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

2018-06-09 16:33

Really, really phenomenal work here. You're demonstrating a great deal of confidence with your linework, as well as a lot of patience and care when working through each exercise. It's clear that you take the time to read through the instructions and ultimately follow them to the letter - which considering the density of the content, is no small feat (and one that a lot of people stumble with).

This confidence in your linework helps you maintain smooth lines and evenly shaped ellipses. The only area where you didn't quite do this as well as elsewhere was in your super imposed lines. Now, the margin here is minimal - they're still done quite well, but there is a visible wobbling where your lines go back and forth, rather than maintaining a consistent trajectory as explained here. This is pretty common though, because we don't actually push the importance of a confidence execution until we hit the ghosting exercise.

There is a little stiffness when you attempt to draw the ellipses in planes (largely coming from the desire to deform them in order to get them to fit into these awkward spaces). Always try to maintain the integrity of the elliptical shape to the best of your ability and as your first priority.

Jumping ahead to your rough perspective boxes, I'm really pleased to see that you applied the double checking method with your blue pen - though I definitely recommend doing this on all the pages of this exercise. It's an extremely useful tool in identifying one's tendencies when it comes to estimating the accuracy of your estimation of perspective.

Your rotated boxes were done fairly well. It's good to see that you kept the gaps between your boxes narrow and consistent, and were able (mostly) to use neighbouring edges as hints when drawing new lines. I do believe that your rotations could have been pushed a little further, and that the rotations diminished towards the corners, but overall you did a pretty good job here. This exercise, as well as the organic perspective boxes, comes with a pretty significant expectation of struggle, and on that basis you've done far better than most students are meant to. It's really about getting you to think differently about rotating objects in space, and constructing scenes that are not limited to 1, 2 or 3 vanishing points.

Now, your organic perspective boxes do need work as well (specifically with maintaining consistent convergences for sets of parallel lines), but again this is entirely normal. We'll be working on this next.

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

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

2018-06-08 21:01

Hey! I currently don't have you down in my records as being eligible for private homework critiques. If you're a new patron, be sure to check your inbox as I'll have sent a message to gather your reddit info. If not, you're welcome to submit your work directly to the subreddit to receive a free critique from the community.

Uncomfortable in the post "Lesson 3: Drawing Plants"

2018-06-08 03:38

A lot of this depends on whether or not we feel convinced in the illusion that something we've drawn is three dimensional and solid. The idea that you yourself buy into this lie you're creating for others. It's something we work at, because it is at the very core of our ability to communicate that idea to others.

It's not the easiest concept to describe, but you can think of it this way: if you draw a ball (which is essentially just a circle), consider what it means to you to draw a line across its surface. If your first instinct is to draw a straight line from edge to edge, then you perceive it to be a flat circle. If however your gut feeling, without any further thought is to draw a line that curves along the surface of this imaginary, illusory ball, then you are properly convinced of its solidity.

All of this is integral because when we believe what we draw to be three dimensional, we make little subconscious decisions that continually reinforce this illusion - just like the nature of that line on the ball's surface.

Now, you may certainly ask, "how do I know if I believe that it's three dimensional?" - unfortunately I don't have an answer to that, and you'll simply have to continue practicing until that part becomes a little clearer through experience. While I try to minimize the number of things "you'll get it when you get it", sometimes it's unavoidable.

That said, when it comes to the difference between the marks I pointed out as being loose, disconnected lines, there is a clear difference between those and complete, enclosing and connected lines that can begin to define the bounds of a solid form. Start by fixing those.

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

2018-06-08 00:56

Honestly, try both. It's not really something I give a whole lot of thought to. Personally, I think I do a bit of both, having a vague idea of the scene (my imagination is not terribly visual, so at most it's all fairly abstract when I try to hold a scene like this in my head). I explore that space I've concocted in my mind by drawing inside of it, and probing it as you say.

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

2018-06-07 23:53

I'd recommend at least getting halfway through the challenge before starting the organic parts of lesson 2. You should complete the whole challenge before moving onto the form intersections.

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

2018-06-07 23:05

If you don't believe that what you're drawing is three dimensional, you won't even begin to scratch the surface in communicating how the forms relate to one another. It, like the form intersections, has multiple tiers to it. First you gotta believe. Then you can impress your belief on others.

Uncomfortable in the post "Lesson 3: Drawing Plants"

2018-06-07 20:36

Your leaf constructions are looking pretty good, and your leaf-heavy plants came out fairly well (like this one). There are a number of issues that I noticed however:

• With your branches exercise, you're not quite applying the technique of constructing lines with segments properly. Currently there are visible breaks between each stroke - you need to focus a lot more on having your lines flow directly on top of each other. It looks like when you stop your lines, you have a tendency to hook them slightly, rather than ensuring that they aim towards the next ellipse, so the following line would naturally run directly over it. The goal is to have the segments merge together into one visually distinct stroke all the way through.

• You're definitely struggling when it comes to adding line weight, and the result is generally strokes that look stiff and hairy, with a great deal of wobbling. When you add line weight, you need to be doing so with the same confidence, planning and preparation you would have used when drawing the initial mark. If you execute slowly in an attempt to match this original line, your stroke will wobble. It also seems that when one attempt didn't go too well, you repeated it over and over - causing a fairly messy result. You should only be reinforcing your line weight once or twice, as the weight we're after is subtle. On top of that, if you're making a mistake, do not attempt to correct it. This will only make things worse.

• When faced with more complex constructional challenges, you have a tendency to panic and devolve into more sketchy, unplanned behaviour that doesn't show a great deal of forethought. It's entirely normal when overwhelmed by a great amount of detail, but that is a challenge you must overcome. If you look at the part of this page that you highlighted as being particularly difficult, you'll notice that you were not constructing nor drawing any sort of concrete forms. What you drew were arbitrary lines, just marks on a page, hoping that something would arise from the chaos. That's not how we approach these kinds of challenges - we break them down into concrete, individual pieces. Now this example was definitely extremely difficult, as it's essentially a cluster of a number of different leaf forms, and that density makes it particularly overwhelming. Still, you know how to draw individual leaves - your approach here did not reflect the way you know how to construct them though. The following page (the numerous flowers) was similarly overwhelming, but each individual flower is just a ball core surrounded by a few petals (petals are essentially the same as leaves, constructed with the same purposeful flow/direction line, though more rounded). Again, you didn't stop and think - you panicked, and sketched.

While some of your simpler leafy plants were fairly well done, in general there is a sense of vagueness that suggests to me that you gradually attempt to add solidity to your drawing phase by phase. You start off a little loose, a little less thought out, and gradually make things more concrete as you build upon them.

The constructional method is all about being solid all the way through. Each and every phase of construction, no matter how simple, should end with a clearly planned result, which captures a sense of solidity. No vagueness here - we're not sketching, we are constructing.

Each phase of construction is essentially a limited number of decisions being made. For example, when constructing a leaf, we start by establishing the flow line, which defines just how that leaf is going to move through space. We're not loose about it - it's one specific line, defining a very specific flow. Once this decision is made, we do not contradict, undermine, nor further seek to define it. Trusting that the decision has been made in full allows us to then move onto the other things that need deciding. Being loose means building upon a rickety foundation of half-decided things, with an expectation to further clarify them later. It's messy, it's muddy, and it results in weak constructions.

So, here's what I want you to do:

• One page of the branches exercise

• One page drawing along with my potato plant demo (which has a similar kind of clustering as what you're struggling with right now).

• Two pages of plant drawings - I specifically want you to pick things with some clustering, like the potato plant. Basically, things that are made up of a lot of smaller, simpler components, that is only challenging due to the number of those components present.

Uncomfortable in the post "Drawabox, /r/ArtFundamentals and Reddit going forward. My plans for the future, and the chance to include you lot in on the discussion."

2018-06-07 14:30

I have no intention of adding figure drawing lessons in the forseable future. I'm am actually going to be reorganizing everything after lesson 7 rather soon, after rebuilding the website (which I'm planning on doing this month). But back on topic, yes, moving onto Proko, Michael Hampton, etc. after lesson 7 is probably a good idea.

Uncomfortable in the post "Drawabox, /r/ArtFundamentals and Reddit going forward. My plans for the future, and the chance to include you lot in on the discussion."

2018-06-07 14:10

Aah, I forgot to remove that from the sticky post. A while back I decided not to move forward with the figure drawing lessons, as I'm not equipped to teach that material as well as others perhaps could. It would result in a poorer use of my time, and an overall decrease in the perceived quality of drawabox as a whole (since everyone's bound to jump to figure drawing in their first visit just to take a peek, and they'd likely judge the whole website on those lessons).

You'll see in the sidebar here, as well as in the desktop version of the website, an explanation regarding the missing figure drawing lessons.

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

2018-06-06 20:01

I'm noticing that in your cylinders-in-boxes, you're neglecting to draw a minor axis. The box is meant to serve as a way to construct a minor axis that is oriented in a specific manner within your scene. When constructing the cylinder, you're still meant to follow the minor axis first and foremost. That said, you're doing a pretty good job with them, but I'd still recommend drawing and following explicit minor axes rather than leaving them out.

The curvature of your organic forms' contour curves is generally pretty good. The main thing you're going to want to focus on is getting the curves to fit snugly between the edges of the form. Remember that a contour line is something that runs along the surface of a 3D form (and in doing so, helps describe how that surface flows through space). If your contour curve ends up slipping outside of the bounds of the form, or floats inside of it, then it breaks the illusion that the line is flowing over its surface.

This is something to keep your eye on while continuing to practice this exercise as part of your warmup routine.

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

2018-06-06 19:57

Definitely much better. Two things:

• Keep working on nailing the alignment to the minor axis (you have a tendency to slip slightly where the forms turn).

• When drawing your contour curves, and really any lines, try not to press too hard. Ideally you want your lines to taper slightly at the ends, and when we see the lines come out rather uniformly, it's a result of either pressing too hard or drawing too slowly (usually a combination of the two).

I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete. Keep practicing the exercises from the first two lessons as part of a regular 10-15 minute warm up routine, but feel free to move onto the next lesson.

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

2018-06-05 23:51

Once you're able to draw a line from your shoulder, it's up to you to decide which pivot to use for that particular stroke - it should be an option, rather than a situation where you choose to draw from your wrist because you're not able to do it from your shoulder.

It will come with practice - drawing from your shoulder is difficult and awkward to begin with due to it being unfamiliar, but even then drawing longer lines from your shoulder ends up coming much more quickly than the shorter lines (where the wrist always feels like an option).

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

2018-06-05 23:48

Your work here is really phenomenal. There's not much to criticize, just a couple minor things to point out. You're demonstrating an exceptional amount of control and confidence with your linework - each mark is smooth and consistent, but still maintains a good deal of precision. This applies not only to your straight lines, but to your ellipses as well.

On top of that, you've demonstrated here an exceptional degree of patience, clearly filling each page to the brim with no signs of rushing or delivering anything but your best.

You've also done remarkably well with the last two exercises (rotated boxes and organic perspective boxes), which are intentionally meant to be extremely challenging at this point. Your rotated boxes are spot on, and while your organic perspective boxes show a little inconsistency here and there, they're still far above my expectations for this lesson. The inconsistencies I do see (generally with the convergence of lines towards their implied vanishing points) are not always easy to detect.

One thing I do want to mention is that with the rough perspective boxes, it is important that you go over the completed work as described here, to help identify where your estimation of perspective tends to drift.

Now, as one might imagine, I'm absolutely marking this lesson as complete. I do however want you to move onto the 250 box challenge next. You're very close to demonstrating a solid grasp of 3D space and how forms sit within it, and I think the best way to move forward would be to really nail this down. The challenge page's notes and videos go over a few technique to work towards a fully developed mental model of space which I think will prove very effective for you. It certainly is tedious, and honestly I'm on the fence about assigning this or leaving the decision to you, but at the end of the day we're here to ensure that your skills improve as much as possible.

Uncomfortable in the post "250 Box Challenge"

2018-06-05 23:39

Very nice work overall. You've demonstrated a good deal of patience and care, and you've been extremely thorough in checking your boxes after the fact, and you've clearly learned a great deal from doing so.

As your constructions are coming along great, the one thing worth mentioning is that your line weight starts off very nice, but steadily seems to get a bit heavier throughout. The key to successful line weight is that it is subtle. There's no need to be heavy handed with this, and often being so can work to the detriment of the forms you're attempting to depict. Remember that line weight is always relative - it's all about one line appearing heavier or lighter than another, even if only slightly. That is always enough.

Anyway, keep up the good work and consider this challenge complete. Feel free to move onto lesson 2.

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

2018-06-05 23:35

Overall you're doing a pretty solid job here. There are a few things I want to mention, and one issue worth visiting, but overall you're demonstrating a good grasp of 3D space, a great deal of patience, and a good deal of care with how you approach the material covered in this lesson.

For your arrows, you're doing a good job of capturing how they flow through all three dimensions of space, and avoiding the tendency some people have to stay within the bounds of the flat piece of paper upon which they're drawing. My only concern here is the use of line weight - it's way too much, and it results in a fairly cartoony, graphic appearance that'll bite you when used to draw anything more realistic. With line weight, subtlety is always key - just a little extra weight here and there tends to read quite strongly. It does seem to me that you've probably switched to a different thickness of pen, which should generally be avoided. Aside from cases where shadow shapes need to be filled in (where a brush pen is quite helpful), all your linework should be drawn with the same pen (ideally a 0.5 or equivalent).

I did however notice that you had a tendency to blend your areas of heavy weight in quite nicely with those of lighter weight, demonstrating a good control over the tapering of your lines. This is excellent - be sure to do the same, just with considerably less thickness.

Your organic forms with contour ellipses are generally pretty solid. One area where they could improve is with the alignment to that central minor axis line. You're on point more often than you're not, but you do have a handful where the ellipse is not running perpendicular to the general flow of the sausage form. Remember that the minor axis should be cutting each ellipse into two equal, symmetrical halves down its narrower dimension.

Oh, also worth mentioning: give these notes a read. Right now the degree of your ellipses tends to stay fairly samey. Consider how the angle at which the viewer would see each cross-section changes, resulting in a slightly shifting degree through the course of an organic form.

Your organic forms with contour curves is one area that is going to need some work. Overall, I get the impression that you need some more practice with getting your contour curves to wrap around the form convincingly - often times the curves don't quite accelerate enough as they reach the edges, and fail to give the impression that they continue along the opposite side of a rounded form. For this, I generally recommend overshooting the curve slightly as it hooks back around, as described here.

Additionally, focus on using simple sausage forms, as shown in my demonstration. You've got some weird ones here, with branching and a fat end leading into a smaller end, and so on. This has a tendency of distracting you from the core of this exercise.

Everything else is really well done. Your eye for texture and your approach to each one was fantastic. You handle the overwhelming amount of visual information with a great deal of structure and care. Your form intersections are solid, and demonstrate a good grasp of 3D space (and your use of line weight here is spot on). Finally, your organic intersections show that you grasp of the forms interact with one another is coming along well (though it also suffers from the same contour curve issue).

Before I mark this lesson as complete, I'd like you to do one more page of organic forms with contour curves. You're very close, but this last bit is definitely important.

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

2018-06-05 23:14

This is vastly better. Previously you weren't showing any grasp of the fact that the exercise was meant to be done with a single vanishing point, your lines were going off wherever they pleased. Now, while you have lines where your estimation is off, it's very clear to me that you fully understand what you should be aiming for. This is basically where everyone else is at the end of this lesson - estimating perspective is something that requires a great deal of practice, and it gets better steadily, so long as you understand what your goal is.

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

Uncomfortable in the post "Lesson 7: Drawing Vehicles"

2018-06-05 22:45

It's great that you were able to get an ellipse guide pretty cheap! I've heard a lot of students who've only been able to find them being sold for exorbitant prices. I even had one guy make his own out of acrylic, as he had access to a laser cutter.

So one issue I noticed (much moreso in your later few pages) was that lines that ought to be parallel in 3D space tended to go off towards wildly different vanishing points, with entirely different horizon lines. Take a look at this.

There's a few differently coloured lines. The magenta one is the horizon line based on the body of the bus (we'll treat that as the correct one since it's the biggest form in the construction). The other colours all belong to a different component - the wheels, the body, etc. Each of the wheels appear to have a different vanishing point, and more than that, those vanishing points sit WAAAY above the horizon line. This tells us that the wheels by that construction are actually not sitting properly on the ground plane.

Ensuring that all the lines that are parallel in 3D space sit go off towards roughly the same vanishing point is extremely important. Without that, your construction will start to fall apart.

Now there are areas where you've shown definitely improvement - you're much more aware of the basic construction, and you're less eager to jump off into drawing based on guesswork. That's a big step forward, and I think that's part of what's bringing these inconsistencies to light.

There are still issues with observation however, which will improve as you continue to train your eye (basically by doing more and more studies). For example, this construction was pretty good, but the slope of that windshield is probably too gradual, and the front section of the truck is too short.

You are making progress - but there's a lot of room for improvement. At this point, all I can really say is keep at it. Follow the same structure as before, focusing only on construction, then coming back later to add your details. Try another five pages, keeping in mind what I've said here about consistent vanishing points, and then we'll see where you've gotten.

And congratulations on the (sort of) new born! I hope things aren't too hectic!

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

2018-06-05 22:25

Your super imposed lines are fantastic. Lots of confidence there, focusing primarily on maintaining a consistent trajectory to your lines. Your ghosted lines exercise is okay, though you've got some waviness at times, which you'll want to iron out. This is mostly a matter of getting into the groove of ghosting and building up the muscle memory - this can take some time to get used to.

I do believe this waviness causes some issues in your planes, where the resulting issues with control become more apparent. It's still the same problem, and it'll get better with practice, but it's certainly something to be aware of. I'm definitely thinking you need to get used to putting more time into the preparation phase before executing with that same confidence. You do get a little better into your second page of planes however (I'm writing this critique out as I scroll through your pages). Still room for improvement, but definitely a step up.

Your table of ellipses is fairly solid. You'll continue to get better at tightening the ellipses up, but as it stands you're doing well. Your ellipses in planes are a little less so - I see areas where you've got ellipses that float arbitrarily in the middle of a plane (rather than touching all four edges of the plane as they're meant to). Always remember that this is the target you're aiming for - having your ellipse touch all four sides.

For the funnels, you're pretty close - just keep an eye on the alignment of the ellipses relative to the central minor axis line. The minor axis should cut each ellipse into two equal, symmetrical halves down its narrower dimension. At the moment you've got a few that are slanting a little.

Your rough perspective boxes are coming along well. As your control over the ghosting method improves, so will your execution here, but when it comes to demonstrating an understanding of the exercise itself, you're pretty much spot on.

While there's plenty of room for improvement on the rotated boxes, you actually did a very solid job. This exercise is intentionally meant to be very challenging at this stage, and similarly to the organic perspective boxes, it's akin to me dumping you in the deep end of the pool without really teaching you how to swim. That said, you've managed to achieve a solid rotation on all axes, and while symmetry is a little off, that's really not a big loss against your victories here.

Your organic perspective boxes do show room for improvement, but again - that's totally expected. In regards to what I'm looking for, you're showing some great development when it comes to arbitrary rotations of forms in 3D space, and are stomping down with gusto down the right path.

Now there's a lot of minor issues I've mentioned, so be sure to keep up with these exercises as part of a regular warmup routine (10-15 minutes at the beginning of each sitting), but I'm definitely going to mark this lesson as complete. I'd like you to move onto the 250 box challenge next, to get some more work in on really solidifying your grasp of free rotations in 3D space. 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 2: Organic Forms, Contour Lines, Dissections and Form Intersections"

2018-06-04 21:45

I definitely agree that your arrows are coming along pretty well, especially when it comes to getting them to flow through 3D space. Leaves follow the same principle, but they're harder not just for the reason you stated, but also because they tend to start and end at a point - so getting that sense of scale across (with the farther end being smaller and the closer end being larger) isn't really doable.

The thing about the arrows exercise however is not so much about how the arrow is drawn that can be applied to your leaves, but more about how the exercise makes you think about 3D space - how you can envision things moving through the depth of the scene, and how you can see the page as a window out onto a larger world.

When it comes to leaves, it all comes down to that initial arrow. It determines the flow of the whole thing, so the majority of your thought and effort needs to be geared towards it. A lot of people will draw something more arbitrary and expect the later steps to play a greater role, which is what ends up screwing them up. As a rule, the construction method's efforts are always invested heavily up-front.

Now, you can't show scale when you're drawing what is basically a line on the page, but again it comes down to how your brain is perceiving it. All of this is a big farce into tricking you into believing that what you're drawing is three dimensional. Same goes for contour lines, drawing through forms, etc. They're all tricks that convince you of the illusion.

One thing that personally helps me, and I actually do this quite frequently, is that when I'm drawing that initial flow line, I'll put a tiny arrow head at the end to really drill into my mind the fact that this is a directional thing, that something is flowing from one end to the other through space.

When you yourself are properly convinced of this crazy lie, that is when your drawings start to become more convincing for others. It tends to be in subtle, unquantifiable ways, (which itself is harder to teach, which is why we aim for the tricks that'll make you believe in the lie instead) - but a good way to think about it is if you draw a circle on a page and someone tells you to draw a line across it, you'll draw a straight line. But if you believe that this circle is in fact a sphere, then the line you draw across it will in fact curve along its three dimensional surface, because you know damn well you can't just draw a straight stroke through a 3D object. This is all despite the fact that what is present is a circle - your perception as the person doing the drawing matters a lot.

Anyway, i'm getting very far off track from the lesson critique. Your arrows are definitely looking good. Your organic forms with contour lines are coming along well, though there's two things I want to stress with this.

• Firstly, when you draw your sausage forms/shapes (before adding the contour lines) you have a tendency to leave a sizeable gap where the two ends of the line should meet. Admittedly it's not easy to have your lines come together, but that's something you're going to want to work on. The gap left there goes a long way to undermine the solidity of the resulting sausage form.

• Secondly, keep working on getting the ellipses and curves to fit snugly between the edges of a given sausage form. It all comes back down to building that illusion - if the lines end up going outside the bounds of the form (or even if they end up falling short) it'll break the illusion that the ellipse or curve is a stroke running along the surface of this rounded form. None of this is easy of course - balancing the confidence of your stroke to keep it smooth and even, with the control necessary to keep it snugly where you need it to go is hard and takes practice. But these are the goals we're aiming for. Currently you've got confidence aplenty, which is great. And your control isn't far off - but keep working at it.

For your dissections, there's one major thing worth mentioning that I noticed. When you draw a single element in your texture - like a kernel of corn, a single scale, etc. you're usually doing so with lines that fully enclose it. You're treating those lines as the bounds of each object. This is a rather inflexible way of capturing something, and we see this best when you try to transition into a fully blank space.

Instead, it's important to regard those lines as being the shadows cast by those forms - be they bumps, scales, kernels, or whatever else. They each cast a little shadow. Shadows, unlike rigid enclosing lines (that technically don't exist in the world around us) are quite flexible. They aren't necessarily just a thin, uniform thing. They can get very thick, and fuse together with neighbouring shadows, or if the light is close enough, they can be blasted out altogether. That's what the "blank" area on your objects is meant to be - an area where the light hits your object so directly that it blasts the shadows out. And on the fringes of this area, you have the little cast shadows gradually coming back, first as minute little shadows, growing denser and denser.

The texture challenge is all about this, and the exercise specifically has you practice getting your various textures transitioning from highly dense to extremely sparse. While in some of these textures you do show a grasp of the whole shadow thing, it's the ability to transition from dense to sparse that you're currently lacking, due to the rigidity of these gapless line-enclosures.

Your form intersections start off a little weak, but by the end there you're demonstrating a pretty good grasp of how these forms exist in space and how they relate to one another. Your organic intersections are okay, but what requires work here is your grasp of how the shadows are cast. The main thing you seem to be missing is that a shadow is cast upon another surface. Similar to how you wrap a texture around a sausage form, when a shadow is cast, it is going to warp to the surface it is cast upon. Currently your shadows are still very much tied to the objects that are casting them.

Now, there's clearly areas to work on, so I fully expect you'll continue to work on these exercises (as well as those from lesson 1) as part of a regular warmup routine. But I think you should be good to move onto the next lesson. Definitely take some time to absorb what I've said here in this critique though, and maybe read through it a couple times over the course of a few days.

Uncomfortable in the post "250 Box Challenge"

2018-06-04 20:52

There's definite improvement over the set, with your awareness of your convergences becoming more acute as you push through. There's still a lot of room for improvement of course. When you draw a given line, it's important that you try and think about all the other lines to which this one is going to be parallel. It's easy to get caught up in thinking about the other lines, line those that'll come together at a particular corner (a lot of people say that the back corner is the hardest), but think only about parallel lines.

Think about those that have already been drawn, the one you're drawing now, and those that have not yet been drawn, and consider how they're all going to converge together towards the same far off point. Also, think about which of these lines are more similar to each other.

Also, it's worth mentioning that when you apply the line extensions, it's probably best to draw along the entire length of the line as well, rather than starting the extension where the line ends. Aim for something more like this.

Lastly, putting some consideration towards line weight (there's notes about that on the challenge page) is a great way to kick your boxes up to the next level and to help increase the sense of cohesion and solidity you get from your boxes. When your lines are all left at a uniform weight, they tend to feel more like a loose collection of lines, rather than a single solid form.

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

Uncomfortable in the post "250 Box Challenge"

2018-06-04 20:34

Imgur seems to have a penchant for shuffling things around as it pleases. Not sure why.

Overall I can definitely see progress over the set. Your estimation of perspective is improving steadily. There's certainly room for more growth, as is expected, but you've definitely made a solid jump forwards with this challenge.

One thing that caught my eye was that up until your late 100s to early 200s, you had a tendency of applying the line extension method to check your mistakes on two of the three sets of lines. This causes your awareness of the convergences to become a little unbalanced - where you'll tend to do really well on two sides, but then compensate by having the third fall a bit out of whack (and sometimes even diverge when it should be converging). The fact that you start extending the lines of all three later into the set does show that you're aware of this, but it was certainly worth mentioning.

As you continue to move forwards on this, I definitely recommend looking into the use of line weight (there are notes about this on the challenge page) to help increase the general sense of cohesion and solidity of your boxes, as it can definitely help kick things up to the next level.

Aside from that, keep up the great work. I'll go ahead and mark this challenge as complete, so feel free to move onto the next lesson.

Uncomfortable in the post "250 Box Challenge"

2018-06-02 18:06

It's definitely really clear that your understanding of how those sets of parallel lines must converge together consistently has improved considerably over the course of the challenge. It's really quite interesting to see the continuous progression - not much plateauing or stalling, just continuous, steady improvement.

There are two things worth mentioning - the first doesn't matter much, but your scanner settings aren't doing you any favours. It looks like you're using the "drawing" presets many scanners have - this is designed to really ramp up the contrast on an image, in the interest of having a stark white background. It also tends to blast out any of the nuance of your linework, and makes it look pretty bad. The photograph presets are usually preferable.

Related to your actual work though, the next step you'll want to take with these is playing more with your line weight to help improve the sense of cohesion and solidity across your forms. When the lines are all uniform, it's easy for a box to feel more like a collection of marks that are loosely connected to one another - once you add a little line weight here and there (keeping it subtle of course), it starts to feel more like a single object.

There are notes on the topic of line weight on the challenge page, so be sure to give them a read. I also talk a little bit about it on the form intersections video for lesson 2.

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

Oh, also worth mentioning - if you do end up taking that NMA course alongside drawabox, remember that it's very important that you try not to let techniques from one course contradict what another course tells you to do. So when you're doing NMA stuff, apply NMA's techniques. When you're doing drawabox, apply drawabox techniques. Some people do find it a little tricky to balance these out, and leaving the decisions on what is valuable and what is not to the end isn't always easy - but it is important to understand the various techniques and principles within the full context that they're taught.

Uncomfortable in the post "Lesson 7: Drawing Vehicles"

2018-06-02 18:01

I think it's pretty amazing that you were able to laser cut your own ellipse guides - most definitely find that they're way too expensive (I've heard people talking about cheaper ellipse master templates, but they definitely cover fewer cases).

Overall, you definitely did a phenomenal job. Earlier on in the set (I'm not sure if these are in chronological order) with some of your planes, things were definitely a lot more simplistic, but as you progressed you seemed to gain a much greater awareness of how forms could be broken down further. It's clear that you did struggle a fair bit with some of the fuselages, especially those with more specific, nuanced curves to them. These are notoriously difficult, it's really the specificity of those curves that makes them tricky, and it'll take a good deal of practice to really get over that last 10%. To be completely honest, due to the fact that I've rarely ever drawn airplanes, it's not something I've gotten past either (though with some targeted practice, I have no doubt that you'll get over that barrier if you so choose to).

The rest of your constructions are really fantastic, and convey a really strong sense of solid form. Your proportions are spot on, and even those that stray from the symmetrical nature of most vehicles (like the industrial lift at the end).

I do agree that you went overboard in many cases with the black sections - the key here is to remember that at least in these construction drawings, our main use of solid black "shadow" areas is to separate things out from one another. A little cast shadow here and there can help focus the eye on one form over another. In this regard, having solid black areas on the parts of a construction that sit closest to the viewer (so not serving to clarify any form overlapping that section) becomes largely pointless.

I can definitely see the draw aesthetically (this one came out beautifully), but the cases where it really helped were those where they did function at least partially to help separate things out. Here and here on the other hand, it actually worked to your detriment as it hid a lot of the valuable contour lines you had in there, which would have helped define the form (especially in the latter).

As for your Vespa, I actually think it was going pretty well, and it's too bad that it went unfinished. That said, when I draw things with an overbearing amount of construction and subdivision, I have a tendency to factor considerations towards line weight in throughout the process, rather than only at the end. It's usually very subtle, and I'll still find places to push things further at the end, but I'll usually try and pull some forms out as I build them up, so as to keep things from getting too visually confusing.

At the same time, as you practice dealing with complex constructions like this, it does become easier to see the hidden vehicle. In this regard, I can make out your vespa without too much trouble - so as much as being a matter of technique, it's also a question of continuing to train your eyes.

Anyway, you've done some more excellent work here. I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete - and with that, you've completed the dynamic sketching curriculum! So congratulations on that. Right now there isn't really much else as far as drawabox goes to tackle next, but in the coming months (after I've had a chance to rebuild the website, which I should be starting in the next week or so) I'm planning on developing another lesson set focused on design and form language - basically taking what we've learned about drawing real objects and leveraging it to create fresh and interesting designs. It is worth mentioning though that the critique tier for these will likely be the $20 one, due to the more general and flexible nature of that subject matter. The lesson material, as always, will be completely free.

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

2018-06-02 17:28

This is actually considerably better than before, and you're doing a much better job of capturing most of your volumes. There's still room for improvement, and one issue that I'm seeing is that your contour curves often (but not always) have a habit of failing to accelerate in their curvature enough near the edges to give the impression that they wrap around a properly rounded form. Overshooting, as explained here can help.

Contour curves are used to give the impression of volume because they give the viewer a very specific sign of how that surface turns through space. It's a path our eye can follow - because our eyes understand the idea that these lines are meant to be "straight" relative to the object they're on, so how they curve is directly related to the surface they run along.

Being able to pull off this curvature comes from how well you're currently able to hold the idea of the surface being three dimensional in your head. Those who feel that they're drawing along a flat page, will find it difficult to achieve much curvature. Those who are fully convinced in the idea that what they're drawing is 3D will conversely not be able to just draw a straight, 2D line across a rounded object in their drawing, because it simply won't make sense. It constitutes a whole spectrum between these two extremes, and it does take time and practice to move from one end to the other. That's what the exercises from lessons 1 and 2 are all about - gradually building up those skills and shifting how you see the world, and how you perceive your own drawings.

There's one other thing worth mentioning - in my initial critique's notes, I mentioned that one should construct legs with sausage forms (which you're mostly doing), and reinforce the joints between these forms with contour curves. You may have misunderstood this last part. Right now you seem to be placing contour curves around the joints (one on either side), but that's not what I'm asking for. Here's a better demonstration of what I mean. You are to actually define the location where the two forms intersect. This helps immensely with all forms that intersect with one another (including the abdomen and thorax in your drawing), as it makes very clear how those two forms relate to one another in space.

Anyway, I am going to mark this lesson as complete, as this spider drawing shows considerable improvement. Make sure you do a lot of refreshing with those lesson 1 and 2 exercises before moving onto lesson 5 however - and of course, keep up with them as a regular warmup. This is something I recommend quite explicitly in that first lesson and intro video for a reason.

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

2018-06-01 23:59

Overall you're doing a reasonable job. There are areas where you can improve, but you're well within the range of what I'd expect to see for this lesson.

• In your super imposed lines, your straight lines are pretty good. You're focusing more on drawing confidently and maintaining a persistent pace and a consistent trajectory rather than fussing too much over accuracy. This keeps your lines smooth, which is what we want. When you tackle your wavy and curving lines however, I do see a bit more of a tendency to slow down so your brain can guide your hand as you draw. You want to work on trusting more in your muscle memory, and to get that confidence back. Remember that your accuracy is not the main focus here - it's maintaining a consistent, smooth trajectory throughout the stroke.

• In your ghosted lines exercise, you definitely focused pretty much only on lines of a considerable length. I think it helps a lot to work your way up, and to give yourself a good deal of variety. Train your arm on the shorter lines first, go up to longer ones, then back down to smaller.

• Ironically with your planes, I think you drew those to be too small. You have a bit of variety here, but in general it does give the impression that drawing more cramped may have come from a lack of confidence (it's something I see often). Drawing smaller feels like a way to hide one's insecurities in their skills, but at the same time it robs you of the confidence that you need to really push those confident strokes. This was especially the case when you hit the ellipses in planes, where your planes got especially tiny.

• All your other ellipses are drawn much more confidently, which is pretty solid. What I am noticing however is that your ellipses tend to come to points on either end. That's definitely something you'll want to work on, as this sudden point means that they're not yet proper ellipses. Be sure to continue practicing this, and smoothing them out. This may be caused by you drawing more from your wrist - try to push yourself to draw your ellipses (and really any linework that needs a more consistent, smooth, confident trajectory) from your shoulder.

• Jumping ahead to your rough perspective boxes, there's a few things I noticed. Firstly, again - you're drawing pretty small. Even though it might feel unnatural, you need to push yourself to draw bigger. Not ridiculously huge, but 1.5-2x bigger than you currently are. Secondly, pay attention to the nature of your horizontal and vertical lines here. As I explain here, there are three different sets of lines, and each set follows a different behaviour. There's no guesswork - you just need to find which behaviour the line you're drawing is meant to follow, then execute that task. I'm noticing that your horizontals and verticals tend to slant. I don't think this is a case of you not knowing when a line should run parallel to the horizon, or when it should run perpendicularly to it, but rather I think it's just that you're not focusing enough on applying the ghosting method for each and every stroke - and the minimal preparation causes you to draw lines without enough control.

• Also for the rough perspective boxes, you seem to try to apply the double checking method for a couple of these in purple. You're not quite following the instructions here correctly though. In these notes I ask you to extend your lines back to where they intersect with the horizon, rather than drawing the lines as they would have been, had they converged perfectly. The benefit from my way is that you can see how far away the intersection with the horizon line is from the actual intended vanishing point.

• While you technically didn't finish your rotated boxes (as there's 7 boxes missing), those you did draw were coming along well. Don't make the mistake however, of stopping because you're afraid of ruining the drawing. None of these drawings matter - they're just exercises, total fodder that could be tossed into a fire upon completion. The only thing that matters is what we learn from doing them. A bad drawing that taught you a lot through its numerous failures is far more valuable to you than a pretty one that taught you nothing.

• Your organic perspective boxes are pretty crazy, but that's totally normal and expected. This exercise is hard, and I don't expect students to even come close to nailing it. Its purpose is more to get you to think differently about 3D space, and to break away from thinking of entire scenes as being dominated by 1, 2 or 3 point perspective. Rather than digging into the issues with foreshortening being too dramatic, or your sets of parallel lines not converging consistently towards the same vanishing points, I'll leave that be - as that's what we'll tackle in the 250 box challenge, which will no doubt be assigned (though I know you've already started on it).

Before you get back to the 250 box challenge however, I want you to try one page of rough perspective boxes again. Watch the video for that exercise and read through the notes (and the self critique resource notes), then attempt the one page and submit it here. Then I'll mark this lesson as complete and you can get back to the 250 box challenge.

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

2018-06-01 23:31

Overall, very nice work! I've got a couple things to mention, but you're doing a great job.

In your first page of super imposed lines, you were definitely quite stiff and focusing too much on being accurate, which resulted in some rather wobbly lines. By the second page however, you gained a good deal of confidence and shifted your focus to the consistent trajectory and flow of each stroke, which produced a much stronger result.

I definitely noticed some stiffness in your ellipses in planes exercise. This isn't entirely abnormal, and I often see it when students struggle between drawing a smooth ellipse, and getting them to fit snugly within these awkward shapes. Your ellipses in the other sections were much smoother, so I think this was more a case of you getting a bit overwhelmed, causing your focus to shift into the wrong area (accuracy over flow).

In your funnels, keep an eye on your ellipses' alignment to that central minor axis line. You want each ellipse to align such that it is cut into two equal, symmetrical halves down its narrower dimension.

Your rough perspective boxes were pretty well done. I know you may have been a little shocked by seeing that your estimations were off as much as they were, but I assure you that this is entirely normal. Improving your estimation here is a process of practicing the exercise, then going back over it to check where you were off (and trying to identify the patterns, and in turn compensating for those patterns of behaviour during your next attempt). This is why it's definitely very important that you apply the checking method each time - I noticed that you didn't do so on that second page.

Excellent work on your rotated boxes. This is a notoriously tricky exercise, and I honestly don't expect most students to nail it, or even come close. It's more about getting students to think differently about 3D space, and to break away from thinking about entire scenes in terms of 1, 2 or 3 point perspective. You did an excellent job however, and followed the instructions very well. Your line quality's a bit wavy at times, so definitely work on the use of that ghosting method, but you still did a great job.

Your organic perspective boxes are coming along well, though there's definitely more work to be done as far as rotating boxes freely in 3D space goes, and getting a sense for how your various sets of parallel lines ought to converge. We'll be working on that next.

So, 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 as well before starting the work, as there are some extremely valuable tips that will help you better understand how each form sits in 3D space, and how to benefit most from each page of boxes.

Uncomfortable in the post "Lesson 3: Drawing Plants"

2018-06-01 03:44

A play by play definitely sounds like a good idea.

Uncomfortable in the post "Lesson 5: Drawing Animals"

2018-06-01 01:56

Aah! I was just drawing, and I remembered something I meant to mention in my critique, but had forgotten to. It has to do with eye sockets. When drawing them, you're generally approaching them as being an ellipse. Instead of that, I want you to try constructing them as a more intentional, carved series of cut-segments. You can see me demonstrating this towards the bottom right of this demo I did for another student.

This forces you to consider how that socket exists as part of the 3D head construction, running those lines along the various planes that exist there. In turn, this helps make your eyes more believable.

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

2018-05-31 23:50

I've been looking at your drawings for several minutes now, scrolling up and down the album. There's something off about your approach that I can't entirely put my finger on. I think it's that all of your linework feels very... stiff. Your lines don't flow smoothly and continuously, there's little kinks and bends and jerks throughout. Now, I don't really have any clear gauge for scale, but this is often something one sees from students who draw much too small on the page, which always results in a lot of cramped linework and a decreased ability to think through spatial problems. Another factor can be drawing more from the wrist than the shoulder.

Of course, both of these points may or may not be the case - they're points you'd have to confirm or deny yourself. All I can remark upon is what I see.

Furthermore, your drawings - at least these ones - give the impression that you're still seeing your drawings as marks across a flat page. You're attempting to draw forms, but there's no sense of the relationship between them. For example, if you look at this treehopper, you haven't fully established the volume of the main body before you start moving onto the wing. You're drawing through some areas, but in others you're doing the same thing I advised you against in my last critique - that is, allowing forms to stop where they are occluded by others.

That said, in the very last drawing, you did do a much better job when it comes to layering the various segments along its thorax and abdomen - so that's a move in the right direction (although its legs are both flat and stiff).

I want you to try and draw this spider. It's fucking disgusting and I hate looking at it, but it's an excellent subject to work from, as it's not nearly as complex as some of the subjects you've attempted here. I want you to focus ONLY on construction, with no detail whatsoever. At the end of each phase of construction, I want you to photograph your work, and then submit it all together so I can see your process. Remember that each phase should end with forms that feel solid.

Also worth mentioning: a question that's been ringing through my head as I've looked over your work is whether or not you've kept up with the exercises from lessons 1 and 2 as part of a regular warmup routine. Your current work suggests that you haven't been practicing your organic forms and organic intersections as much as you should, which has caused you to get rusty.

Uncomfortable in the post "Lesson 5: Drawing Animals"

2018-05-31 21:14

You've done some really phenomenal work here. As I flipped through your pages, I tried to develop a mental list of things I could mention. Being less scribbly/zigzaggy when handling fur, starting with a smaller cranial ball when starting a head construction, and so on. There wasn't a lot, but there were a few things I figured I could scrounge up to make my critique worth a damn.

But as I moved through the set, you knocked down every point I was set to tackle. Further on in the set, you started dealing with smaller craniums and relied more on building forms up on top of that base, and you paid more attention to how you designed each tuft of fur, doing so with clear intent rather than trying to rely on a more subconscious pattern.

So, all in all, you've demonstrated a massive amount of improvement over this set, on top of the already strong grasp of the concept of construction that you started with. There's none of the issues I initially pointed out in regards to the previous lesson - you're focused on the individual forms and how they fit together, only giving texture and detail a thought once all of that is solid.

You're also leaving me with scraps to point out for myself, but I suppose that's a very good thing.

It's clear that you were struggling with that rattlesnake. You were very good to clearly call out the fact that its body has distinct planes to it, but I think it may have been worthwhile to tackle this with the branches approach from lesson 3 first, then impose the separation of planes on top of that.

Also, don't forget about the little feetsies. You clearly know how to construct them, and have done so with great results in plenty of places. But you've also got some cases where you left them somewhat.. nubby. The coatls, for example - the rest of them was really well done, so being left with mittens definitely takes away from it a bit (though you obviously did a close-up study of them, so my point is kind of moot - I'm trying really hard to nitpick!)

Aside from those minor points, you're doing extremely well. So, I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete. Feel free to move onto the next one. I'm actually really interested in seeing how you'll tackle geometric objects. I know you've had prior experience with drawing, drawing portraits and figures and such, so being thrown into the ring with something unorganic may well be a very different experience!

By the way, I loved your hybrids. Those are really the big test for whether or not a student understands construction, as they force you to use everything you know about how the various parts of the animals sit in space.

Uncomfortable in the post "Lesson 3: Drawing Plants"

2018-05-31 14:55

Alright, that's understandable. It's definitely a pretty peculiar situation though, and I am worried about the bit about the critique image I sent over. Were you able to make out the handwriting once you downloaded the image? Bandwidth usage aside, once downloaded it should be the same 650kb image that I uploaded, which should be big enough to make out the writing (aside from the fact that my handwriting isn't the clearest). I definitely need to know if you haven't been able to read the majority of my last critique.

And if an image of that size costs you $1.90 in bandwidth, then I can't imagine viewing the website (each page of which has several megabytes of images) and the youtube videos is cheap either. Have you been able to look at all of the lesson content?

Uncomfortable in the post "Lesson 3: Drawing Plants"

2018-05-30 23:08

Aaaalright. So, I just spent the last half hour or so writing directly on your pages, so the text portion of this critique will be brief.

Overall, I think you're not quite grasping the concept of construction yet, and have a ways to go. As it stands, you're still caught in the land of sketching - where the various stages of a drawing are loose and vague, gradually building towards solidity as you work through the phases.

You'll notice in my demonstrations however, that this is not how I tackle things, and it is not what I'm teaching you. The methodology we follow here treats every phase of construction as one, or maybe a few, decisions being made at a time. These decisions are not vague or loose, they are solid at whichever stage they are made. For example, the very first step of constructing a leaf is establishing the line that drives its flow. It's a single line, but I still demand of it a sense of precision, of energy, and I need it to come out as a specific, intended stroke - not a loose mark that can be adjusted as I go.

The reason for this is that this line is a decision that I am making now, and one I must abide by through the rest of my drawing. That doesn't mean it's going to be, or needs to be 100% correct - it just means that whatever I do here will impact the end result of my drawing. Construction is, after all, a process of breaking the overall target into a series of manageable decisions, to be made one by one until reaching the end.

If you find yourself remaking a decision later on that you made previously, this will upset the structure and undermine the solidity of the result. Holding to a previous decision that may not have been 100% correct may result in you not matching your reference perfectly (which is far from our goal here), but it will result in something that feels more concrete and believable in its own right.

You'll notice that the notes I've written on your work follow this vein of thinking. I want you to review what I've marked there, then go back over my demonstrations (especially the videos). Try and draw along with them, following the explicit steps I lay down.

Then I want you to do 5 more pages of plant drawings. This time, I don't want to see any detail - construction only. I noticed a lot of additional marks you were adding in that suggested that you were being distracted by superfluous features in your reference that had no bearing on the forms you were constructing, so lets just leave that out this time so you can set your eye on the real target.

Oh, and from now on, use imgur to upload your work, for my sake. I mentioned earlier that it saves the trouble of permissions problems, but I realized that google drive is a massive pain in other ways - for example, if I want to draw on your pages, instead of being able to just copy and paste them into photoshop, I have to download each one individually.

Uncomfortable in the post "Lesson 3: Drawing Plants"

2018-05-29 22:50

• Your branches are vastly better. Keep at it, but that's definitely a big step up.

• For the hibiscus, remember that the initial ellipse you drew defines the bounds to which all the petals will extend. Once you've determined this (when drawing this ellipse), you've basically made the decision. So afterwards, do not remake the decision by drawing petals that extend beyond that space.

• Your pitcher plants are coming along, but there's definitely room for improvement, specifically in the sense of stiffness. Focus on getting them to be more organic, rather than having these sort of lilting stops in the flow where you have each ellipse.

• For the cactuses, pay special attention to where the different masses intersect with one another. This is what will ground the forms to one another, rather than having them float arbitrarily. The intersections themselves can be defined and reinforced by drawing a line along the contour where they meet - if you think about two spheres intersecting, their intersection can be defined as a simple contour ellipse.

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

Uncomfortable in the post "Lesson 3: Drawing Plants"

2018-05-29 22:43

When I try and access the album, it says that I need to request access. I actually clicked the request access button earlier, thinking you might see it before I actually had a chance to do critiques, but you don't seem to have gotten around to it.

:P Imgur is sooo much better for this. Easier for me to navigate, and none of these permissions pitfalls. Anyway, let me know when you've gotten that resolved.

Uncomfortable in the post "250 Cylinder Challenge"

2018-05-29 19:06

It comes down to how quickly your parallel lines converge towards their vanishing point (or rather, how much smaller the far end is relative to the near end). If a cylinder's far end is relatively close in size to the near end, then this tells us that there's fairly little perspective at play and that the size relationship seen on the page (that is, the 2D drawing) is pretty close to the form that is represented. If however the far end is considerably smaller, then it tells us that there's more perspective distortion and that there's a stronger likelihood that the far end is actually a greater distance away, making the cylinder read as longer.

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

2018-05-29 00:54

Nicely done overall. I noticed early on in your lines section that you had a tendency to draw your lines a little too slowly, which resulted in them wobbling and coming out a little stiff. As you progress however and once you hit the planes, you show a much better awareness for their flow. This carries through into your ellipses, which helps keep them evenly shaped. That kind of growth is exactly what we're looking for.

Throughout the rest of the lesson, you do a pretty solid job of following the instructions and progressing with patience and care. I'm very pleased to see that you applied the line-extension method to your rough perspective boxes.

Though definitely a challenging exercise, you did a pretty good job with the rotated boxes. It's definitely true that your rotation could be pushed just a little bit more (if you try and pinpoint where your vanishing points are, and track how they slide along as your boxes rotate, you'll notice that the outermost boxes' vanishing points only move a little relative to their neighbours, when they really should be experiencing a more dramatic change.

That said, you did a great job of keeping your boxes tight and structured, and leveraged the instructions to great effect. I also like your use of line weight.

Same goes for the organic perspective boxes. Here there's definitely a lot of room to grow, both with having your lines converge consistently towards their implied vanishing points, as well as being more consistent with your rate of foreshortening. Right now you've got a lot of boxes that have some really dramatic foreshortening to them, which generally suggests that the object is very large (like looking at the top of a tall building from the ground) or that it is very close to the viewer's eye. It becomes difficult to make sense of so many objects with such a large implied scale being together in such a way, so the sense of scale of the whole scene ends up feeling odd, even if the viewer isn't necessarily sure why.

That said, that's totally normal at this point. This is something we'll work on next. As it stands, this exercise was largely to get you to think about how forms can be rotated freely in 3D space. You've also done a great job with your line weights here, which helped make your forms look solid, despite the awkwardness of some of them.

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 as well, before starting the work.

Uncomfortable in the post "250 Box Challenge"

2018-05-29 00:46

Good work completing the challenge. I can see various degrees of improvement throughout, especially in your last few pages. That said, I do agree that there are still some areas where you are struggling rather consistently. That is, it's pretty often that you have lines that should be parallel, that end up diverging as they move farther away, rather than converging as they ought to.

The important thing here is that when you're drawing a line, don't distract yourself by thinking about the corners so much. What matters, and what you should be focusing on are the other lines the current one runs parallel to (remember, three sets of four parallel lines). When you're drawing a line, think of those - including the ones that haven't yet been drawn - and consider where they're meant to converge to.

Also, think about their similarlity/proximity. This isn't necessarily speaking of how close, physically, two lines are, where they're drawn. Rather, think about the angles at which they radiate out from the vanishing point they all are meant to share. If the angle between two of those lines is quite small, then where they become a part of the box, those lines are going to end up being much closer to being parallel to one another.

Here's an explanation of what I mean. It's tricky, but one must learn to think strategically about what they cannot necessarily see, or what has not yet been drawn. Also, leveraging the part of the ghosting method that involves placing points for the start and end of an intended line can be helpful. That is, placing the points for numerous lines before committing to them with an actual stroke.

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

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

2018-05-29 00:21

You're doing a pretty good job, especially in some of the most important areas. That includes how closely you're following the instructions for each exercise, and the patience with which you complete them.

One thing that jumped out at me however was something that comes up across most of your exercises. It's that when it comes to executing your lines, there's two main priorities that we keep, and from the looks of it you're attacking them in the wrong order. There's accuracy, how closely we match the mark we're trying to make, and flow, how smoothly we execute our stroke, and how closely we maintain a consistent trajectory throughout.

At the moment you're focusing more on accuracy, as many do - though you should really be putting flow first. Once you've ghosted and prepared all you care to, it's important to execute your mark with a smooth, confident and persistent pace. If you're too focused on accuracy, it'll cause you to slow down so your brain can control your hand as it moves, allowing you to course-correct as you go. These course-corrections manifest as wobbles in a line.

Now, your wobbles are minimal, but I do see them across the board. So you'll benefit from pushing yourself to execute your marks a little more confidently, and to work on hesitating less as you draw. Accept the fact that mistakes happen. We prepare all we can, and once we touch our pen to the page, we've committed ourselves and must move forwards boldly, rather than showing our fear and uncertainty.

As I said, this applies across the board - it keeps your lines smooth, and your ellipses evenly shaped (as opposed to stiff and bumpy). Of course, accuracy is still important, but that is something that will develop with practice, whereas a smooth execution comes more from how you approach the problem.

Aside from that, you've done a pretty good job. Your rough perspective boxes is solid, and you took the time to double check your estimation towards the vanishing point. Your rotated boxes - despite being a notoriously challenging exercise was very solid (though there's no good reason for having skipped the corner boxes - some do so because they're afraid to ruin a nice drawing, but when it comes to these exercises, the results don't matter, only what you gain from doing them does).

Your organic perspective boxes do need work, but they're absolutely where I'd expect them to be at this point. The exercise is largely meant to push students to think about how forms can be rotated arbitrarily from a different angle, separating themselves from some of the rigid 1/2/3 point perspective systems (and erroneously applying them to entire scenes). This is a great start, and we'll work on improving your grasp of how each box sits in space.

I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete. I'd like you to move onto the 250 box challenge next. Be sure to read through all of the notes and watch the video on that page - and remember that along with being an opportunity to further your grasp of 3D space, it's also an excellent chance to work on those smooth, confident executions of your linework.

Uncomfortable in the post "250 Cylinder Challenge"

2018-05-27 18:02

It's kind of surprising to see someone from way back when critiques were free. It's definitely nice to see that you've returned, and that your skills haven't gotten too rusty from the break.

Your cylinder constructions are pretty good at the moment. There are some that seem a bit squished (which is totally fine for now, as we don't actually get into the complicated mechanics of drawing an ellipse that is guaranteed to represent a circle in 3D space, so it's expected that we'll have some that feel more ovular as the faces for our cylinders here). What's important is that you're drawing with confident lines, and are conscious of aligning your ellipses to your minor axes. Moreover you're experimenting with a good deal of variety, and are playing with both constructing around an arbitrary minor axis as well as by starting from a box.

On the topic of how you make your outlines bolder, one thing I noticed was that when you do this, sometimes your lines get a little stiff. This is because you're trying to match the underlying stroke accurately, which causes you to slow down (and in turn, wobble). In general, I try to discourage people from adding line weight to whole lines or ellipses at once. Often times it makes things look very heavy-handed and lacks nuance, while also risking this issue of stiffening up.

So there's two things to keep in mind with that. Firstly, remember that every mark you put down should be drawn with the same kind of confident, persistent pace (whether it's an initial construction line - of which yours were very smooth and confident) or if it's an attempt to add line weight). Secondly, Try to add weight to SECTIONS of lines and ellipses, rather than the whole thing. This will keep things more subtle, and will allow you to focus on using that weight to gently pull your form out from its surrounding area where necessary. This is especially the case with ellipses, where it often looks better to have a line that transitions from being lighter to heavier and back. It adds a sense of dynamism.

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

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

2018-05-27 17:55

Overall pretty well done! I noticed a considerable shift in your approach between your first and second pages of superimposed lines, which saw a significant improvement. On the first page your strokes were more wobbly, where you aimed for accuracy over the flow and consistency of your marks. On the second page, it was clear that you focused more on flow, resulting in smoother lines, which in the long run are a much better way of practicing.

Your ellipses are generally quite well done too, though you'll want to work on tightening them up as you continue to practice. This can be quite challenging, as we don't want to lose the smooth, even shapes that come from the confidence of your stroke, but be sure to chip away and tighten them bit by bit as you go.

I did notice that your funnel ellipses were slanted slightly - remember that they need to be aligned to that central minor axis line, such that the minor axis cuts each one into two equal, symmetrical halves through their narrower dimension. You're not far off, but not quite there yet.

Your work was pretty solid for your rough perspective boxes, and I'm pleased to see that you extended each one's edges back towards the horizon line to check your estimation of perspective.

You made a solid effort in your rotated boxes. This exercise is purposely intended to be quite challenging for students at this stage, and I don't expect them to fully succeed just yet, as I haven't actually taught anything pertaining to the free rotation of boxes yet, I'm really just dumping you into the deep end of the pool. While being an opportunity to break away from a more structured view of perspective, and seeing entire scenes as being bound to one, two or three point perspective (which is an erroneous view that many beginners tend to have), it's also an exercise in following instructions closely and carefully, and exhibiting patience.

You did follow most of the instructions quite well, especially with how narrow and consistent you kept your gaps, using neighbouring edges as hints when adding new lines. I did notice though that you only drew the "extremity" box for the right side, not the others.

One thing I did notice though was that your outer boxes weren't actually rotating relative to their neighbours. I demonstrate this here: https://i.imgur.com/b7Eb9mK.png

The organic perspective boxes exercise is of the same sort - that is, extra challenging, no expectation of success, aimed at getting students to think differently about rotating forms in 3D space. That said, you did a pretty decent job. There's definitely room for improvement with the consistency of your convergences, but we'll definitely work on that. All in all, you're in a good state relative to my expectations.

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

Uncomfortable in the post "250 Box Challenge"

2018-05-27 17:01

While I do agree with the line weight/super imposed lines stuff getting a bit sloppy by the end (and being really quite solid at the start), you definitely did improve considerably over the set on the core of the challenge - that is, becoming more consistent with your convergences. The set as a whole is pretty solid.

One thing that I do want to recommend is that you not make a habit of continually drawing new lines when things go wrong. I can see areas where you probably felt you missed the super imposed line, and decided to go back over it again and again until you got it right. Better to invest more time into ghosting through it, then executing once (whether it works or not). Usually one extra stroke is enough to provide some nice, subtle weight. If you really want to you can go at it once more, but only if the first attempt worked out okay (so as to avoid doing it because the first attempt went awry).

Anyway, you definitely learned a lot from extending your lines. Just spend more time on ghosting through the motion before you add weight to a mark. I'll go ahead and mark this challenge as complete - feel free to move onto lesson 2!

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

2018-05-26 22:27

• You're definitely still rushing.

• I don't see a single attempt at intersections on your form intersections page.

• Your cheetah texture looks more or less the same as the one you drew previously (just arranging them in a pretty regular pattern that looks nothing like how a cheetah's spots are arranged).

• While you say you're trying to make those fish scales compress at the edges, which at least shows awareness of the point, they don't actually look any different.

Do these pages again, and do not submit them to me until May 31st. It seems that you really need to be forced to actually slow down and take your time with each of these exercises. I absolutely do not want to see rushed work again, as it is a complete waste of my time to have to point out the same issues again and again because you didn't take the time to slow down, absorb the critique, reread the pertinent parts of the lesson and invest the time that is actually required.

Oh, also for the dissections, draw bigger. You're giving yourself virtually no room to work, so all your linework ends up extremely cramped and awkward.

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

2018-05-26 19:41

Your organic forms with contour curves look much better, so I'll check that off. Of course, there's room for improvement, but you're on the right track now and the rest is a matter of practice.

Your dissections are pretty close to where they were before. On the matter of shadows, picking a different pen thickness was not a great idea. Not only does it break the requirement of "do these exercises with a 0.5 fineliner", you've also thrown any subtlety and nuance completely out of the window in the interest of a quick solution. That's not how this works. You also missed several points I raised in my last critique:

• Compressing your textures along the edges of the form as that surface turns away from the viewer (for example, your fish scales)

• Avoiding working from memory (for example, your cheetah fur, where you looked at the texture, saw that it's made up of spots, and then went on to draw a bunch of spots without taking into consideration how they're arranged).

Here's how I would have tackled these textures: https://i.imgur.com/qRqChhd.png

Your form intersections are basically the same as before. You didn't make any effort to change either of the points I mentioned in my critique, which were regarding the fact that you used stretched forms instead of sticking to equilateral ones, and the fact that you didn't make any attempts to explore the actual intersections between the forms.

Your organic intersections are less sloppy than before, and definitely improved, though the ones at the bottom of the page are definitely better than those at the top. That said, those cast shadows are still extremely hamfisted, which is no doubt in part due to the fact that you switched to a different pen to draw them. Now, I'm not actually against using a brush pen to fill in the dark areas, but only if you're able to control it well enough. And even then, you should still draw the cast shadow shape with your initial pen.

I know you're trying to rush through to get to lesson 4, and I'm strongly against any kind of rushing. These lessons are extremely important, and while they may not be as interesting as the later content, if you cannot demonstrate the patience to read through the content and critiques, you will crash and burn later on. You're already putting the time into completing these exercises, so you owe it yourself to invest what is required to do it correctly. Otherwise you'll end up spending more time overall on redoing things, than you would have in the first place had you decided not to rush.

I want you to do:

• One page of dissections (i don't actually expect these to come out well, I just want to see you applying the concepts I've covered in my critiques - and don't switch pens, stick to one weight throughout).

• One page of form intersections. Again, like I said before, avoid stretched forms like long cylinders, stick to approximately equilateral forms (which are roughly the same size in all three dimensions), and actually try to draw the intersections between the forms as shown in the demonstration for this exercise.

• One page of organic intersections. You are doing better on these, but I want to see you do those cast shadows correctly. Right now they are very sloppy and quite detrimental to your result. Being able to control how you fill in cast shadow shapes will be extremely important later on, so you need to be able to get it down now.

Uncomfortable in the post "250 Box Challenge"

2018-05-26 19:02

Honestly, you've done a pretty solid job with these. Your linework is extremely confident, and you're doing a great job applying line weights. There is improvement with the consistency of your convergences (which the extended lines are meant to test), but there certainly is room for improvement on that front. I still do see areas where you've got lines that converge more in pairs (like the parallel edges of a given plane converging together, but not to the same point as the lines on an opposite plane with which they are also parallel), so that's something to work on. As you draw a line, it's important to try and think about all the other three lines with which that one will be parallel - whether you've drawn them yet or not. Think about where they're going to converge, even if it's farther away, and if possible, think about how "similar" a line is going to be to another in the same set.

If you look at box 250, you can see those two middle lines there going down towards the bottom left. They're extremely close to each other, so you know that they're going to be nearly parallel since they're to converge towards the same far off point. It's easy to gauge this because the lines are actually drawn close to one another in this case - but there are cases when lines are quite similar to one another (being just a few degrees different when you actually compare the angles at which they come out of the vanishing point), but may not be drawn as close together on the page, so it's harder to tell.

Anyway, that's something you'll want to keep focusing on as you continue to grow. You've done a great job with this set, so consider this challenge complete. Feel free to move onto lesson 2.

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

2018-05-26 18:52

You've got a lot of excellent stuff here, but I did catch some minor things that are worth mentioning and should help you solidify overall.

• Your arrows are looking good, and you're exploring all three dimensions of space quite nicely with one end clearly being farther from the viewer than the other. They are however rather samey, repeating the same kind of flows frequently. Try and play with variety.

• One thing I caught in your organic forms with contour lines and curves is that there isn't much shift in the degrees of your contours. I can see some in your contour curves, but your contour ellipses are mostly the same degree. Now, everything else in those exercises is spot on, but capturing that shift is important. I explain this further in these notes.

• You've got a great variety of textures and experimentation in your dissections, and that's great to see. One thing that I really, really want you to stay clear of is any sort of hatching lines or scribbling. Hatching is a filler texture that people use when they don't actually care what texture is present. It gives them a way to capture lighting/shading without having to observe their references closely. We are not doing any sort of shading here. You'll notice that my lessons don't touch upon it at all. This is because while most drawing courses will teach you all the arts of rendering things like a sphere, and about how light bounces around and such, I find that it's a distraction, and a crutch. If a drawing of theirs feels flat, they figure the solution is to shade more. The solidity of a form comes its construction - the decisions made when constructing its silhouette, defining the distinction between its faces and any contour lines they may add to it. If that is solid, any amount of shading will still look good (as long as it doesn't contradict what the construction declares). Anyway, since we're not doing shading, then hatching lines serve no purpose here. We either want to capture the texture of a surface, in which case we observe it carefully and draw marks that correspond to what we see, or we leave the surface blank.

• The other point is to avoid scribbling, randomness and chaos. Often we'll see a texture that seems to be erratic at first glance. But there is always some kind of structure, flow or rhythm to it that can be identifier through careful observation. Therefore relying on randomness and scribbling is never an appropriate solution. If you want to scribble, stop yourself, and look at your reference again.

• In addition to this, it's definitely worth mentioning that "beetle" is not a texture. A beetle's shell has a texture, but beetle itself is an object composed of lots of major forms and volumes. The texture is that which is wrapped around a larger form, and while it is itself composed of many little bumps and microforms that cast the shadows we perceive, those little features flow along the surface of a larger form.

• Worth mentioning, I think you did a great job with the armadillo texture. The sand was quite well done too, and the log was fairly successful. Some of the others were decent, but things like coke were too focused on shading, and the skin was drawn more from memory rather than attempting to capture specific features with each stroke. Also, your stone wall doesn't wrap around the organic form, so it ends up flattening out completely.

• Your form intersections are really good (though again, stop shading things. It's totally okay to fill one face of a box or cylinder with some tight, consistent hatching, but that's not for the purpose of shading - it's to serve as a visual cue, telling us which side of the form is facing towards us. In other situations, cast shadows are the only kinds of shadows we deal in, though usually as solid black shapes (like in the organic intersections) rather than soft-edged hatching.

• Your organic intersections were very well done. You've done a great job of capturing how those forms interact with one another, and how they have a tendency to sag on whatever is supporting their weight.

I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete, so feel free to move onto the next one. It does look like you may have been using a ballpoint pen for these (correct me if I'm wrong, it's sometimes hard to tell as some felt tip pens can simply be running low on ink). Lessons 3 onwards should be done with fineliners.

Uncomfortable in the post "250 Cylinder Challenge"

2018-05-26 18:02

You've done a lot of great work here. You've explored a good variety of cylinders, in many different positions and orientations, and you've stuck quite stringently to the minor axes. I have two suggestions as you continue to move forwards:

• You seem to be jumping between drawing your ellipses so they sit completely on your minor axis line, and being more centered towards the minor axis' endpoints. I strongly encourage you to do the former. When you allow the line to cut through the whole ellipse, it's easier to keep track of whether or not the ellipse is aligned correctly (and as a result, the cylinders you've drawn that do that tend to come out better).

• You don't seem to have tried constructing any cylinders from a box as a starting point as shown in the video. I highly recommend that you practice this and get used to it before hitting lesson 6. It's a ways away, but when you actually need to position cylinders in specific orientations relative to other objects, starting with a box becomes extremely useful - though it is a bit tricky at first and requires some practice.

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

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

2018-05-26 17:32

Your arrows are generally pretty good, in that they flow nicely through space. The one issue here that I do want to mention though is that the way they flow is limited largely to the two dimensions of the page, rather than all three. What this tells me is that you are still thinking as though you are drawing lines on a flat, 2D page. What you want to push yourself to think and believe is that the page is just a window to a larger, limitless three dimensional space where objects can also move through the depth of a scene. While drawing your arrows, try and think about one end being farther away from the viewer, and the other being much closer. As we know from perspective, this would mean that as you draw your arrow, you'd exaggerate the scale on either end, making the farther end smaller and the closer end larger.

Your organic forms with contour ellipses are generally pretty good, though the ellipses themselves tend to be a little stiff which results in them coming out somewhat unevenly. Remember to apply the ghosting method - which means taking the time to prepare and plan before each stroke, and then executing the mark with a confident, persistent pace. Do not hesitate, do not worry about making mistakes - once your pen touches the page, you're locked in, and need to follow through. If you mess up, that's fine, it's an accepted risk. I can also see a few places here and there where the alignment to your minor axis is off, though for the most part you're doing a pretty good job on that front.

I'm pleased to see that you applied the overshooting method to your contour curves. That said, your organic forms with contour curves are a bit weaker than the contour ellipses, for a couple of reasons. Firstly, unlike your ellipses, your curves here do not shift in their degree over the course of the form. In the contour ellipses, we can see them transitioning from being wider, to narrower, and so on, as the angle relative to the viewer shifts. With your contour curves, they stay the same, which suggests to the viewer that something is wrong. The other issue is that I believe you may be applying too much pressure to the pen as you draw your contour lines. What suggests this to me is the fact that there's very little nuance or tapering to the ends of those lines as your pen lifts off, which is a common thing both when a student presses too hard on their pen (which also plays the risk of damaging the tip), and when they fail to draw confidently enough.

Your dissections are a bit of a mixed bag, but that's not a bad thing. It means you're experimenting, trying to figure out what works best and what doesn't. I think your most successful set was the right side of this page (when it's rotated properly). So, the black mould and snake scales. You've shown here much more patience when observing your reference image, and a better awareness of how light plays across the surface. The most important thing with texture is to be aware of the fact that the lines we draw are really the shadows cast by the various small forms present on a surface. In that we don't capture an individual bump by enclosing it in a circle, but by focusing on the shadow it casts. You demonstrate a better sense of this in these texture, rather than the others.

Your second page is mostly a big mess though. I can see that your attempt at what looks like fur went pretty catastrophically. The reason for this is that you tried to rely on chaos, scribbling and randomness. This never works. In every single texture, there is some manner of rhythm and flow, even in hair and fur. You can think of it a lot like how the wind seems random and chaotic, but if you zoom way out and look at a map of weather patterns, you can see how they follow their own logical path. It's just a matter of pinning that path down, which can take a great deal of observation, practice and most importantly: patience.

Your form intersections, while certainly dense, suggest to me one thing: similarly to the arrows, you've drawn these more as though you were drawing lines on a flat page, than solid forms constructed in 3D space. You seem to have gone more for quantity over quality, and didn't take the time with each form to ensure that it felt solid before moving onto the next. You also ignored the instruction on avoiding stretched forms (like long cylinders) in favour of sticking to more equilateral forms. Lastly, you didn't make any attempts at the intersections themselves from what I can see, which while being a lesser focus of this exercise, is still something I want you to try.

The organic intersections are somewhat similar, in the whole quantity over quality deal, along with suffering from the issues I mentioned in regards to your organic forms with contour curves. You are however starting to show a grasp of how those forms wrap around and interact with each other, but there's still a great deal missing.

Try and think about how each form actually sits in all three dimensions of space. Think of the forms as though they're waterballoons that are being stacked on each other (and how gravity impacts them), and focus on convincing yourself that each one you draw is solid and three dimensional. Also, be careful with the little contour ellipses you draw at the poles - it's good that you're drawing them, but you're frequently getting their degrees wrong - for example, when the pole would be facing away from the viewer, it ought to be quite narrow, but you've drawn it as a near circle.

Here are some notes that should help in areas that you're struggling with:

• http://i.imgur.com/1rv8Qb4.jpg

• https://i.imgur.com/vjh13A3.png

I'd like you to do the following:

• One page of organic forms with contour curves

• One page of form intersections

• One page of organic intersections

With the last two there, I don't want you to go nearly as dense as you have here. Focus on making each form feel solid, and understanding the relationships between them. You should also rewatch the video for each exercise before starting on it.

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

2018-05-26 16:46

It's definitely good to hear that you are doing them. The reason I asked was because of how some of your lines have a tendency to come out a little stiff at times. Not all of them - you've got a lot, especially when you're doing construction, that come out smooth and confident. But when you go in to apply line weight to emphasize an existing mark, or where you need to fit an ellipse into a particular space, you draw noticeably slower. This isn't uncommon but it is something you need to push through, getting yourself to draw with a confident, ghosted stroke regardless of the situation. This is hardest when you're afraid that you're going to mess up a drawing, but that's a worthy sacrifice if it means getting yourself to draw every mark with a confident, persistent pace without hesitation. Mistakes happen - but if you shy away from them, they'll hinder your growth.

The thing with confidence is that it's 90% lies. It's hard to just "be" confident - but we can fake it. And when you fake it long enough, one day you'll find that it's gone from being a farce to being genuine.

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

2018-05-26 02:08

You were close in most of the drawings, but in some of them they weren't overlapping or interpenetrating enough. I'm not sure how big these drawings are, so another factor could just be that the legs may be getting cramped, due to not being given a whole lot of room for that kind of construction. You're not that far off, really. Just make sure they interpenetrate, and avoid putting contour curves along their lengths (keep them at the joints).

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

2018-05-26 01:59

I'm going to start by saying that I really, really like the very last drawing. The thing on the right side of this page. It actually shows an excellent use of concepts that you've either bungled a little, or misunderstood in previous drawings, and frankly, I think you really nailed it. Could it improve? Sure, the ellipses could be better. Ellipses are a bitch, especially when placing them in planes - but the important thing here is that you used them reasonably well and constructed forms that feel solid. You also applied line weight effectively, making things more cohesive, and pulling the construction out of all those subdivisions.

It's worth mentioning that I also really liked the drawing on the right side of this page.

Your other drawings are a mixed bag, but they're all hovering around "not bad". Nothing's remotely horrific, and the only reason that they're generally hovering around that place is because of your starting points - that is, the boxes you start with. But for everything after that, you're mostly on point. Your minor axis stuff is lacking early on, but after having that explained post-hairdryer-earphone-debacle, you got that down pretty well.

So, how do you improve? You may hit me for saying this, but it's the truth - the biggest impact is going to come from the simple things. Mostly practicing drawing freely rotated boxes, specifically ones that have fairly shallow foreshortening - that is, the hard ones where the vanishing points are very far away, convergence is gradual, and you constantly risk accidentally making your lines diverge instead (resulting in far planes that are larger than your near planes).

Working on ellipses is also something you're going to have to focus on - specifically getting ellipses to fit smoothly in planes. As you get into lesson 7, there's a couple of videos that touch on the topic of circles in planes, so be sure to watch them. Then try and carry those principles into the ellipses-in-planes exercises from lesson 1, which originally were not meant to factor in perspective or anything like that. It's a very versatile exercise though, and with a few additional rules, it can be quite helpful in this case.

This does lead to an important question though - have you been doing the exercises from lessons 1 and 2 as a regular warmup routine, picking two or three of them to do for 10-15 minutes at the beginning of each sitting? Haaaave youuuuu?

If you haven't, you'd better damn well start.

Anyway, I'm going to go ahead and mark this lesson as complete. The next lesson has a little more leeway - you're allowed to use a ballpoint pen, ruler, and even an ellipse guide if you have one (though most people don't). I HIGHLY recommend that you use a ruler and a ballpoint pen - it'll take a lot of the stress off, which is good because vehicles can tend to be pretty overwhelming at times.