring that the silhouettes of each form gets just a little bit of weight will help make each form feel more cohesive and sturdy.

Anyway, overall you've done really well. Keep up the good work and consider this lesson complete. Feel free to move onto the next one.

Uncomfortable in the post "250 Box Challenge"

2018-07-09 00:26

Great work! I was a bit concerned at first but I'm glad you started applying the line extension method, and held fast to it through the rest of the set. I think it went a long way to helping you make your convergences more consistent, and the result seemed to be more solid and better constructed boxes by the end. Your confidence on those last few pages is really fantastic, and your use of line weight really helps make the whole form feel more cohesive.

One thing that can help as you continue to move forwards is to try and make the line weight more subtle. I actually quite enjoy how you've got it right now (especially the fact that individual lines tend to taper and expand, which gives a great sense of dynamism). One thing you will want to watch out for though is pushing the weight much further than this. The thicker things get, the more graphic and flattened they tend to be. With line weight, one can achieve a great effect even if the variation in weight is much more subtle - as long as there's enough of a difference for the subconscious to pick up on it, it'll still read just as well. Just something to keep in mind.

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

Uncomfortable in the post "250 Cylinder Challenge"

2018-07-09 00:21

Congrats on completing the challenge. I'm glad to see that you focused quite well on utilizing the minor axis when constructing your cylinders. You definitely pushed through and developed a fair bit of confidence with working in 3D space by the end. There are a few things I want to mention however:

• It seems like towards the last page there, you started leaving the minor axis out. You really shouldn't - it's an important guideline to remind you how your ellipses should be aligned, and the point of including it when doing these exercises is to make it second nature, so ultimately you are able to visualize that minor axis line without actually drawing it. We get to that point by drilling it in over and over - the awareness of that minor axis and what it represents should always be there.

• You seem to have neglected to draw through a lot of your ellipses. I know you've been away from these exercises for quite a while, so it's an important thing to mention - you should be drawing through each and every ellipse you draw for these lessons, ideally two full times around the shape before lifting your pen.

• It appears to me that you may not be applying the ghosting method to your linework here - be sure to review it from lesson 1 and make it a regular habit, to be applying that multi-step process to how you make each and every mark in order to ensure that you maintain both confidence and control without falling back to scratchier linework.

• One thing that was covered in the cylinder video was starting with a box and using that to derive the minor axis line. It's a great way to handle situations where you need your cylinder to fit into a specific location, so it's definitely something you should practice.

I'll go ahead and mark this challenge as complete, so be sure to keep the points I've raised here in mind.

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

2018-07-09 00:14

You definitely start off strong. Your arrows flow really nicely through 3D space, and your organic forms with contour ellipses show a good grasp of how the lines need to wrap around the forms and how the ellipses' degrees shift over the form's length.

Once you hit the organic forms with contour curves however, you start to stray pretty far from the instructions (making all kinds of overly complex, loopy forms and neglecting to utilize the minor axis as instructed. The further you go, the more you push away from the focus of the exercise.

I do feel that for the most part you understand what contour lines are for and how they're meant to be used, but you definitely get pretty sloppy here.

With your dissections, you've got a lot of interesting textures and a lot of great experimentation. As far as my expectations for this lesson goes, you're doing a great job. There are a few places where you can work on these however - for example, making sure the textures wrap around the rounded form (like your metal texture), working on your choice of what constitutes a texture (grass can be a texture, but the blade of grass itself is a form - the texture is what exists on the form, that's what we're interested in removing from the blade and applying to these sausage forms). Also, I noticed that you are struggling with varying the density of your textures - you tend to go from full texture to none, with no transition between them. Give the notes on the texture challenge a read, and try the exercise. It should help you develop in this area.

Your form intersections is where the hiatus starts to show. Your linework's a bit scratchy at times, the perspective on the boxes is a bit wonky, and overall I'm not entirely sure you read the instructions or watched the video for this exercise as carefully as you could have. One big thing I recommend in the instructions is that you stay away from long tubes or other overly stretched forms, sticking to forms that are more equilateral instead. As you continue to work on this, you tend to stray more from the instructions, and end up going off on a tangent.

Your organic intersections are coming along pretty well. You demonstrate a good grasp of how these forms interact with one another, so you end on a good note.

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

• One page of organic forms with contour curves. Stick to simple sausage forms, use your central minor axis lines, etc.

• Two pages of form intersections. You may want to review the material on the 250 box challenge page, as it's definitely been a while since you last completed that (and the video there has been updated).

Before tackling each of these exercises, be sure to review the instructions and watch the videos. I know there's all kinds of ways one can modify these exercises to take them in all different kinds of directions, but when submitting them for critique here, you need to follow the instructions to the letter. Each exercise has a specific focus, and by allowing yourself to deviate, you risk missing out on it.

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

2018-07-08 23:57

Overall you did a really solid job. Your arrows flow nicely through space, your organic forms with contour lines convey a strong illusion of form and volume, your form intersections demonstrate a good grasp of how the various forms relate to each other in space in a cohesive and consistent manner, and the interactions between your organic intersections are coming along well.

I have just a few things to mention:

• On this page, the use of line weight wasn't the best. The dark internal lines with relatively light external lines (those that define the silhouette of the object) broke the cohesion of the overall form. Generally you want line weight variation to be quite subtle, and you want the silhouette to be heavy enough to maintain the idea that all the lines make up a single form. With all these overly dark lines sitting inside, it ends up feeling more like a collection of loosely related lines rather than a single solid form.

• Also for your organic forms with contour lines, I highly recommend that you not break away from using a central minor axis line, as it plays an important role in helping one to align contour ellipses and curves.

• Your second set of dissections (where you didn't modify the underlying form) were definitely more in line in terms of approach. The point of texture is that while it is made up of smaller forms, they are meant to simply wrap around another form as needed. So an "ear of corn" is not a texture - the corn kernels themselves can be, but the sheaf would not be included in that. On the note that textures wrap around their base forms, keep that in mind. You often manage it just fine, but the "car hood surface" texture jumped out at me because your lines did not wrap around the rounded form, which largely fought against the illusion that the form is three dimensional.

• Also worth mentioning, when handling textures, avoid scribbling or using hatching lines. You didn't for the most part, but there were a few areas (ear of corn, soda can) where you didn't really pay attention to the texture and seemed to be more interested in filling the surface with something. Hatching is usually just a filler texture when people aren't interested in looking deeper to actually find the texture that is present (usually because they're more interested in just shading an object, which is not what we're doing here).

• Worth mentioning, your use of line weight in the form intersections was pretty solid (in comparison to the issue I raised with your organic forms with contour ellipses). The forms feel very cohesive. Going around the ellipses you did stiffen up a little though (when adding the additional weight) so remember to work on applying that weight with as confident a stroke as you would when drawing it initially.

• Your organic intersections are coming along well. There is room for improvement, but that'll come with continued practice. It's mostly a matter of always pushing yourself to imagine as though you're piling a bunch of water balloons on top of one another, thinking about how they're going to sag against one another. You're doing a pretty good job as it is, but a couple of the forms (the squiggly one towards the top left, and the leftmost one resting on top of the big bottom one) are still a bit weak and don't quite sell the illusion.

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

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

2018-07-07 22:53

Looking at your work, it seems to me like you took a bit of a break, and then came back to the assigned revisions fairly recently. That in and of itself is generally okay, but what stands out to me here is that you don't seem to have reviewed the instructions before starting up again.

• In your organic forms with contour ellipses, you totally left the central minor axis lines out.

• Your contour curves also tended to be rather shallow and didn't always give the impression that you were drawing marks that wrapped around these rounded, 3D forms. This was likely because unlike your previous attempt, you stopped applying the overshooting method. This resulted in a fairly mixed bag, where some contour curves wrapped around okay, and others felt more like they were just lines across a flat page (rather than marks running along the surface of a 3D form).

• In your form intersections, you still didn't make any attempt at drawing how the different forms actually interested (a point I raised in my critique).

• Also worth mentioning, you're drawing really, really small for this exercise. It's important that when tackling these kinds of spatial problems that you give your brain the room to think through them rather than making everything cramped. Drawing bigger would also give you the room to draw where the various forms intersect.

I'm going to ask you to try the pages I had assigned (one page of organic forms with contour curves, one page of form intersections and one page of organic intersections) again. I highly recommend that whenever you sit down to work on an exercise, you reread the instructions for that exercise and rewatch the video for it, to ensure that you don't accidentally waste your own time by skipping steps and doing things incorrectly due to misremembering how they're meant to be done.

Uncomfortable in the post "Lesson 3: Drawing Plants"

2018-07-07 22:43

One thing I liked quite a bit is present in your first page - it's how you're going about building up the various levels of complexity. You're not skipping steps there, not are you zigzagging when you have to add a wavy line. You're ensuring that each "wave" comes back to the simpler curve from the previous stage of construction. This is actually very important, and the way you're approaching it results in a much stronger result, since you're properly breaking up the various challenges into bite sized pieces. Instead of trying to figure out how the edge ripples while also handling how the whole edge flows through space, you tackle the flow first, then add a wave to it. Well done. I often have to point this out to students, like I did in this demo.

One thing I do want to mention in regards to the leaves though is how on this page you've clearly tried adding the sort of veins of the leaves in a lot of the drawings. While I get that you're trying to add a little extra detail here, you're obviously adding it as an afterthought - it doesn't show any signs of careful observation, or really trying to match what's present on a reference image. As a result, it doesn't come out well, and instead tends to feel pretty sloppy and halfassed.

Always remember - if you're going to go into detail, you can't just dip a toe in - you need to make sure you're using reference, and that every single mark you put down to that end reflects something you see in your reference image.

I think when you started out, your leaves were pushing a good sense of flow as they moved through 3D space. As you continued on, you seemed to think less and less about this - and once you hit the actual plant drawings, a lot of the leaves drawn there tended to feel more stiff. This is actually a common issue I see in students. Part of it comes down to just forgetting to think about flow, and eventually getting too caught up in trying to draw something concrete from reference - but there's a little more to it.

Drawing a leaf is a lot like drawing an arrow from lesson 2, and if you're doing it correctly, it's going to feel pretty much the same. There is something that tends to get in the way, however. When we draw the arrows, because of the very nature of drawing an arrow, we tend to perceive them as representing more than just a static object. While we're drawing something that starts at one point and ends at another, we get the feeling that what we're drawing continues further than that. It's like we're not drawing a concrete object, but rather we are drawing a representation of something abstract - of a force that is moving through space.

When we draw a leaf, we lose that - we end up thinking about how this leaf exists in the world, and it has edges, and that it starts and ends. We think of it as an object with limitations. Something concrete and real, and therefore static. This is why the very first step of the leaf drawing process - the central flow line - is so incredibly important. It's where we can channel the energy and motion of the arrows exercise, and imbue our leaves with it.

When I draw my flow lines, I try not to think about the leaf itself, but rather about all the forces that are exerted upon it. The breeze that no doubt pushes and pulls at it, the tension in the leaf itself, and all the other forces that act upon this object. The leaf itself has so little mass that it effectively becomes a visual representation of these forces. So my flow line - which you'll notice I often draw with a tiny arrow head (as seen here and here and here).

When you draw some of the leaves in your plant drawings, you need to keep this sense of motion and energy in mind. That line needs to be drawn with the kind of confidence that pushes and drives it through space. You cannot settle for a timid or wobbly line.

On that note, that is a serious problem in most of your drawings - your lines aren't confident. You're constantly afraid of making mistakes, so you're not pushing yourself forward. Remember the ghosting method - if applied correctly, wobbles would be a non issue, because the execution step always forces you to draw with a confident, persistent pace. Sure, your accuracy may not be the greatest, but as we've discussed before - that's not your main priority.

Drawings like this mushroom have a lot of good things going for them as far as construction goes, but the timidity of your linework undermines its solidity.

All that said, you may label this aloe vera as a "hard fail", but frankly it's one of your better drawings. Yes, it has its mistakes, and the forms don't read too well, but the lines are confident. That will always be your top priority.

A couple other things worth mentioning:

• Always draw big. You've got some drawings at a good size, but I'm noticing others that feel a lot more cramped. Draw big, and use your shoulder.

• When getting into detail, like the little growths on the cap of this mushroom, you gotta think beyond just "okay there's growths on this cap, lets draw that". You gotta think about how they're arranged, whether they cover the whole surface evenly, or if they cluster in certain ways. Also, you missed out on a really good opportunity to add a couple to the silhouette of the form. Any detail that changes the silhouette is going to have a HUGE impact on how it reads. The first thing the viewer sees is the silhouette, before noticing any internal detail. The earlier the viewer's subconscious notices something, the stronger its impact will be.

• Your branches definitely do need more work, as we discussed elsewhere, but you're moving in the right direction. Again, a lot of it comes down to confidence, making sure you're drawing from your shoulder and applying the ghosting method.

I want you to do another page of leaves, another page of branches and 4 more pages of plant drawings. Stick to simple plants, just basic combinations of branches and leaves.

Uncomfortable in the post "Lesson 5: Drawing Animals"

2018-07-07 22:03

You've got a lot of fantastic stuff here. I especially love the work you did with your birds - you demonstrated an excellent grasp of construction there, and conveyed a strong sense of form and 3D space. I also noticed that you leveraged an interesting balance of understanding how what you were drawing existed as a series of flatter, more two dimensional (but considerably more gestural and expressive) shapes, while also keeping an eye on that illusion of form, and ensuring that your results did come out feeling solid.

I think the obvious challenge for you arose with head construction, especially when you were trying to draw the various cats. I noticed that things started to get much more cartoony, which usually suggests a shift away from looking continuously at your reference, and more at spending stretches of time largely working through the visual puzzle while relying primarily on your memory.

As I've probably covered in previous critiques and lessons, this tends to be a common weak spot, as our human memories are not designed to retain as much information as we need to do this effectively - at least, not until we've been able to rewire our brains to better sort through that wealth of data.

I noticed that when struggling with these head constructions, you had a tendency to drift away from the approach covered in the head construction video, especially in how you tackled your muzzle. In your ocelot, for example, you built out a basic box (in my demonstrations, I find it easier to start with a boxy form with its top edges more beveled, so as to add a few additional faces to the form). You also went on to draw within that box with curves that did not adhere closely enough to the previous form - meaning you were skipping steps in a way that undermined the solidity of the resulting drawing.

Also when it comes to eyes, you tend to skip on starting with a sphere. Doing so gives you something solid you can start wrapping things around, so it's immensely beneficial.

You may not have seen this, but a couple weeks ago I did a demo of a tiger head construction for a student, which I posted on the subreddit, patreon and discord. It should be helpful in this area.

Admittedly as you push through, I do see improvements with your heads, but it's still very much delving into a sort of cartoony style. The difference here is that where initially it seemed the kind of cartoony that was unintentional from relying too much on one's faulty memory, here it does seem distinctly intentional. That said, I wouldn't recommend applying any kind of stylistic interpretation when doing these lessons. You'll benefit most from figuring out how to accurately represent the objects you're drawing first - then you'll have far more control over how you apply those stylistic choices.

On the subject of fur, there are a couple things I want to suggest. I like that you're largely focusing your fur in key areas rather than covering the whole thing with scribbles. That's definitely a good first step. The second step is to control and design the individual tufts you're drawing, rather than relying on a sort of rhythmic zigzagging. If you look at the tiger head demo I linked above, you'll notice that I deal with the fur tuft by tuft. My goal is not to decide, "okay I want this whole edge to be furry," (which usually would result in going on auto-pilot). Instead, I decide where I want to add individual tufts of fur, and I think about each mark I put down. As soon as you slip into auto-pilot, your fur will start to pick up a rhythmic pattern that becomes very obvious and repetitive to viewers.

Resist the urge to zigzag or to scribble or sketch, and take the time to think through your marks.

The last thing worth mentioning is in regards to your hybrid. I usually don't comment on these - they're an excellent way to show if a student understands how to apply construction, but there's not usually any value in critiquing them (because the issues would be present in the other direct studies anyway). In this case, however, I think it's a strong example of where you get a little sloppy with your observation.

Even though it's meant to be a somewhat imaginative piece, it's supposed to be based on taking pieces of reference and merging them together by leveraging your understanding of form and space. Overall however, I get the impression that a lot more of this was informed more from your imagination, resulting in major components that don't feel plausible. One example of this that stands out most to me is how the torso is extremely rigid. It lacks any real sign of the kind of fluid solidity we see in the bison just a few pages up.

So, long story short, there's a lot of good, but there are a few points that stand out as being issues. I am going to mark this lesson as complete however - the next lesson will really put you through the ringer if you don't make a point of observing more carefully and consistently, or if you skip important constructional steps, so it should help you with some good old fashioned tough love.

So, keep up the good work, and keep these points in mind as you move onto the next lesson.

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

2018-07-05 21:16

You've got a lot of good stuff here. I did catch a few things that I'd like to point out however that should help as you move forwards.

• You're definitely pretty focused in your super imposed lines with accuracy. Give these notes on the topic a read. I believe this is an issue that sticks with you through most of your linework, where you're focused too much on accuracy, to the detriment of the flow and confidence of your lines. At the end of the day, flow is far more important than accuracy, as it helps you maintain smooth and even strokes. Ensure that whenever you put a mark down, you do so with a confident, persistent pace (after preparing to the best of your ability with the ghosting method).

• As far as the wobbling/wavering goes, your ellipses are actually a fair bit more consistent than your straight lines. For the most part you execute them with a good deal of confidence, which helps keep the shapes even and balanced. The only issue I noticed here was that in your funnels exercise, you had a tendency to draw them at a slant. One of the focuses of this exercise is to maintain a consistent alignment with the central minor axis line (basically, ensuring that the minor axis cuts each ellipse into two equal, symmetrical halves down its narrower dimension).

• Your plotted perspective boxes are looking solid. Your rough perspective boxes are alright - mostly it's the line quality, the wobbling, that's a problem here but we can work on that. I also did notice some places where your horizontals failed to be entirely parallel to the horizon, or where your verticals failed to be properly perpendicular to the horizon, but this wasn't too frequent.

• The rotated boxes and organic perspective boxes are definitely meant to be quite challenging, and generally beyond the capabilities of students at this stage. Your attempts were solid, with plenty of room for improvement, which is what I usually hope to see. That said, there were a couple issues worth mentioning.

• In the rotated boxes, I did notice that you skipped the step of placing squares at the extremities of each axis, which suggests that you didn't necessarily follow the instructions as closely as you could have.

• I did like that you did a pretty good job of keeping the gaps between your boxes narrow and consistent, which helped keep things structured.

• You did have a bit of a tendency to stretch your boxes as you went out towards the sides, rather than rotating them much. In the future, try and avoid that kind of stretching effect - it comes from your brain actively trying to fight your desire to rotate the forms. Our brains like things to exist on nice parallel grids. You may also notice that your rotation was actually minimal because of this, and if you look at the two boxes directly below the center one, you'll see that if you look at how their lines align, they're actually perfectly parallel to one another. Their lines converge towards the same vanishing point, so there's no rotation there at all - though your brain probably tricked you into thinking there was while you were drawing it.

• Your organic perspective boxes got a lot better as you worked on them - early on you had a lot of dramatic foreshortening, but by the end things were looking more consistent and controlled. There's still plenty of work we can do on your sense of how the parallel lines converge towards the same vanishing points and such, but you're doing a good job as it is.

So, I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete. I'd like you to move onto the 250 box challenge next. Be sure to read through all of the notes on the challenge page and watch the video linked there before starting the work. This is both going to serve as an opportunity to improve your understanding of 3D space, and how these forms can be freely rotated within it, as well as an opportunity for you to work on fixing up your linework to draw more confidently. Over the course of this lesson you did improve on that to the point that your linework in the organic perspective boxes was considerably better, but be sure to keep an eye on that as you work on the challenge.

Uncomfortable in the post "Lesson 3: Drawing Plants"

2018-07-05 21:05

Overall this is a pretty good start, though there are a handful of things I'd like to point out.

• When drawing leaves with wavy or complex edges (or really in principle, when drawing anything complex), make sure you work your way up to that complexity rather than jumping straight there. So for the leaves, you want to lay down a simpler edge on which you can build the waves later on. Here's a demonstration of what I mean: https://i.imgur.com/xRNEEzV.png . I also noticed that in later drawings you did apply the additional step, but you'd draw the wavy edge in a sort of continuous zig-zagging motion. Be sure to draw each wave/bump individually, focusing on rising up from and coming back down to the simpler edge. This will give your drawing a stronger sense of structure and believability, where drawing the line continuously or without a the prior step requires you to handle both the complex edge while also figuring out how it needs to flow through 3D space.

• A few things for your branches. Firstly, you may want to draw these a little bigger, taking more advantage of the space you have on the page. This will allow you to engage your full arm more easily, and will keep you from suffering from the sort of cramped drawing that one encounters when having to navigate in a tight space. Secondly, draw through each and every ellipse you draw for my lessons without exception. Usually two times around the ellipse is best to ensure that you maintain a balance between control and confidence. Thirdly, think about what the degree of each ellipse tells us about that particular cross-section of form (and its orientation in space). If the degree is wider, that ellipse is facing towards the viewer. If it's narrower, the form is flowing across the page, rather than into it. You have a lot of situations where your branch is clearly flowing across the page, but has ellipses with degrees that suggest otherwise. Lastly, you definitely need to work on how you're applying the segmented build up of your edges. There's a lot of visible breaking in flow - you want an edge to shoot past an ellipse and aim towards the next one as it tapers off. Then the next segment is meant to flow directly over the previous one, causing them to blend together. If you're seeing lots of tails where a previous segment hooks around to the side, then you need to work on this further to ensure that everything ultimately comes together into a single visible mark.

• Your full plant drawings are coming along well, and certainly moving in the right direction. You're thinking about construction, which is important, and are clearly trying to apply the techniques we've covered.

• Again, I think size is important - your drawings have a tendency to feel somewhat cramped, so I'd recommend giving each one more space on the page, and perhaps squeezing fewer into each sheet. These are spatial problems, and working small makes thinking through spatial problems and getting the kind of line confidence you need a lot more difficult. This difficulty manifests in a lot of the stiffness I see in your lines, where you're slowing down and letting your brain drive your strokes rather than your muscle memory.

• There are some places, especially where leaves tend to get packed together quite densely, where you draw a leaf only where it is not hidden by other leaves. It's quite important that you draw each and every form in its entirety, not worrying about where things overlap - drawing only part of a leaf makes you think more about how that leaf sits as a two dimensional shape on the two dimensional page. One of the most important things constructional drawings drills into you is a belief in the illusions you yourself are producing through your drawings. The idea that what you're drawing is in fact not just flat, but rather that the page itself is a window out onto a full three dimensional world. Every trick we employ works towards convincing you of that fact. Once you buy into it completely, it has a far greater impact on how you put these marks down - but belief in such a lie is a lot harder to come by than it might seem, and it's something that needs to be worked on extensively.

• I also noticed some leaves where you don't quite push the central line (that very first flow line we put down for each leaf) with the kind of enthusiasm it demands. That line represents how your whole leaf flows and pushes through 3D space. Beyond that, it represents all the forces applied to it - the wind, the tension of the leaf itself, and so on, as they work in 3D space. You'll see that in a lot of my demos, I add a little arrow head to its tip - this is to remind myself of the kind of oomph that drives this line, and how it is a depiction of force and energy rather than just the spine of a leaf. When drawing this mark, make sure you're doing so with the kind of confidence and forcefulness that lays the groundwork for the whole leaf as a dynamic, flowing object - rather than something static and stiff.

Taking what I've said here into consideration, I'd like you to do one more page of the branches exercise, followed by three more pages of plant drawings. Take some time to let the various points I've expressed sink in as well, and consider rereading it a few times (on separate occasions, rather than a few times in succession).

Uncomfortable in the post "250 Box Challenge"

2018-07-03 21:15

There is a very clear and obvious increase in your ability to manipulate these forms in 3D space, and to capture the illusion that they are solid and cohesive, across this set. You've done some really fantastic work here, and the fact that the gradual progression is so clear really brings me pleasure.

By the end, you've got some excellent constructions and are demonstrating a good grasp of how to really push them to the next level with successful line weight.

There's certainly room for improvement, as there always is, but you're definitely showing a good grasp of the line extensions and what they tell us, and I expect that you'll continue growing on this front as you go.

Keep up the fantastic work and consider this challenge complete. Feel free to move onto the next lesson.

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

2018-07-03 21:11

Pretty good work, but there are a couple things I want to recommend.

• Your arrows are looking great. They flow very nicely and tend to explore the full bounds of 3D space, rather than focusing only on the two dimensions of the page.

• Your organic forms with contour lines are coming along well, but there's two points I want to raise here. Firstly, avoid having those forms that pinch in the middle (you actually did quite a few of those). Focus purely on simple sausage forms that are fairly consistent in their widths through their lengths. Secondly, always think about how the degree of your ellipses/curves will differ as you move from cross-section to cross-section, as explained here. In some cases I could see shifting of the degrees, but in quite a few it seemed to stay the same, even though the angle of sight from the viewer's eye to that cross-section would generally be changing.

• For your dissections, you have a lot of variety and took quite a bit of care as far as observation goes with each texture. One thing I did notice though is that you have a tendency to shift from full density to nothing very quickly, and will want to practice your ability to demonstrate a texture in varying levels of density. This is something the texture challenge goes over quite a bit.

• Your form intersections are pretty solid. Your linework does seem a little weak though, so you may want to work on how you apply the ghosting method a little more. Might be rushing just a tad.

• Nice work with the organic intersections - you're demonstrating a good grasp of how the forms bend around each other, and how they generally interact. The only thing that caught my eye though was how it'd be a particularly difficult arrangement to pull off physically. I usually like to picture this exercise as though I'm piling water balloons on top of each other, so gravity and physics in general tends to come into play a fair bit. But either way, you did a good job.

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

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

2018-07-02 18:46

It has indeed! Thanks for looking into that for me.

For the most part, your work here is solid. You're demonstrating a good grasp of many things I tend to focus on for this lesson - you're breaking the complex insect bodies into a number of simpler forms, and are paying attention to how they relate to one another. You make this quite clear with your lay-ins, and it continues on into your more developed drawings.

One thing I'm particularly pleased with is the abdomen of this wasp - it shows perhaps better than anything else your awareness of how these objects exist in 3D space, and how you're building things up from simple to complex. You're wrapping those segments around the core mass, creating a sort of layered appearance that really sells the drawing.

There is an issue I want to bring to your attention though.

Firstly, while you build up your drawings quite well, on an individual shape-by-shape and form-by-form basis, the way you're drawing things feels a little rushed, and it give ways to a degree of sloppiness. What this means is that while your results are coming out well, they can definitely be improved to feel more solid and sturdy.

This is best shown in how your legs are approached. You're actually quite close to doing exactly what I want to see, it's just the sense that you need to stop yourself for a moment, think, and perhaps prepare a little further with the ghosting method before executing your marks. I like that you're moving towards using sausage shapes for the individual segments of the legs, but there's a few points I want you to pay more attention to:

• Make sure they're sausage shapes, rather than stretched ellipses. The difference is subtle, but basically you want it to be more like two balls connected by a tube with a consistent width throughout its length. That is, rather than a single ball that has just been stretched (resulting in a width that gets wider towards the center of the form).

• Always think more form than shape. It really does come down to how you think influencing what you end up drawing, because you're still drawing the same kind of mark regardless - but if you push yourself to believe that what you're drawing is 3D, the care with which you draw it and how you choose to use it will be different than if you simply felt that it was a flat line on a piece of paper. 3D forms are closed loops, they're solid. 2D shapes don't concern themselves with those kinds of limitations.

• Focus on how those segments flow - this comes back to using sausages over stretched balls, because a sausage can carry a nice smooth sense of flow, whereas a stretched ball tends to feel more stiff and rigid.

• Make sure the ends of your sausage segments overlap/intersect - and define/reinforce that intersection joint with a contour curve.

Here are a bunch of notes/demonstrations I've written in the past that cover the use of this technique:

• https://i.imgur.com/NQBBjvo.png

• https://i.imgur.com/pPyrBgB.png

• https://i.imgur.com/rQvn6kV.png

• https://i.imgur.com/I6nDc7l.png

• https://i.imgur.com/9kAp6JZ.png

Aside from that, just one other thing! I could be wrong, but it does feel like you're drawing a bit small, which could be reducing the amount of control you have when drawing these teeny tiny sausages. Try and take advantage of more of the room you've got on the page - you don't need to cram a bunch of drawings onto the same page, you can give them each their own.

Anyway, keep up the good work. 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"

2018-07-02 18:27

You've demonstrated a really remarkable growth over the course of this set. It's clear that towards the beginning you were struggling with how to handle constructions of this complexity, and at this kind of scale. I noticed that you had some confusion on that very first page, towards the left side, where things got a bit wacky due to being outside of the two vanishing points (technically it was correct, but it sure as hell didn't look it due to the inevitable distortion).

You definitely approached things the right way though, as far as blocking everything out into its major forms and focusing largely on nailing their proportions and the relationships between the various components. One of the important things in my eyes is that as soon as you hit this truck, you were showing a lot of careful attention to the nuanced design decisions that went into the truck itself. It's very easy, while attempting to nail the solidity of the construction, to lose track of how careful and intentional the angles and relationships within the design generally are, and to gloss over seemingly superficial details in the interest of focusing purely on solid forms. That's what makes the difference between something being a believable object but feeling more like a child's toy, and something actually feeling like a truck you'd see on the road. You've done a great job of nailing that.

Through most of these drawings, you did stick pretty closely to laying out your two vanishing points. This definitely comes with challenges of its own, and personally it's not something I'd recommend - sure, you can be more specific about how you're plotting your lines back, to ensure things maintain their alignment and everything converges consistently, but it also forces you into a fairly dramatic rate of foreshortening. This can come out as feeling quite awkward, since the foreshortening suggests that the object is entire enormous (like building-sized), or that it is extremely close to the viewer, and uncomfortably so.

Now, this is an issue that you seemed to come to terms with yourself, and you shed that reliance more and more as you pushed on through. I was especially pleased with the motorbike at the end, where you were more interested in the patterns of convergence that imply certain vanishing points, rather than the vanishing points themselves. The one thing that I would suggest in regard is to put down a specific horizon line. This can really help solidify your own sense of the space you're working in without having to worry about where the VPs are in specific terms.

Honestly, your work is excellent - and it reminds me a lot of things in the vein of Scott Robertson's work. I'm assuming you've looked at his books (like the ever-recommended How to Draw). If you haven't, I think it'd serve as an excellent next step, as you're definitely leaning into this subject matter. I do think that it's rather dense for beginners, but someone at your stage would definitely benefit from a lot of the more technical principles, and I think that you'd find Scott's work in general quite inspiring.

With that, I'll go ahead and mark this lesson (and the curriculum) as complete. Keep up the fantastic work! It's worth mentioning that in the next month or two, (once I've had the chance to finish rebuilding the website to better deliver the existing content), I'm planning on expanding into lessons that talk more about design. That is, lessons on shape and form language, manipulating proportion and creating new designs from different kinds of source material. It's the kind of skills that I leverage frequently in my work as a concept artist - I just need to pin down how exactly I want to organize and communicate the principles.

Uncomfortable in the post "Lesson 7: Drawing Vehicles"

2018-07-02 18:07

So it's clear you're heading down the right track. There are some issues that I'll point out, but fundamentally you're focusing a great deal on your major forms and establishing everything as components that sit firmly grounded in 3D space. The reason they're looking "goofy" comes down to your observational skills.

Up to this point, your observational skills have always been ahead of what's been required. I think that's because the previous courses you've taken really leaned into developing those, so you had a pretty significant head start. While you've certainly been flexing those muscles throughout these past lessons, most of your focus and development has been concentrated on handling those 3D forms.

Vehicles are complex and nuanced in ways that we haven't quite seen just yet. The everyday objects from lesson 6 start treading into this sort of territory, but their scale tends to make them a lot more relatable. On top of this, in that lesson we were mostly looking at objects we had in front of us, whereas this one forces us to rely more on photo reference. All of this comes together to really push the limits of our observational skills.

This has an impact in several areas:

• Proportions. This is a huge one, and it really bites people in the ass with this lesson. I can definitely see you improving quite a bit with this over the course of the set, but while I can't be certain without seeing the references you were drawing from, I feel like you have a tendency to make the wheels smaller than they ought to be.

• Nuance. This is definitely the most frustrating part, as it plays such a huge role, but it's the sort of thing that can only be developed through a lot of targeted practice. With all that is going on in these various vehicle designs, it's quite challenging to distill out the key features and details that really carry the entire thing. Sometimes it's the precise flow of the curvature of the hood, or the angle of one piece relative to another, but with vehicles when the mark is missed, it tends to be terribly obvious (without being entirely clear as to what was missed - just that something has been). On the flipside, when you really nail a particular point of the vehicle's character, it's equally obvious. For example, we know this piece has proportions that are all kinds of goofy - but if you look at the way you've handled the hood and the headlights, despite the relatively simple level of detail, you can see that the character of that piece has been nailed down quite well. Conversely, look at this one, the angle of the windshield feels off, despite having no idea what the reference actually looks like. It's the nature of the subject matter - vehicles, especially consumer ones, are so meticulously designed, that the margin for acceptable error is pretty slim.

Aside from those issues, I did notice areas where your ellipses were off by a fair bit. It usually comes down to the ellipses-in-planes, and applying the criteria for whether or not an ellipse represents a circle in 3D space. Here's an example where things were off. The red one closely matches yours, while the blue one is what would have been more correct. As you can see, the minor axis was pretty close, but what really had a significant impact was the matter of the contact points to top and bottom of the enclosing plane. This suggests that the degree of your ellipse should have been quite a bit smaller in order to represent a circle at that orientation (based on the vanishing point towards the right side).

Another area of contention are the wheels as a whole - and to an extent, this excites me. The reason is that your wheels tend to capture the essence of most of the problems I've raised above. Obviously, ellipses and maintaining the illusion that they represent circles are extremely important when it comes to drawing wheels. Beyond that however, wheels and tires have a lot of nuance to their own designs, and can be quite complex if taken so far as to worry about tread, rims, etc.

So, I want you to set aside the vehicles for the time being and instead focus on drawing 30 wheels, from reference. Focus first on making them feel solid (so constructing sturdy, consistent cylinders), then pay attention to the tires (you'll notice that their edges are a little beveled, so they bulge more than basic cylinders), give some consideration to tread, and finally play with their rims. Look at a variety of kinds of wheels - basic sedans, SUVs, sports cars, jeeps, motorcycles... hell, even the landing gears from air planes.

You're going to be a bit of a guinea pig on this - I may turn this into an exercise tied to lesson 7, kind of like how lesson 3 has the leaves and branches exercises.

I dwelled a lot on the criticism side of the critique, but I figure it's worth mentioning - I think you did an excellent job with the helicopter, and you did some pretty good work nailing the particular design nuance of this car (and its wheels look pretty good too!). The very last thing I want to mention is that once we get back to vehicles after the 30 wheel bit, I want you to try leveraging the constructing to scale methodology more to construct your enclosing boxes to specific measurements. There does appear to be a fair bit of winging it here, where you accidentally end up having to build outside of your initial boxes, due to a misinterpretation of scale.

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

2018-07-02 16:28

It looks like patreon's attempt to charge you for June was declined. Let me know when you've been able to resolve that issue, and I'll add this submission back to my critique backlog.

Uncomfortable in the post "Lesson 7: Drawing Vehicles"

2018-07-02 04:36

Looks like you forgot to include a link to your work!

Uncomfortable in the post "250 Box Challenge"

2018-07-01 21:06

Looking good! I can see a lot of improvement on several fronts. Your line quality is confident and smooth throughout, and you maintain that across the whole set. I can see you experimenting with different ways to apply line weight, and by the end your forms end up feeling very cohesive and solid. I can also see that you're paying careful attention to what those line extensions tell you about your constructions, and the convergences of given sets of parallel lines continue to become more consistent as you push through.

Fantastic work. I'll go ahead and mark the challenge as complete, so feel free to move onto lesson 2.

Uncomfortable in the post "250 Cylinder Challenge"

2018-07-01 20:00

Yeah, imgur can be pretty annoying when it comes to ordering uploaded images. It's totally fine - it makes life a lot easier for me in a lot of other ways, so I've pretty much accepted that homework submissions won't always be provided in the intended order.

...That said it looks like you reorganized them anyway, 'cause as I go through them, they're in the right order! So thanks for that.

You've got a lot of good variety with your cylinders, having drawn many in different orientations, as well as with different levels of foreshortening. That's definitely great to see. Over the course of the set, I can see you improving a fair bit when it comes to getting your ellipses to line up to the minor axes (though there's still areas where you'll want to continue working on this - for example, 245, 242, 235, etc.). I think it comes down more to the amount of time you've invested into each cylinder, and ultimately each ellipse. The ones where things tend to go a bit awry also show signs of having received a lower investment of time (perhaps due to impatience).

At the end of the day, patience and discipline is key - whether what you're drawing is one of a thousand of the same kind of thing, or if it's unique, you should be focusing only on what you're drawing at that moment. We often have a tendency to approach things by looking too far ahead, which causes us to lose focus on the mark we're currently putting down.

On the bright side, this means that many of the areas where things are a little off seem to be more from this, rather than an actual lack of skill. I believe that given a greater investment of time and effort on each individual cylinder, you'd do a much better job with each.

One other thing I feel was a little lacking was that you only did a couple cylinders that started from boxes. Drawing cylinders around an arbitrary minor axis is an important skill to develop, but I do think it's important to balance it with the box method, as this will help when you need to align your cylinder to other objects within a scene or within a construction. Ultimately the box is what you use to construct a specific minor axis, and then you go on to follow the same process.

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"

2018-07-01 19:50

It looks like you only linked one page of your boxes (1-7)!

Uncomfortable in the post "250 Cylinder Challenge"

2018-07-01 19:39

Nice work! I'm seeing a good deal of variation in the cylinders' orientations, as well as a pretty good balance between those constructed around an arbitrary minor axis and those constructed with a box as a starting point.

One thing that catches my eye throughout is that you may be rushing a little bit with your linework - there's some signs that you could probably have slowed down and taken a little more time ghosting your marks and ensuring that your lines ended where you meant them to. There's a lot of little gaps and such, as well as areas where your ellipses aren't properly aligned to your minor axis, but as a whole it seems like you would have nailed them more consistently had you given yourself the time to work through the process (as opposed to it being a lack of skill).

This is probably something that is something you'll want to work on in general - impatience can be a real killer. I can see why one might allow themselves to get sloppy when faced with drawing 250 of the same form, but ultimately you want to build up the patience and discipline to focus on each individual thing you draw, as you're drawing it, rather than looking ahead many steps down the road. Focus on the form you're drawing, focus on the mark you're making, and don't worry so much about where you are relative to the finish line.

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

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

2018-07-01 19:29

Overall you've done a pretty good job. I do have a few things to suggest, but you're headed in the right direction.

• Your arrows are coming along quite nicely. You're showing a good grasp of 3D space with how you're twisting and turning the arrows (rather than having the flat of the arrow face the viewer directly, you're playing a lot with having it facing in other directions). To push this exploration of the depth of the scene further, I'd recommend picking one end of each arrow and situating it as much farther from the viewer, and putting the opposite end much closer. This'll force you to play with the scale and foreshortening of your arrows and penetrate through all three dimensions of space even more.

• I noticed something similar with your organic forms - they have a tendency to run across the picture frame, rather than into it. As a result, most of your contour ellipses and curves have a fairly narrow degree. Try playing around with having more organic forms that move through the depth of the scene - the sort that would require contour curves and ellipses with a much wider, more circular degree.

• You're making a pretty good start with your dissection textures. There's plenty of room for growth, but you're heading in the right direction and are demonstrating a well developing eye for detail and are mostly avoiding oversimplification. As you continue to tackle this, you'll benefit from looking over the notes on the texture challenge page.

• Now fundamentally your form intersections are fine - you're demonstrating a good grasp of 3D space, and you're able to depict these various forms existing cohesively within the same space. The problem here is how you approach drawing them. I see a lot of scratchy, rough marks which fundamentally contradicts the methodology we're drilling through all of these exercises. We are not being explorative here, and we are not sketching. Each mark must be drawn using the ghosting method, and must involve forethought, planning and ultimately confident execution and commitment. There will always be challenges that are overwhelming, and that will tempt you into falling back on old habits - you need to push back on them. When something feels like it's too much, stop and take a step back. Think through the problem, break it down into smaller steps, rather than trying to do all your problem solving directly on the page. I also see this issue in the organic intersections and to smaller degrees in other exercises.

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

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

2018-06-30 01:23

Really, really nicely done. Your lines and ellipses show an exceptional degree of confidence in their execution (which helps keep them smooth, even and maintain an excellent flow), while also demonstrating precision and control. It's not an easy thing to pin down, especially with the ellipses.

Your plotted perspective boxes are obvious solid, though given that you've already done this lesson, that's expected. Your rough perspective boxes are also spot on.

Your rotated boxes are at that point where you're demonstrating a grasp of how those boxes are meant to turn in space, but your proportions are getting stretched and unbalanced, resulting in an end result that looks kind of off. I am pleased with the fact that you're maintaining narrow, consistent gaps between the boxes and keeping everything structured - just be sure to avoid stretching boxes as you turn them.

I'm pleased to see that you're drawing through the boxes in your organic perspective exercise. As far as that goes, you're doing a pretty good job. There are some inconsistencies (for example the frontmost box on the leftmost panel, you can see the pair of edges towards the center of the whole form are definitely off), but overall you're doing pretty well.

One thing that may help is to go to the 250 box challenge page and watch the video there. In the video, I describe an error checking method that involves extending your lines back towards their implied vanishing points. You can try applying this technique to the boxes of your organic perspective exercises, to find where things are off. While some are obvious, when one reaches a certain level of proficiency, it becomes harder to detect mistakes and techniques like these become more necessary in order to avoid plateauing.

One other thing worth mentioning is that right now you have a tendency to add extra weight to the internal lines of your forms (usually those that are closer to the viewer, likely to differentiate them from the lines on the rear side. This is actually not a great idea, as it breaks the cohesion of the overall form. By having heavier lines inside, you're emphasizing the idea that your boxes are really just an assortment of vaguely related marks.

On the box challenge page, there are some notes on how to successfully apply line weight, so I suggest you give them a read. The short of it is that you generally want to apply weight to the outside to solidify the silhouette of the form and increase the sense of cohesion.

As for the problem you were attempting to resolve with weight (clarifying which side is closer to the viewer and which side is farther away), I'd recommend adding some tight, consistent hatching lines to one of those front-facing faces to serve as a clear visual cue.

Anyway, you're doing great. I'm not sure if you've decided to refresh your basics, or if you're working your way from the beginning again (which is something I encourage people to do). If it's the latter, be sure to let me know and I can clear off your flairs to better track your progress.

Uncomfortable in the post "250 Box Challenge"

2018-06-30 01:09

Congrats on completing the challenge. I'm glad to see that you approached the exercise quite conscientiously and drew through all your forms. It's also great that you took the time to mark in corrections.

There is one thing that's missing though, but it's probably not your fault (that kind of depends on when you started this challenge). I went to look at your lesson 1 work, and noticed that you submitted it quite a long time ago (over two and a half years ago now). The lessons on the drawabox website have been updated and developed as the years have passed, and the box challenge is no exception. One thing I've added (which is contained in the updated how-to-draw-a-box video) is the idea of going over a page once it has been completed and extending all of the lines of each box towards their implied vanishing point. This allows us to see how those lines tend to converge (and more importantly, where they fail to converge as they're meant to).

I recommend that you watch the video and try applying that technique to your last page of boxes, so you can see where you will want to focus your continued efforts.

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

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

2018-06-30 01:01

Excellent work! I noticed when you started out that a lot of your arrows looked kind of samey - they were good, but kind of repetitious. You seemed to notice the same thing, and into the second page you included a lot more variety.

Your organic forms with contour ellipses are coming along well. You're maintaining some really nice, smooth, even ellipses. You will want to continue working on your ability to control those marks however without losing that confidence - one of the key aspects of this technique is to give the impression that your ellipse runs along the surface of this sausage form, so having the ellipse fit snugly between either side is pretty important, as is gradually tightening the ellipses up. You're heading in the right direction though, and you'll continue to improve simply by incorporating this exercise into a regular warmup routine.

It does appear that you're being somewhat more mindful of controlling your contour curves, in terms of getting them to sit on the surface of the forms. They slip outside here and there, so it's still something to work on, but it's definitely an improvement over the previous exercise.

Really phenomenal work with your dissections. You tackled a great many different kinds of surfaces, and tackled each in a manner tailored to its needs. You demonstrated excellent observational skills, along with a lot of patience and forethought towards how the details were organized. Very, very well done.

One thing I noticed towards the lower sausage on this page was that while you seem to be aware of how the surface turns away from the viewer towards the sides of the form, you definitely could have stood to flatten out the pentagons/circles of the various textures more. As that surface turns, flattening shapes like these out is a great way to sell the idea that it exists in three dimensions, so it's worth really pushing that aspect.

Your form intersections are coming along great. You're demonstrating a solid grasp of how these forms exist together within the same space, and have gone as far as managing the intersections themselves with great success (despite it being generally more challenging than most students at this stage can manage).

And finally, your organic intersections are pretty good. The main thing I feel that is missing is more focused towards the top of the little tower - that's where the illusion that each of these forms is weighed down by its own mass starts to break. With so little support, I'd expect some of these lone sausages to sag more - but that's really a pretty minor point. The only other thing I'd mention is to watch where you put those contour ellipses (the ones at the ends of each form). Remember that if that ellipse has a small degree, that tells us that this end of the form is mostly turned away from the viewer, so the ellipse itself would sit quite close to the edge. And similarly, if it's quite wide, it'd sit further from that edge. There are a couple here where the ellipse is at a middling degree, but far enough to the edge where it feels that it ought to be more or less a full circle.

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

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

2018-06-29 01:03

Your lines and ellipses are looking pretty good. Lot of confidence there, keeping your strokes smooth and your ellipses evenly shaped. A couple recommendations on those fronts:

• When practicing the ghosting method, try working with smaller dots - you don't need to make them so big and obvious. Usually a tiny mark is more than enough. The sort that'll end up getting engulfed by the line itself.

• In the ghosted section you did seem to need more work on controlling where your lines stop, but you seemed to improve quite a bit on this front in the planes.

• For your ellipses, try bringing the number of times you draw through them down to two. I know I say 2-3 times is best, but working your way down to 2 can help you focus on tightening them up (while maintaining the confidence of that stroke).

For your rough perspective boxes, two things:

• Watch your horizontals. You're doing a pretty good job of keeping your verticals perpendicular to your horizon, but your horizontals are sometimes off from being parallel to it, as they should be.

• Remember that you need to be applying the double checking technique after the fact. It'll help you track where your estimation of perspective tends to drift.

Your rotated boxes are coming along well. There's still plenty of room for improvement (as far as the subtler aspects of rotating forms in 3D space), but as far as this lesson goes you're where you should be. Same goes for the organic perspective - all this is probably what I mentioned to you beforehand in my last critique. I can't actually see the last submission as the imgur album's gone, but there's going to be a lot that you'll learn from the 250 box challenge (which you should still be doing next) when it comes to rotating forms in 3D space.

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

2018-06-27 20:42

Looking great. Your constructions are looking solid and your observations are spot on. I'm actually on a plane at the moment, so I can't change your flair just yet, but I will as soon as I can. Feel free to move onto the next lesson, and consider this one complete.

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

2018-06-27 01:48

Nicely done! You've got some really confident linework through the first two sections - that confidence helps keep your lines smooth and consistent, and also helps you maintain fairly even shapes. I noticed a lot of the little red marks where you noticed mistakes - don't get too hung up on those. Your lines are going to separate towards one side in the super imposed lines, for instance, that's expected. It'll get better as you continue practicing, but if you focus too much on every little mistake, you'll end up shifting towards drawing more slowly and carefully, which in turn will result in you losing that smooth flow.

Jumping ahead to your rough perspective boxes, you did well, but I did notice the areas where you went drastically overboard with that line weight on certain sides of the boxes. In this exercise it's not really a major focus (adding extra things to exercises can often result in missing their primary focus), but as far as line weight goes, remember that the key is subtlety. If your line weight is too heavy, it's going to start flattening things out. Ideally you just want to add enough additional thickness for the change to be just barely noticeable. It's more important that the subconscious pick up on it, rather than it being very loud and obvious.

Your rotated boxes and organic perspective boxes are coming along well, though they do leave plenty of room for growth. This is basically what I'd hope to see at this point - the exercises are more about pushing students to think differently about 3D space, and to break away from the rigid 1/2/3 point perspective systems that beginners have a tendency to lock themselves into when it comes to defining entire scenes. In truth, the exercises are a lot like dumping a child into the deep end of the pool before teaching them how to swim - there's a lot of things we haven't gone over here, but it's an important but of exposure.

The only bit of advice I want to offer in regards to the organic perspective boxes is that if you make a mistake, don't correct it. It's a bad habit to develop, to get caught up in making corrections and making areas with mistakes darker and more noticeable. It's usually best to just leave it alone and keep moving forwards with the rest of the drawing.

I'm going to go ahead and mark this lesson as complete. I'd like you to move onto the 250 box challenge next. Be sure to read through all of the notes on that page and watch the video linked there before starting the work.

Oh, one last thing - it looks like you've got your flair on this subreddit turned off (using the "Show my flair on this subreddit" function in the sidebar). Be sure to turn that back on - I use it to track who is eligible for critiques, and which lessons/challenges they've completed thus far.

Uncomfortable in the post "250 Box Challenge"

2018-06-26 20:26

Nice work! You're definitely showing improvement and understanding of the concepts (like working on having your lines converge at a consistent rate), though there's always going to be room for growth. You did a pretty great job with 250, but there are still other boxes (like 248 for example) that have some inconsistencies with how the lines converge. It is of course a continuous thing, and you've made some pretty significant strides with these 250 boxes.

I also like that the general confidence of your lines has improved over the set. The earlier boxes look a little less certain, with ink getting blobbier where you've hesitated, and so on.

As you continue to develop in this area, always think about the similarities between different members of a set of parallel lines. Two lines are more similar when the angle between them where they intersect is smaller. I explain this further in these notes.

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

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

2018-06-25 22:08

Nope, you had me right the first time. I meant take the weekend, as I didn't want you to try and bang them out as quickly as possible.

Anyway, across the set you are showing definite improvement, but it's in some places and not in others. For example on the first page, towards the bottom left side, you've got some great segmentation wrapping around. Strong contour lines, that sort of thing. On the last page, bottom right, it's gone back to being quiet weak.

Overall, you're also drawing pretty small, so your constructions are being forced into a fairly cramped space. This results in lines that are a lot heavier relative to your overall drawing, and therefore a lot more stiffness and generally clunky looking construction. You need to be taking far more advantage of the space your pages give you, so you can engage your full arm when drawing, and so you're able to think more about the intricacies and subtleties of your construction as you piece it together.

Lastly, there's varying amounts of sloppiness here and there, especially in regards to observation, which is something I had mentioned before. You need to keep pushing yourself to observe your reference more carefully, and to ensure that every mark or form you put down corresponds with some feature in your reference. These legs with short segments and nubby ends are very clearly an oversimplification of what you're seeing, in a sort of cartoony fashion.

Overall, these are things that fall to you to practice. I've pointed them out, but it's on you to reread the critiques I've offered and to really absorb it all. It does take several passes - the lesson and the critiques are usually fairly dense and it's normal to only absorb select parts at a time, and to have to review it several times before it starts to sink in.

So, I am going to mark this lesson as complete. You've got a lot of room for improvement, but you are heading in the right direction. You can start on the next lesson when you feel you're ready, but I do recommend that you take some time to absorb these critiques a little more, and to do more insect studies on your own.

Uncomfortable in the post "250 Box Challenge"

2018-06-25 21:57

Very nice work! I'm glad to see you pushing through all of these and maintaining some very confident, smooth linework. I can see you experimenting with different ways to approach things like line weight throughout, and by the end you settle on a fairly subtle approach which I think works best.

I do have some thoughts on how you apply the line extension method however - one of the key points about the technique is to be able to study how lines converge as they extend. On many of these, where you draw only the ends of the extensions, I think the relationship between the original line and its extension gets a little muddled - especially when you end up with a lot of red marks already present on the page. This can make it a lot harder to properly analyze what the extensions tell us.

For example, if you look at 248, specifically the lines that go down towards the right, you can see that two of your middle lines cross very early on. This is a common problem that extending lines will highlight, but when they aren't extended fully from the original line, it's harder to identify and really internalize what you're doing wrong. Here are some notes on the problem: https://i.imgur.com/bqGEzHk.png

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