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

2018-05-26 00:32

In a lot of these drawings, you're demonstrating a good sense of 3D space, and the relationships between objects and forms. You've got a number of strong and interesting constructions, my favourites being the wasp, these black widows, and the ground beetle on the lower right.

That said, I definitely agree with the assessment you had on that first image, about your boxier methods making things come out rather stiff. The grasshoppers are a good example of that. One thing to keep in mind is that when we draw these objects, we're not just drawing what is present - we're drawing how those objects seem to us.

That is to say, you might look at the abdomen of a dragonfly and think that well, it's straight - so I'm going to draw it straight. And as a result it ends up feeling quite stiff. But those fuckers aren't stiff - they're quite flexible, and can have a lot of grace to them. And even when looking at a photo, we can still tell that they don't seem stiff and rigid, despite the fact that they still look straight to us.

That's some of the interpretation we need to factor into our drawings - and we usually do so in exaggerating the imperceptible. Pushing what we know is there, even if we can't see it explicitly. Usually it has to do with taking something that feels straight and geometric, and forcing the fact that it's organic, by exaggerating its curves and flow.

This is where a boxier approach tends to get in the way. Boxes are great for getting your head around the 3D nature of things, but they can be limiting when what you're drawing isn't perfectly geometric. So rather than constructing animals and creatures with explicit boxes, I try and think about what a box is, and apply that. Boxes are planar - they have distinct edges that separate their faces. If you apply this to an organic sausage, you can start distinguishing its sides, and find where the edges come out. This can give your drawings a strong sense of being three dimensional, but since you start out organic, with sausage forms and balls, you maintain the fluidity and flow.

On that topic, the one other thing I want to talk to you about is legs. You're attacking them in a number of ways, from drawing to drawing. My preference goes to how you drew them here, where you drew them with flowing sausage forms linked together - except for one thing. They're not overlapping and intersecting enough.

Instead, try and construct legs like this: https://i.imgur.com/pPyrBgB.png

A sausage form for each segment, intersecting fully and then reinforced with a contour curve at that intersection. Focus on exaggerating how the sausages flow, and try to keep them from being too stiff. Contour curves through the length can definitely add to a sense of stiffness, while keeping them at the joints generally reinforces them enough to hold the illusion of form without becoming too rigid.

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

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

2018-05-25 23:53

You demonstrate some good qualities in this set, but there are a number of things I want to draw your attention to. Rather than trying to type out explanations for each one, I'm going to draw out some demonstrations that should help express them clearly. For the most part, they're a matter of approach, so implementing these changes should help a great deal.

I've summed up my whole critique in these images. Give them a read, then I want you to try another four pages of insect drawings.

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

2018-05-25 00:08

Your work is really well done, though at a first glance it doesn't seem that way - due to the awful scan job. It's not an uncommon issue, and easily fixed. Just make sure that when you scan your work, you don't use the "drawing" presets that most scanners offer. Use photograph presets instead. The drawing ones will ramp up the contrast to the point that the result looks extremely harsh and your linework loses all of its nuance. I honestly have no idea why those presets even exist...

Anyway - your linework is really solid. Your execution shows a good deal of confidence, which helps keep your marks smooth and eliminates any wobbling. This carries through to your ellipses too, which maintain an even shape.

I did notice though in the funnels exercise that the alignment of many of your ellipses was off. Remember that this exercise is all about keeping your ellipses aligned to that central minor axis line, so the minor axis cuts each ellipse into two equal, symmetrical halves down their narrower dimension. Many of yours tend to slant a little.

In your boxes section, there is one thing I noticed. If you compare the quality of your lines to those in the first section, they seem to take a bit of a hit. This is actually a common thing - I see students start to think about the amount of time each exercise should take, and they split them into what we can consider "units of effort". In the lines exercise, each line will take one unit of effort. In the ellipses, each ellipse is one unit. And in the boxes section, each boxes takes one unit-

except that doesn't make sense. Because the boxes consist of multiple lines, so each line is now given a fraction of a unit - which means you're not giving them as much time as you could, and they come out a little sloppier. Keep that in mind as you move onwards, it's very easy to get caught in the trap of rushing because you feel you ought to be doing things more quickly.

Aside from that, your work here is solid as well. You did struggle with your rotated boxes exercise, but still exceeded my expectations with it. Students always have a tough time with that one, and the purpose is more to get them to think differently about rotating forms in 3D space, and breaking them away from thinking about entire scenes in terms of 1/2/3 point perspective, than actually expecting them to do anything close to perfect work.

Same goes for the organic perspective boxes. I'm very pleased to see that you drew through all of those boxes despite not being instructed to. This definitely helped you to get a better grasp of how each form sits in 3D space. That said, there are still inconsistencies in how your lines converge towards their far-off vanishing points.

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 the notes and watch the video linked on that page before starting the work.

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

2018-05-24 23:58

You've got a mix of work here, with some exercises being done quite well, and others being a little more sloppy.

To start with, your arrows came out quite well. Aside from the awkward shapes of the heads (where they're not really triangular as arrows generally are), you've achieved a good sense that each ribbon form is flowing smoothly through 3D space.

Your organic forms with contour ellipses are a mixed bag, but I think you make it clear that you're entirely capable of drawing contour ellipses properly, and you've got plenty of examples to that effect. That said, you also have a number of ellipses that were drawn somewhat sloppily - where they're floating arbitrarily inside of the forms. Consider what a contour line actually is - it's a line that runs along the surface of a 3D form. When your ellipses end up floating inside of the form (rather than fitting snugly against the edges), this illusion breaks completely.

With this exercise, it's best to focus on simple sausage forms, as shown in the lesson. Avoid any extravagant branching, or any swelling or pinching. Just stick to a simple sausage that is fairly consistent in width through its length. Going any more complex than that is really just going to distract you from the main focus of the exercise, and you won't get as much out of it.

This applies to your organic forms with contour curves as well. These were a little less solid than your contour ellipses, and I think one of the issues is that you didn't treat that central line that flows through the length of your forms correctly. From your drawings, it appears that you were trying to have the line flow over the surface of the forms (as though it was a contour line as well). That is not its purpose. Instead, we want it to pierce through the center of your sausage form. This allows us to use it to help align our contour ellipses and curves (remember that when we draw contour curves, it's basically the same as contour ellipses, except we don't draw the portion that runs along the opposite side of the form - so when we align our curves to that central minor axis line, we treat it as though it's a full ellipse).

The dissections exercise brings to light a few important points - which is exactly what it's designed to do. I haven't really taught you much at all about texture, my expectation with this exercise is to see how students handle the subject, and what they need to focus on. Here's what I noticed:

• You rely very heavily on your memory. That is to say, you'll look a little at a reference image, then spend most of your time drawing without looking back. Because of this, your textures tend to come out very simplified, and built up from symbols rather than actually reflecting what you saw. The reason for this is that our brains are not well built for remembering all the complex visual information we see with every glance. Instead, the second we look away, our brains go to work throwing the vast majority of that information away, clinging only to the very core of it. I explain this in greater detail in the texture challenge page's notes, so I highly recommend that you read it. But the short of it is that you need to spend much, much more time looking at your reference. Draw less, observe more, and don't make more than a couple marks before looking back at your reference. Try and make every mark you put down represent something specific you see in your reference image.

• When you tackle things like fur - which has a lot going on - you fall back to relying on chaotic scribbling. This is never the solution. Everything you draw should be the result of forethought and consideration, relying on chaos is only going to make your drawing look messy. Instead, when you look at a reference image, try and ask yourself how things are arranged and grouped. There's always some sort of structure or rhythm, regardless how crazy something may look. It just takes a lot of patience to identify it.

• We're drawing things with line - so it's normal that you think of the marks you're putting down in those simple terms. Instead of thinking of them as being lines that mark the edges of things, try and think as though what you're drawing as shadows. That's ultimately what texture is - it's the little shadows cast by the tiny forms that make a surface feel rough, or bumpy, or whatever else. How those shadows are arranged is what gives it that sort of impression. The thing about shadows is that they're not all simple lines - they can get fatter and thicker, and they can vary. They can even come together to fuse into larger shadow shapes. And depending on how light hits a surface, shadows can be completely blasted away, to the point that a scaly surface under harsh light may result in some scales casting no shadow at all.

• Always remember that texture wraps around a form - kind of like applying wrapping paper to an awkwardly shaped gift, it conforms to the object to which it is applied. Take a look at your brick texture - see how it feels very flat? This is because you drew the bricks as though they were applied to a flat wall. Instead, the lines you've drawn should curve along the surface of the rounded form. Similarly, your fish scales should compress as they reach the edges of the form, where that surface turns away from the viewer.

Moving onto your form intersections, while these are somewhat sloppy at times, you are demonstrating the core of what I'm looking for. That said, there are two things you totally missed from the instructions:

• You were instructed not to use forms that are stretched (like long cylinders), and stick to those that are more equilateral. You instead used a lot of stretched forms, which brought a lot of foreshortening into the mix and made things considerably more challenging than they should have been, and distracted you from the core of what you should have been focusing on.

• You didn't actually try any of the intersections at all. Now, this wasn't the core of what I was interested in with this exercise, but I expect students to still try them.

Your organic intersections are really sloppy. While you do demonstrate a grasp of how the forms wrap around each other and interact with one another, your lines are basically falling apart. This completely eradicates the illusion of solidity and form. This makes it very difficult to critique, as there is definitely issues with the alignment of your contour curves throughout, but the specifics of those problems are obscured by the fact that they tend to fall out of the forms altogether. Your cast shadows are also really messy, and I honestly don't know why. It's not a question of the shadows being wrong, it's just that when you fill them in, you end up spilling your strokes all over the place.

There are a lot of signs that you understood the concepts in most of these exercises, but that you didn't give the exercises the time they required. So, there's going to be a great deal to repeat, as I want you to show me that you can capture the illusion of cohesion and solidity that comes from a far better control over your linework. I want you to do the following:

• 2 pages of organic forms with contour curves. Rewatch the video and reread the notes for this exercise before starting the work.

• 1 page of dissections, after you've had the chance to read through the texture challenge notes. Remember, you need to spend most of your time observing your reference, and draw marks that correspond to specific things that you observe. Do not rely on memory.

• 1 page of form intersections. Stick to equilateral forms that are not stretched in any one dimension, try and control your linework better (avoid gaps where lines should be connecting, as these drastically weaken the illusion of solidity). Lastly, actually try drawing the intersections between your forms.

• 1 page of organic intersections. Again, take your time, focus on making every form feel solid.

Uncomfortable in the post "250 Box Challenge"

2018-05-23 23:29

I think you're going to benefit a lot once you hit lesson 3 and start learning about the constructional approach. The main focus there is taking a complex problem and breaking it down into bite-sized pieces. Right now you're definitely trying to tackle a lot of things at once - texture, light, form, flow, etc. And you are having some success, but it's also a bit overwhelming.

One thing I did want to mention on the topic of light and shadow is that shading isn't actually something I talk about at all in my lessons. And there's a reason for this - a lot of beginners and basic drawing courses will teach students about how to shade a sphere, or something like that. They'll talk about the core shadow, bounce light, diffuse light, etc. - I don't mention any of it.

Beginners have a tendency to try and use shading as a way to capture and sell the illusion of form. If something feels flat, they'll think it's their shading that's off and continue to push that. Instead, I focus on teaching how to convey the solidity of form without shading. We use constructional approaches, drawing through forms and contour lines to sell the illusion and convince ourselves of that lie we're trying to sell to our viewers.

That's really our goal - to convince ourselves that what we're drawing is 3D, because once we believe it to be so, how we draw, how our marks move through 3D space changes. It's these little shifts that allow us to carve objects with silhouettes that feel 3D without having to worry about lighting. From there, any shading we add largely becomes decoration.

Now, when we talk about texture, we focus more on cast shadows - that is, the shadows that are cast by an object occluding the light, onto another surface. This is basically what the marks that make up detail and texture are - we don't draw a line enclosing every little bump on a surface, we draw the shadows those bumps cast when they obstruct the light.

Anyway, going back on track - you're definitely confident with your marks, but in regards to the techniques you've been learning thus far, many of these drawings are still very sketchy, sometimes a little chicken scratchy. You'll definitely want to keep working on making the ghosting method something of a habit, always thinking and planning before every mark you execute.

Uncomfortable in the post "250 Box Challenge"

2018-05-23 19:50

Overall you're doing a pretty good job. If you compare where you started with this challenge to the end, you've improved a fair bit in your understanding of how those lines need to be converging with those they're parallel to, towards a vanishing point (be it closeby or far off). There is definitely room for improvement on this front, getting them to converge more closely towards the same point, but that will come with practice.

It's definitely important though that you've shaken off, for the most part, issues with lines diverging as they move farther away.

I'm also pleased with the confidence of your lines. You're maintaining straight, smooth strokes throughout. The next step would be to spend some time thinking about how using line weight to help accentuate the solidity of your forms - there's notes on that topic on the challenge page, so be sure to check them out.

I'll go ahead and mark this challenge as complete. As for your other request, go ahead and include the link. I don't generally offer general critique on non-drawabox work, so I won't promise anything in-depth, but I'll take quick look all the same.

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

2018-05-22 21:07

You've done some phenomenal work here. Your lines are smooth and confident, and you're demonstrating some exceptional precision without sacrificing the smoothness and flow of your lines when using the ghosting method.

Your ellipses are also coming out evenly shaped, and you're quite mindful of keeping them constrained within their intended spaces. And honestly, your boxes are more of the same - you've clearly demonstrated a great deal of patience and care in following the instructions to the letter, and your work is completely in line with my expectations.

You even did a remarkably solid job with the rotated boxes exercise, which along with the organic perspective boxes was intended to be a little too challenging for students at this point. Your organic perspective boxes do need work, but you're right on track. The real point here with these two exercises was to get students to think differently about 3D space, and to disengage them from thinking about entire scenes in terms of 1, 2 and 3 point perspective.

One thing I do want to point out though is that in your organic perspective exercises, you had a tendency to draw lines, and then abandon them, drawing another correction instead. In general, this isn't a great habit to develop. What you're doing here for the most part isn't as bad as rampantly trying to draw corrections directly on top of existing lines, but it's still the same sort of thing. When we get in the habit of correcting ourselves reflexively, we end up making our problematic areas much darker and more obvious to the viewer. It's generally best to do what you can to plan ahead of time (committing only to individual points first, which have a smaller footprint, until you have a better sense of what you're after), then if you make a mistake, just leave it be and keep going.

Anyway, you're doing really well, so I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete. I'd like you to move onto the 250 box challenge next to get some more work in on developing your grasp of 3D space and handling those freely rotated forms. Be sure to read through the notes on the page and watch the video linked there - the techniques mentioned of drawing through forms and extending lines to check for mistakes should help you solidify your grasp of the material quite a bit.

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

2018-05-22 00:32

You've done a pretty good job over all. You did show some uncertainty at the beginning, but quickly got used to the general process of building up from simple to complex, and using clear, intentional marks rather than rough, sketchier explorations.

By the end you also showed some interesting texture explorations, which shows a fair bit of improvement over pages like this where you still relied quite heavily on hatching in places, and didn't seem to be entirely clear on which kinds of features each mark was meant to represent. By the time you hit the spider on the right side of this page you showed a much clearer grasp of the purpose of each line you put down, and focused more on communicating the idea of certain textures and surface qualities, over just getting some interesting nonsense down on the page.

I do however want to discourage you from playing with shading for shading's sake for now however. You'll notice that none of the drawabox lessons actually talk about how to deal with light and shadow outside of texture. This is because I see a lot of art students learn about shading too early, and rely on it as a means to convey form (instead of using the techniques we apply - construction and contour lines). This often results in those drawings falling a little flat, or generally being less solid than those my students produce.

The only shadows we really deal with are those that are cast from one object occluding a light source, most commonly in textures (with every mark of a texture really being a shadow cast by little bump or irregularity on the surface). If you ever catch yourself just adding shading for its own sake in my lessons, stop yourself. You'll have plenty of opportunities to do that outside of drawabox, but in this case it'll only serve as a distraction.

The other thing I wanted to mention was in regards to how you draw the legs of your insects. I see a lot of cases where you draw a segment of a leg, and then have its lines stop before completing the form/shape. This is usually because the form you're drawing is overlapped by some other form, so you avoid drawing over it. Give these notes I've written a read. You'll see that I'd like you to draw every form as a complete, enclosed shape on the page, drawing through forms wherever necessary. This helps you to maintain the simplicity and the solidity of each form as an individual, before considering how it interacts with the rest of the construction.

Anyway, aside from that, you've done very well. Keep up the good work and feel free to move onto the next lesson.

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

2018-05-22 00:08

You've done some really, really fantastic work here. You've gone to such lengths to push the constructional element, subdividing your enclosing boxes, building things up from simple to complex, and even ensuring that each of your curves are well defined and made to follow a specific scaffolding. Every one of your constructions feel solid and believable. And furthermore, while it's very true that ellipse-based constructions are incredibly difficult, you tried your hand at several here and frankly you nailed each one.

The only piece of advice I have to offer, and it's not really a hard-fast rule that I'm presenting you with, but rather something to think about - is in regards to the kind of foreshortening you're using when you construct your initial enclosing boxes. I've noticed that many of these are constructed inside of boxes with fairly dramatic foreshortening, and vanishing points that are quite close.

Now, the kind of foreshortening you choose to use is entirely up to you, based on how you're deciding to depict an object, but keep in mind that the foreshortening does tell the viewer something about the object.

An object with extremely dramatic foreshortening is one of two things:

• Very large - like looking at the top of a tall building from the ground floor

• Very, very close to the viewer

The vast majority of objects that you've drawn here would find a shallower foreshortening, where the rate of convergence is much more gradual, to be a better fit - but there's certainly the argument to be made that you just wanted them to be seen as though they were being held up quite close.

What's important is that you understand the result of that effect, so you have a greater control over what you're trying to achieve.

Aside from that, you've done a fantastic job here and should be very proud of yourself. I'm going to go ahead and mark this lesson as complete. Feel free to move onto the next one - it'll be tough, but you're absolutely up to the task.

Uncomfortable in the post "250 Box Challenge"

2018-05-21 02:10

Looks like you're paying attention to the right areas. Keep up the good work, and feel free to move onto lesson 2 (though I'm sure you'll want to keep working on boxes as part of a warmup routine).

Uncomfortable in the post "250 Box Challenge"

2018-05-20 22:43

Looking good. Do you recognize the kinds of mistakes that the line extensions make more obvious?

Uncomfortable in the post "250 Box Challenge"

2018-05-20 19:57

Pretty nice work! Your lines are confident, and you're demonstrating a strong awareness of where your vanishing points lie, and how the various sets of parallel lines converge together. I'm also pleased to see that you've been applying the line extension method fairly consistently throughout.

The only piece of advice I have to offer is that you should try to aim for a little more variation in regards to how close your vanishing points sit to the boxes. For the most part here, your boxes demonstrate a fairly dramatic foreshortening, with rapid convergence. Sometimes the vanishing points are a little further away, and that convergence is reduced a little, but it is still quite obvious in all cases.

The reason I want you to consider boxes with shallower foreshortening is because that ends up coming into play a fair bit. Where dramatic foreshortening suggests boxes with a very large scale (like looking at the top of a tall building from the ground), a box with shallower foreshortening and more gradual convergence of its parallel lines suggests a box that is at a more relatable, human scale. Since most of the objects we'll be drawing are of hits nature, it's important that you get a fair bit of practice in on that front as well.

So, I strongly recommend that you work some boxes of this sort into your warmups, applying the same techniques of drawing through your forms and extending your lines to check for mistakes. That I leave up to you - I'll go ahead and mark this challenge as complete, so feel free to move onto lesson 2.

Uncomfortable in the post "250 Box Challenge"

2018-05-20 19:53

Congratulations on completing the 250 box challenge. You definitely pushed through and drew a great many, and I'm glad t osee that you drew through all of your forms. You're definitely demonstrating some confident, smooth linework, which is great to see.

I honestly would have rather you'd applied the line extension method to all of your boxes however, rather than those at the beginning and a handful of those thereafter. It's an important technique that allows you to identify mistakes you may not have otherwise noticed (after all, as you get better, fewer and fewer of your mistakes will be obvious to the naked eye), and it forces you to think more about the relationship of each line with those it's meant to be parallel to.

You do improve over all, but I can still see many boxes even further on in the set that have lines that do not converge consistently towards the same vanishing point when they should. I also see boxes where you've extended some lines, but not others, sometimes only extending two or three lines out of a given set - even though there's four to each set. What you're trying to see is the relationship between all the lines of a given set, and while the three you extend may look fine, it may be the fourth you neglected that is off.

When you're drawing the lines of a box, always think about the lines with which it must be parallel. Don't worry about how the line relates to any of the others - just those in its set, the ones that ought to go off towards the same vanishing point.

Take a look at this. I've outlined one of the sets of lines from box 245. Obviously there's a serious problem in the relationship between lines B and C. Because they're in such close proximity to each other, they should actually be running basically parallel to each other. We can determine this just by looking at how they're arranged, and considering the fact that they all need to converge towards some far off point. It's not as easy when the lines aren't drawn yet of course, but that's one of the things we're training you to do. To understand the nature of these lines and the relationships they have before you've actually drawn them.

Anyway, keep those points in mind. I'll go ahead and mark this challenge as complete. I do believe that you'll benefit from going back over them and extending all of the lines of your last few pages to better learn the kinds of mistakes you tend to make, but I'll leave that decision up to you. Feel free to move onto lesson 2 when you're ready.

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

2018-05-20 16:19

It doesn't look like I have you down as being eligible for private homework critiques. If you are a patreon supporter, then check your inbox as I'll have sent a message asking for your reddit username. Otherwise you're welcome to submit your homework to the main subreddit for a free critique from the community. Actually, I see that you've already done this.

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

2018-05-20 01:47

Usually I'd wait for you to respond to the message I just sent out through Patreon, but I'll jump on it right now anyway because this is a pretty short critique.

Your linework is looking solid - you're drawing with a confident, persistent pace that helps keep your lines smooth and consistent, eliminating any potential wobbling or stiffness that tends to come from focusing too much on accuracy. You're absolutely on the right track there.

Finding the middle in the ghosting planes exercise is pretty normal - it's actually not really a focus in the context of this exercise (at least now - you'll find that as you progress, you can utilize this exercise to focus on different things, especially as you delve into perspective). For now you only need to look at the planes as being an excuse to apply the ghosting method. Later on, you may want to envision that these planes exist in 3D space, in which case estimating the middle will be a skill you'll want to focus on developing.

Anyway, you're doing very well and are headed firmly in the right direction. The reason this is a short critique is because homework should be submitted when the whole lesson is complete - in this case, all three sections (lines, ellipses, boxes). I look forward to you submitting the rest of your work, and when you do be sure to include these pages as well.

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

2018-05-20 01:43

I think doing at last part of the box challenge would be a good idea. A few pages, so you can get used to using that line extension method and identify some of the mistakes you tend to make.

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

2018-05-19 21:06

Really, really phenomenal work. You've clearly paid a great deal of attention to the instructions and have approached each exercise with patience and care. Your arrows flow smoothly through all three dimensions of space, your organic forms with contour ellipses and curves capture a strong sense of volume and accentuate the curvature of the forms' surfaces, and your dissections show great variety in approach and careful observation.

I'm really pleased to see that you decided to tackle your form intersections first with boxes alone to get a sense of how things sit in 3D space. As you progressed onto different forms, you carried over the same grasp of space, and showed that you were able to place these different forms, all rotated in an arbitrary fashion, within the same space with a great degree of cohesion and success. Lastly, your organic intersections show a clear grasp of how these sausage forms sag and slump against one another, with an understanding of where their weight would be supported and where it would not. Your first attempt was decent, but your second was far better.

I have just a couple things to mention, though it occurs to me that the first is already a moot point. I was going to talk about how useful it can be to draw a contour ellipse as the "pole" at the end of an organic form, but you seem to have understood that yourself and applied it to your organic intersections.

The other point was that in your organic intersections, it's important to keep in mind that the shadows cast by each form are cast upon the form underneath it. Therefore that shadow should be warping to the surface it is cast upon. Right now your cast shadows don't seem to take much of the curvature of those underlying surfaces into consideration, so in that regard they don't read as strongly as they could have.

Aside from that, you're doing a great job. I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete, so feel free to move onto the next one.

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

2018-05-19 21:01

Rather than your memory getting better at tracking that, it's more about your muscle memory improving. You'll understand that you'll need a certain kind of ellipse in a certain area, and that is effectively all you'll require. The internal mechanics of the being aware of your minor axis and such will be handled by your muscle memory (like how you handle the complex mechanics of walking when you want to move across the room).

Of course, it takes a great deal of practice to take something and relegate it to your muscle memory. We work towards that by repeating it over and over, continually grinding the concepts of our minor axis and that alignment until it starts to become second nature.

Overall you've done a great job with the first two sections of your latest push through lesson 1. Your lines are confident and well executed, and your ellipses are smooth and evenly shaped.

When we get into the boxes section, specifically the rough perspective boxes, I do see that you're perhaps not as conscious of the nature of your horizontal and vertical lines, since you're so heavily focused on the lines that go further off into the depth of the scene. Remember that your horizontals must run parallel to the horizon, and the verticals must run perpendicular to it. It's easy to end up having them slant (as if there's some other vanishing point to the far side) when we stop thinking about them.

In addition to this, your line quality drops just a little bit here. Something I see from students is that they'll divide things up into units of work or effort. In the first section, each line will require one unit of effort. On the second section, each ellipse will require one unit of effort. Once you reach the boxes, you fall into the same pattern - each box receiving one unit of effort.

This of course doesn't make sense, because each box consists of numerous lines, meaning each line receives a fraction of the attention it would have received in the first section. So, it's important to always be mindful of each mark you're putting down, and give it the attention it needs in order to properly apply the ghosting method and ensure that your marks are confident and smooth, alongside being accurate.

In your rotated boxes, you certainly made a solid attempt. One important bit from the instructions that you missed however was the importance of keeping the gaps between your boxes very narrow and consistent. Keeping your boxes close together means that neighbouring edges can help you determine how a given line should be drawn, as demonstrated here. When you leave a significant gap, you lose out on this important tool for this exercise. You also end up losing the continuity of scale.

That said, the rotations themselves are coming along fairly well. I do believe that you have not quite managed to cover the full 180 degree rotation on either axis, with your outermost boxes not quite being rotated far enough. That is definitely something you'll want to work on, keeping in mind just how dramatically those vanishing points slide along the horizon as a box is rotated.

For your organic perspective boxes, I'm very pleased to see that you applied the principles of drawing through your boxes from the 250 box challenge to your boxes here. This has definitely helped you to keep a better sense of how each form sits in 3D space. I do believe that the convergences of your lines towards the same vanishing point are somewhat inconsistent at times, so that will be something you'll want to continue working on.

It's been quite a while since you last completed the 250 box challenge, and the notes/content for that challenge has improved since then. There's now a more concrete method to identify mistakes like those that you've encountered here that involves extending your lines further towards their implied vanishing point, to see where the inconsistencies lie. I definitely recommend looking over the video I posted on the challenge page (How to Draw a Box 2) so you're caught up on those techniques.

Anyway, keep up the great work. I think you've clearly done a much better job now than your first attempt. It's like two completely different people.

Uncomfortable in the post "Lesson 3: Drawing Plants"

2018-05-19 20:45

Woops. I sometimes forget to update the text portion of the flair. I've fixed that now.

Uncomfortable in the post "Lesson 3: Drawing Plants"

2018-05-19 18:46

So there's a mix of good and bad here, and a few areas where we can definitely see improvement. To start with, lets look at your leaves.

You've got several pages of these, and there definitely is improvement in how organically they flow over the set. What I am noticing however is that you tend to draw the leaves as they flow across the two dimensions of space defined by the page. As you draw your leaves, try and think about one end of the leaf being farther away from the viewer in space, and the other end being closer. Taking this into consideration, try and exaggerate your scale and push the idea that the leaf is flowing through all three dimensions. This isn't easy, especially since leaves pinch to a point on either end, so where exaggerating the ends of a simple arrow is fairly easy, it's not quite the same here. Still, carrying forward the intent is usually enough to achieve the effect.

Your branches, for obvious reasons, need a fair bit of work, specifically in getting the segments to flow together smoothly. Make sure you're applying the ghosting method and building up the appropriate muscle memory before each execution. At the moment, when you overshoot an ellipse, you struggle to properly aim that line towards the next ellipse as you left your pen off the page. They tend to hook away, causing a visible break where you draw the next mark. The main focus here is to ensure that the second segment flows directly on top of the end of the first.

The issues with your branches definitely carry over into many of your plant drawings, so that's something you're going to want to get a lot more practice in with. Your leaves however do show some improvement on the whole thinking about 3D space front, and they flow more naturally.

When it comes to more solid forms however, and their contour lines, I get a strong impression that you're not taking as much care as you ought to when it comes to the execution of your marks. Rather than thinking through the problems and planning as needed, it looks more to me like you're rushing ahead in the interest of putting marks down more quickly.

More than anything, you need to take the time to buy into the lie that what you're drawing is three dimensional - rather than just a series of loose marks on the page. Do not forget the importance of the ghosting method - it's more than a technique, it's a manner of thinking and approach to drawing that I want you to apply across the board. Every mark needs to be the result of forethought and planning. Even this page, which I felt was fairly successful, was treated more like a rough sketch rather than a planned construction.

Take a look at these notes. I put them together a while ago for students, to cover issues I saw frequently. I think they should help you with certain areas where you are struggling.

I'd like you to rewatch the branches exercise video, then do three pages of the exercise. Following that, rewatch the intro video and the demo videos for this lesson, then do four more pages of plant constructions, taking the time to think through each and every mark you put down, and relating them to the individual forms you're trying to construct. You need to work on believing in the illusion you're trying to sell to your viewers. The first step to being able to convince others that what you're drawing is three dimensional and solid, is to convince yourself of it. This in turn influences how you make your marks. If you believe you're just drawing marks on a flat page, then your drawing will reflect that.

Oh also - it looks like you've turned off the "show my flair in this subreddit" box on the sidebar. I use the flairs to track which lessons they've completed and whether or not they're eligible for critiques, so it'd be helpful if you turned that back on.

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."

2018-05-19 17:59

I strongly agree that limitations are extremely valuable in providing a more directed means to explore a topic. I did want to mention though that it's not that I believe kids can't access the second point (making art to become a better artist). Rather, I know the grindy way these lessons approach the development of skills to be quite frustrating to a great many adults, who only manage to hang on due to solid, long-term goals.

One of the biggest factors on whether or not a student is able to push through and grow that I've seen is whether or not they have already come to love the process of creating, rather than loving (or hating) the result. A lot of people struggle with the separation, and come to base their own value on their results.

What worries me is the possibility that if younger children are exposed to this rigid progression, they'll be more likely to focus on the results of their drawings, rather than the enjoyment they received from producing them. Focusing so much on correct/incorrect results can be massively discouraging. It also has the quality of being a lot easier to sit down and do, so a lot of my students (despite my protest) end up spending all of their drawing time on exercises, without drawing for the fun of it (thus perpetuating that cycle of focusing too much on their results over the process).

Anyway, I definitely don't think that I'm equipped to tailor drawabox to a younger audience. My own uncertainty in regards to how children think aside, when it comes to my manner of writing, this overly complicated waterfall of information is about as simple and succinct as I can manage :P

I'll certainly keep it in mind for the future, but I do think it's important that I try and deliver in the areas where I am confident in my ability to do so, rather than forging into territory where others may be better suited to the task.

Uncomfortable in the post "Lesson 3: Drawing Plants"

2018-05-19 05:13

I'll be getting to this critique tomorrow, but could you upload it to something like imgur instead? imgbox makes it considerably more difficult to look through all of the images and navigate them quickly, and sometimes images fail to load.

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

2018-05-18 22:43

By and large I'm in agreement with you. Overall you've done a pretty solid job and have shown a lot of care in your construction - subdividing as necessary, building things out to be relatively boxy first before implementing curving surfaces and keeping an eye on your proportions.

I think your biggest area of difficulty is with ellipses. Often times when you try to construct them relative to a plane in space, their alignment is off. In the cylinder challenge page, you're introduced to this video about the criteria an ellipse must fit relative to the plane that encloses it in order to represent a valid circle in 3D space.

One that definitely caught my eye as being off was on your electronic pipet filler. The end of the cylinder coming down from its front is definitely off. The minor axis seems about right (it penetrates straight down the center of the cylinder), but the degree of the ellipse has it feeling slanted.

In your coffee maker however, you definitely had better results - although the execution of the ellipses was a little jittery, it's kind of understandable given that they're incredibly difficult to draw in such specific places. Definitely work on the confidence of your linework, but as far as I'm concerned, that's a pretty solid drawing.

Jumping ahead to your barbacue, I do think that adding the little wheels underneath your enclosing box rather than inside of it was probably not the best call. That said, you may have forgotten to factor those in initially, and then tacked them on as an afterthought, in which case it's at least understandable.

For the most part, I'm just nitpicking. Your constructions are quite nice, as is the care with which you study your proportions and break everything down. There is room to improve (some of the enclosing boxes start off with a few little issues which trickle down into the rest of the drawing, for example) but you handle them well by pushing on through. You'll continue to improve with practice, but as it stands you're doing a great job.

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

Uncomfortable in the post "250 Box Challenge"

2018-05-18 20:20

You show considerable improvement in a lot of areas here. The obvious one is the solidity and consistency of your box constructions, but along with that, the confidence of your lines and your use of line weight comes along really well. You're also showing an immense degree of patience and care, and don't really show any areas where you get sloppy (it's not uncommon to see people start to slip up and rush through the last 50 or so as they see the finish line approaching).

One area where you do need work however is more in regards to the variety of your boxes. After the first couple of pages, you started to fairly consistently draw boxes with very dramatic foreshortening, where your lines would converge very rapidly towards their vanishing point (due to the VPs being very close to the boxes). This sort of dramatic foreshortening is definitely good to practice, but you must keep in mind that it specifically implies a very large scale (like looking at the top of a building from the ground floor), or that the object is extremely close to the viewer's eye.

The vast majority of the objects we draw are at a much more relatable, human scale, so getting used to drawing boxes that have a shallower foreshortening and convergence is an extremely valuable skill. You're definitely on the right path, you just need to widen the range of the kinds of boxes you're practicing with. You did mostly focus on this sort of box in your first two pages, but obviously being at the beginning of the set, we aren't able to see the same ramping up of your skills in that area.

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 4: Drawing Insects and Arachnids"

2018-05-17 22:55

Thaat's.... a little overwhelming. You've done some pretty remarkable work here and show a strong grasp of construction and the other various principles covered in this lesson.

One thing I especially like, which I find myself having to do demos for, is how you approached drawing legs (like for this spider. You've done a really good job of capturing how those sections flow, and by using these sausage forms, you've maintained their solidity without making them feel stiff.

Now, on that same note however, take a look at the abdomen of your dragonfly. Notice how it feels somewhat rigid and stiff? Well, you could certainly say, "well it's totally straight in my reference" and you probably wouldn't be wrong. But the question is, does it feel stiff? It doesn't, because those various segments can articulate, allowing the whole thing to bend a fair bit.

So, when we're communicating the idea of this critter, we need to think about the impression it gives off. Often times when we look at something that's straight, there will be minute details that we won't necessarily perceive easily that make the difference between being corpse-stiff and a flexible thing that happens to be straight at that moment in time. But when we draw it, if we think of it only as being straight as we've observed, stiffness is what will be communicated.

So, it often becomes necessary to give a little extra bend to something where it doesn't exist initially. This is frequently something that comes into play with legs, and it's the reason I like that spider so much. The segments aren't afraid to bend a little. I'm not sure how much of that bending is present in your reference, but the point is that it doesn't matter - we know they're not overly rigid regardless, and you've accomplished your goal in communicating this fact.

So, when you're drawing something from a reference, focus on the idea that what you're doing is communicating the idea of what you're looking at, rather than reproducing the image. For the most part, you are fully aware of this already, based on your in-depth analyses and thoughtful constructions.

Aside from that, you're doing extremely well and show a wonderful grasp of space and form, along with highly confident linework and an eager eye that seems to absorb everything it sees. I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete, so feel free to move onto the next one and keep up the fantastic work.

Uncomfortable in the post "250 Box Challenge"

2018-05-17 22:42

Overall your consistency of construction and general sense of 3D space does improve a fair bit over the set. I do have to say though - it's too bad that you stopped applying the line extension method after your first hundred boxes. While it's very valuable earlier on, it really shines when your construction starts to get more consistent and your mistakes get more subtle. It's by analyzing the behaviour of those sets of parallel lines as they converge towards a single point (or fail to do so) that we become more aware of our mistakes.

Also, near the end your line quality definitely falters (as you noted yourself). Those gaps, having lines undershoot or trail off like that greatly weaken the illusion of solidity of your boxes and make things feel generally flimsy. It's extremely important that you apply the ghosting method across the board, and take advantage of how applying it correctly helps improve your control.

Lastly, as you continue to develop in this area, playing with line weight is a great way to kick your boxes up to the next level. I've got notes on this topic on the challenge page, so be sure to give them a read.

Anyway, I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete. You've come a fair distance, but try and limit the number of corners you end up cutting along the way.

P.S. you are absolutely welcome to resubmit previous lessons, if you've redone them.

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

2018-05-17 01:07

Great work! Your first section shows a good deal of confidence behind your linework, which helps keep your strokes smooth and straight, and allows you to maintain a consistent trajectory throughout without any visible signs of wobbling. You carry this through into your ellipses section as well, where that confidence helps maintain even shapes.

In your ellipses in planes, you show a bit of struggling on this front, but this is actually fairly common as it's easy to get overwhelmed by the need to keep those ellipses within those awkward shapes. Just keep the confidence in mind, and remember that maintaining the flow of your stroke and the evenness of your shape is the most important thing, with accuracy coming in second.

In your plotted perspective boxes exercise, I noticed that one with the weird face next to it. This, surprisingly enough, is entirely correct. You followed the rules of two point perspective to the letter, and as you noticed, when it falls outside of the two vanishing points, it starts to get heavily distorted. This'll happen if you draw them too high or too low as well - basically if you imagine there being a circle that passes through both vanishing points on either side, anything outside of that circle will end up heavily distorted.

Your rough perspective boxes were spot on - great line quality (some people forget to ghost their lines here, but you nailed it), and I'm pleased to see you applying that double checking method correctly. You've got some varied results with your several attempts at the rotated boxes exercise, but I think it's clear that you learn a great deal about how these forms rotate in space.

In truth there wasn't really any requirement to repeat the exercise, as both this one and the organic perspective boxes were intended to be too challenging for any student at this stage to really nail down. Rather than that, the focus is getting students to break away from thinking about everything in terms of one, two or three point perspective, and to think about how forms can be rotated freely in 3D space. That said, you definitely showed progress. I think number 2 was the most successful. Definitely room to improve (I think all of them struggle a bit with getting the outermost boxes to really push their rotations farther than their neighbours), but you're getting there.

Now your organic perspective boxes do show room for improvement, but you're heading in the right direction. It's just a matter of working on how you think about each line being part of a set of parallel lines, that all need to be converging consistently as they move further into the distance. You've got some that aren't entirely consistent, and some that actually diverge. This is totally normal - remember that I've thrown you into the deep end of the pool without ever teaching you how to swim. So we'll get into those swimming lessons next.

I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete. Next, I want you to move onto the 250 box challenge next. Be sure to read through the notes and watch the video linked there on that challenge page before starting the work.

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

2018-05-15 20:54

Looking over the first couple pages, it's clear that you were grasping the principles but were struggling to properly push your brain to think in those full three dimensions. You understood the theory of it, but figuring out how these forms you were drawing related to each other, and how their proportions could be turned around in space was still just a little ways out of your reach. Your linework was, as a result, a little hesitant (not in the way that hesitation causes wobbling - your lines are actually very smooth and straight throughout - but in the way that you were drawing smaller and more faintly).

As you push through however, you start to experiment a lot more, to push play with objects that are simpler in terms of the forms they're made of, but also more interesting in the way those forms are arranged. This in itself shows a lot of development in that you were targeting objects that were of greater value for these exercises.

Yeah, your proportions weren't always spot on, but what's most important here is that your constructions felt, for the most part, believable. It's the difference between someone thinking, "well that drawing is shitty" and "the toothbrush that guy drew is stupid". I have successfully trained you to effectively pass the buck and fool your viewer into thinking that what you draw is actually representative of something real and solid.

I really, really liked the perfume bottles you played with. Their forms were extremely precise, an interesting marriage between organic curves and geometric solidity, and you pulled them off really well. The squirt gun was unexpected, and was a bit of a fumble (the top side seemed to be slanted at a bit of an angle), but your approach to it demonstrated a really solid grasp of the material. I think you could probably get it down in a few more tries (although I wouldn't recommend it - it looks like it drove you a bit crazy to even do it once, and I think it'd do the same to me).

Anyway, long story short - you did a fantastic job, and you've got an excellent grasp of what it means to construct these solid, geometric, hard-surface objects. I'd honestly be interested in seeing how this shift in the approach to drawing and construction will have impacted how you draw your animals, but we can do that later - after you've completed lesson 7.

So, I'll go ahead and mark this as complete. Keep up the fantastic work - and I'm not sure you're aware of the little red dots I add next to some of the entries in my backlog list, but you've earned one this time.

Uncomfortable in the post "250 Cylinder Challenge"

2018-05-15 20:24

That's okay - it happens every now and then. Lots of people like to separate their main accounts and their drawing efforts, and it's inevitable that they forget to switch sometimes.

On the bright side, you've done some really excellent work here with the cylinder challenge. Your work was pretty decent from the beginning, but I could see some areas where you were lacking confidence in your linework, or where your understanding of 3D space as it relates to these cylinders was a little rough around the edges.

By the end however, your grasp of the concepts was considerably more solid, and your lines were extremely confident and self-assured. There are alignment issues here and there, but I can see instances where you missed the alignment to your minor axis with your first ellipse, and compensated for it by aligning your second ellipse to the first (instead of to the minor axis) to ensure that your resulting cylinder still felt correct. This shows a great deal of development.

The only thing I wanted to point out was that you don't seem to have experimented at all with constructing cylinders in boxes, as touched upon in the video. That's definitely something you'll want to familiarize yourself with (although this only becomes particularly important once you hit lesson 6, so you have plenty of time). Reason being, once you need to ensure that your cylinder is aligned in a particular way relative to other forms, starting with a box and using that to determine your minor axis can help a great deal (since it's so much easier to position boxes in space than it would be to do the same with an arbitrary line).

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

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

2018-05-15 20:19

Looks like some confusion resulted in this submission slipping through the cracks. Keep in mind that reddit doesn't notify me if you've edited your comment - so anything that needs to get my attention has to be a comment on the root of one of my threads, or a reply to one of my comments.

Anyway, these are vastly improved, and show a bunch stronger understanding of how these sausage forms interact with one another in 3D space. My only criticism is that on the second page, your linework is a lot sketchier and less confident. It's understandable that this would happen, as you're focusing on working through a different problem, so you weren't paying too much attention to applying the ghosting method and generally being more conscientious with your linework, but it's still important to build that up as a habit regardless of what you're doing at the time.

Anyway, keep up the good work. I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete, so feel free to move onto lesson 3.

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

2018-05-15 20:14

Overall you're doing really nicely with your constructions. You've got a good mind for 3D space, and are manipulating these forms quite effectively to build up believable and interesting objects. I especially like your fly constructions - they're extremely confident, and you're not afraid at all of piling on forms on top of forms on top of forms, and drawing through everything as you do so. I also loved how you stacked the segmented plates on the giant weta on this page.

I noticed that depending on the drawing, sometimes you'd treat an initial organic form as being a "container" for what the result was going to be (so the segmented plates would end up sitting inside of it), and sometimes you'd use it as a form on top of which the plates were attached. I want you to keep moving forwards with the second approach, as this is more in line with what we're after with the construction method.

I did get the feeling that when you tried to play more with that stippling texture and deeper, more confident shadow shapes on some of the drawings, you allowed some of the construction to slip through the cracks a bit. That is to say, perhaps when you were drawing these, you were thinking ahead to how you'd handle the detail, and didn't think as hard about construction as you had demonstrated in other drawings. It's very important to focus on the step you're on, rather than thinking ahead. Think detail when you get there, but until then, you shouldn't even be considering whether or not you'll take a drawing to a further stage of completion.

Here are some notes on the container vs. base form issue I mentioned above, and a couple other observations I had. Keep those points in mind as you move forwards - I'll be marking this lesson as complete, so feel free to move onto the next lesson. Keep up the great work!

Uncomfortable in the post "250 Cylinder Challenge"

2018-05-15 16:14

Doesn't seem I have you down in my notes as being eligible for private critiques. If you are a patreon supporter, be sure to check your patreon inbox as I reach out to new folks to get their reddit username. Otherwise you're welcome to submit your work directly to the subreddit for a community critique.

Uncomfortable in the post "250 Box Challenge"

2018-05-15 00:40

Very nice work! While you may have rushed, it doesn't really show that much in your work. Overall your forms are quite solid, and I'm quite pleased with how you use line weight in a subtle, yet effective way. You're not overbearing with it, nor are you too loud and obnoxious. You add just a little extra weight where it's needed, and it punches your boxes up to the next level.

When you started out, I could see that you were doing a pretty good job but you were struggling with a bit of divergence, especially when it comes to the lines that were closer together (like, where you'd extend them they'd run right beside each other, so you could very clearly see that they weren't as parallel as they should have been). By the end however, you became much more consistent in avoiding this problem. That's exactly the kind of growth I'm looking for.

Anyway, you did very well. In the future you may want to play a bit more with a variety of box types - that is, you did a lot with vanishing points that were very far away, you'll want to play with some that are a bit closer, and some that are much closer. Farther away is going to come up more often (because this applies a smaller, more relatable scale), but you'll still want to have experience with vanishing points that are close to the box itself (where the lines converge quickly, suggesting a much larger scale like looking at the top of a building from the ground).

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"

2018-05-15 00:34

Overall you're doing a pretty good job. Your first two sections are really solid - your linework is fairly confident and smooth, which helps avoid the kind of stiffness and wobbling that comes from the slow and hesitant makes a lot of beginners will make. You maintain a pretty consistent flow from the beginning and throughout the execution. The only place I saw some wavering was to a very small degree in your page of ghosted lines - but you seemed to correct that as you moved through the lesson. This confidence carries through into your ellipses, keeping them evenly shaped.

Jumping ahead to your rough perspective boxes, there's a few issues that come up. First and foremost, your lines don't feel quite as sturdy. They waver a little, there's some visible hesitation at times. It's not always the case, but compared to the lines in your funnels or your planes exercises, it seems you may not be putting as much effort into applying the ghosting method. Remember that all your preparation goes into the phase before your pen touches the page. Once it does, you've got to let your muscle memory take over.

Also, remember that in this exercise, you've got to pay attention to keeping your horizontals parallel to the horizon line, and your verticals perpendicular to it. You've got a bit of slanting here and there where you lose focus.

One last thing about this exercise - when applying your double-checking with the red lines, you drew your lines back to the vanishing point. Instead, the instructions say to extend them back to the horizon line. This allows you to see a more concrete sign of how far off you were with each estimation.

It's understandable that you struggled with the rotated boxes - you were meant to, as it's an extremely challenging thing to dump on students at this stage, and I do so largely to get students to start thinking about how to rotate those forms in 3D space, rather than expecting any degree of success. That said, you actually did a pretty good job. The only major problems I saw were the corners, and you actually nailed the one in the bottom right - so for all intents and purposes, you were definitely farther along than I would have expected.

Your pen definitely did get a lot thicker though. I'm assuming you switched to a thicker tip, in which case I'd recommend switching back when you can. Lines that heavy are going make it a little harder to deal in the kind of finesse and nuance that we want to get into (unless you can manage to develop a lot more pressure control quickly).

Your line quality is looking good again in your organic perspective boxes. The boxes themselves are alright, though they do have issues in terms of how each set of lines converges towards their own far-off vanishing points. Like the rotated boxes exercise, that's expected. I haven't actually gone into any depth explaining how to handle freeform rotation. That'll be the next step.

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 challenge page, and watch the video linked there before starting the work, as there are a few important concepts that will help you better understand how each box you draw sits in 3D space, and how to learn from the mistakes you make along the way.

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

2018-05-13 18:43

So far you're doing pretty well! One thing that did catch my eye a little bit however is that when you draw these marks, you may be just a little too focused on your accuracy. Accuracy certainly is important, but as far as priorities go, maintaining a consistent, confident flow to your strokes is the most important. As I explain in this comic, we can achieve smooth lines by ensuring that whenever we execute a mark - after whatever preparation we've done (usually using the ghosting method), we do so with confidence, trusting in our muscle memory rather than attempting to guide our hand with our conscious brain. The wobbles come from course-corrections we make whenever we notice ourselves veering off our intended path.

When we execute the mark, it's important to accept that all the opportunities we've had to ensure our accuracy are basically set in stone - and once the pen touches the page, any opportunity to avoid mistakes are gone. All we can do is push through confidently and accept the result. This way, even if we're off the mark a little bit, our line will still be smooth and will maintain a consistent trajectory.

Now I've said a lot here about what is currently a fairly minor issue in your work - for the most part, you are executing with a good deal of confidence, and your lines are fairly smooth. It's just that slight wobbling that I'm noticing that made me want to point this out.

Also, keep in mind that when you submit your homework for review, you should be submitting all the sections of a given lesson - in this case, the lines, ellipses and boxes sections should all be submitted together. Keep up the good work, and I look forward to receiving the rest of your submission when it's completed.

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

2018-05-13 18:37

Your work here is really phenomenal. You've followed the instructions to the letter, and are demonstrating an immense amount of confidence with your linework. This results in your lines coming out very smooth and consistent with minimal wobbling or stiffness, and also achieves an even shape with each of your ellipses. Despite this, you're still maintaining a good degree of control and precision with most of your marks. The issue usually arises from students putting more effort in their accuracy over the flow of their lines, resulting in wobbling - but your balance between both priorities is spot on.

Your boxes section is generally well done too - the only issues I noticed are apparent in the last two exercises, which admittedly are meant to be beyond a student at this point. I've kind of dumped you lot into the deep end of the pool before teaching you how to swim. The point of this was to get you accustomed to thinking about freely rotated forms without getting caught up in plotting all your lines back to the infinite vanishing points required.

That said, despite the obvious challenge in these two exercises, you did remarkably well. There are definitely issues, but you followed the instructions to the letter and managed to achieve fairly good results.

In the rotated boxes, the one issue I noticed was that the boxes along the outside end not to be rotated in any significant way relative to their neighbours. Take a look at this. I've extended off each box's lines as they converge towards one of their horizontal vanishing points. On the left side, with the blue and green boxes, you can see that along the bottom they're more or less on top of each other. This tells us that they're converging towards the same point, and that they're effectively parallel (no rotation).

When looking at both blue lines as a pair, and both green lines as a pair to compare their overall convergence, we can see that the blue lines actually converge slower than the green ones, meaning that the vanishing point they're converging towards is actually further away.

If you look at this animated diagram from the lesson, you'll see that in this scenario, as the box turns as these boxes are, the leftmost vanishing point should be sliding towards the right (getting closer to the boxes). So the box with the blue lines is actually rotating in the opposite direction.

The same thing happens on the right side, with the red and yellow boxes, although to a more noticeable degree. That's why we get this feeling that the rotation is sort of flattening out. The vanishing point for that farthest box should instead be getting closer to the box itself, with the convergence of those lines becoming very dramatic.

This is a fairly common mistake that I see at this stage, so it's nothing to worry too much about. We're going to be putting a good deal of focus on boxes and the convergences of these lines next, so there will be plenty of opportunities to work on improving in this area.

Your organic perspective boxes, much like the rotated boxes, are very well done in regards to my expectations for students at this stage, but there is definitely room for improvement. The most common issue I'm seeing is having lines that should be converging towards some far off point actually diverging instead. Again, it's extremely common.

I'm going to go ahead and mark this lesson as complete. As I said above, your work is fantastic, and I'm really pleased with the care with which you follow all of the instructions, and the time you spend on every individual mark to ensure that it is confident and controlled.

Next I'd like you to move onto the 250 box challenge. In the notes and video there, you'll see me talking about drawing through your boxes (drawing all of the lines that make up each box, including those on the far side of the form), and about an error checking method that has you extending your lines towards their implied vanishing point to better identify issues with those convergences. Both of these should help considerably when it comes to getting a handle on your free rotations.

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

2018-05-13 18:21

Not bad! You've got a lot of great drawings here, and are demonstrating an understanding of many of the core principles covered in the lesson. I did notice one issue though, and it gives me the opportunity to reiterate a particularly important point.

It has to do with taking the necessary steps to convince yourself that these flat shapes we're drawing on a piece of paper are in fact 3D forms. It's an illusion, a lie we're telling the viewer, and the best way to sell a convincing lie is to believe in it yourself.

Ultimately that's why we draw through forms, and use contour lines where they may not actually exist in what we're drawing. We're not going to be doing that forever, but as far as these drawings go, they're really exercises to get us used to thinking in that manner. Far in the future, you'll have done this so much that you'll be able to visualize these additional lines in your mind's eye, and you'll be able to look at a sausage shape and simply believe that it's three dimensional.

The reason this belief is important comes to light when we look at the abdomens of your wasps. Looking at the segmentation, I'm not getting a very strong sense that they wrap around the rounded form you used in the earlier phase of construction. Instead, they read as being rather flattened out. The reason for this is that you skipped the step to reinforce the illusion of that basic form beforehand with contour lines, and so you weren't entirely convinced of its roundedness when you moved onto this further detail.

I demonstrate what I mean here: https://i.imgur.com/iIv4pca.png

You're actually doing this much better in some other areas, like your cricket drawings, but drawing in one or two contour lines to really reinforce the illusion will help considerably.

Aside from that, your work is really well done. Your lines are confident, your legs flow nicely, and the majority of your forms feel solid (aside from the areas I mentioned above). You're clearly taking things steadily from simple to complex, applying the constructional method to great effect.

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

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."

2018-05-12 19:01

Thanks for the kind words! It's always nice to know that people feel my efforts have been of value to them.

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."

2018-05-12 16:37

Such a page actually exists! You'll find it here: https://drawabox.com/recommendations

Uncomfortable in the post "250 Box Challenge"

2018-05-12 04:49

The only thing I generally require from students is to complete the 250 box challenge before tackling lesson 2. The cylinder challenge on the other hand can be completed anywhere after lesson 1 and before lesson 6. Where in that period you tackle it is up to you, but having a decent grasp of cylinders will certainly help in lesson 2's form intersections.

Uncomfortable in the post "Lesson 3: Drawing Plants"

2018-05-11 23:20

Looking great! You've improved a fair bit on both fronts, and while your branches still have a ways to go, your leaves/petals are looking much better. You're really demonstrating a much better grasp of how those flat forms twist and turn and flow through 3D space.

Keep up the great work, and consider this lesson complete.

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

2018-05-11 23:18

Very nice work! You've got a lot of very confident linework, both in your lines section as well as in your ellipses. This helps you maintain smooth, straight lines without any signs of wobbling or stiffness. It also helps you keep your ellipses evenly shaped. The biggest challenge a lot of students have is noticeably hesitant linework (where they're too afraid of making a mistake to make their marks by trusting in their muscle memory). It seems you're beyond this, except for a couple minor areas where it's usually common - like the ellipses in planes exercise, where most people struggle to get past the need to be more careful in fitting the ellipses into those awkward shapes.

Moving onto the boxes, you're doing pretty well here too. I noticed that you only submitted one page of rough perspective boxes, but the one you did submit is looking pretty good (though be sure to apply that line-extension double checking technique to every line, not just the ones you think are off).

For your rotated boxes, the forms themselves show a well developing understanding of space, though the lines are a little less confident. Make sure you're applying the ghosting method to each and every mark you make, so you can separate the process of planning and executing your marks and execute with full confidence and trust in your muscle memory. Also, I noticed that you skipped at least one of the steps in the lesson (drawing squares at the extremities). While this was not an issue here, I do want to stress the importance of following the instructions to the letter.

While your organic perspective boxes do need work, this is totally expected - and they're actually still better than I would have expected from a student at this lesson. This exercise is more about pushing students to think differently about rotating forms in 3D space, and while there are inconsistencies in how your lines converge towards their various vanishing points, that's something we'll be working on 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 and watch the video on that page before starting the work.

Uncomfortable in the post "250 Box Challenge"

2018-05-11 23:00

You're definitely showing a fair bit of improvement over the course of the set, so great job there. You may want to explore the use of line weight as you continue to push through, as that'll kick them up to the next level by improving the general cohesion of your forms. There are notes about that on the challenge page that you can read through.

As for your question however, I think when you're drawing those last few lines, you may not be thinking about the all lines with which it should be parallel. I'm sure you remember from the notes and video how every box is made up of three sets of four parallel lines. It's easy to mistakenly get stuck focusing only on the relationship of the line you're drawing with the box as a whole, or perhaps only with one other line with which it should be converging.

But the thing is, that line needs to be converging at a consistent rate with all the lines that belong to its set. So if you look at the green extended lines on box 225 for example, the two lines close together towards the center should be drawn more or less parallel to one another (because they're so close to one another). Or, if you look at 232, you can see the two leftmost red lines, where they're converging much earlier than the other red lines.

Ultimately you have to think about how the line is going to interact with all those other marks in its set. The fact that we use the ghosting method for all of our marks (meaning, we start by laying down start/end points) can help a lot in this regard, because we can place them down for a bunch of lines before committing completely.

Anyway, I'll go ahead and mark this challenge as complete. You're doing a great job and showing a fair bit of progress, but be sure to keep an eye on what I mentioned there. Feel free to move onto lesson 2.

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

2018-05-10 21:24

It's a little known fact that I always get hammered before my critiques :P

Your new drawings are considerably improved, and show a good application of all of the points I raised in my critique. They feel much sturdier and more believable, and continue to maintain that even as you push your detail and texture a little further. Very well done.

The only thing I wanted to comment on as far as advice goes was the head of your grasshopper. Where you started off with a sort of stretched ball encompassing most of the head, I would perhaps have started with a more spherical, smaller ball instead and then added boxy/planar forms onto that to flesh out the rest. You'll see a lot more of this in the next lesson, especially in the head construction video, and you can also see the same principle in this animal head demo that I did for a student very recently (specifically the bottom right).

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

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

2018-05-10 21:19

Your lines section is looking pretty solid. You're demonstrating some nice, confident execution that keeps your lines smooth and straight, without any significant wobbling (aside from the curved/wavy super imposed lines, and that's fairly normal). When you get into the ellipses, you maintain a similar kind of confidence, which is certainly good and helps maintain even shapes, but your control is a little weaker at times. Because of this, there's definitely a significant number of ellipses that tend to be looser and less defined, where the ellipse you were aiming to draw gets a bit lost.

Applying the ghosting method (as you should be doing for every mark you put down) should help here, specifically using more time in the preparation phase so as to build up your muscle memory. This will make your confident strokes more accurate, as the muscles driving that motion will have had more time to get ready.

Jumping into your boxes, you did a great job with the plotted perspective. Your rough perspective boxes are solid as well, though I noticed that when applying the double checking method, you applied it incorrectly. You drew your lines all back to the vanishing point, when the instructions said to extend the lines you had drawn up to where they intersect with the horizon line. The reason this is better is that when you see the distance between your intersection and the actual vanishing point, you get a more concrete and useful sense of how far your estimation of perspective was off.

You did a really good job with the rotated boxes, with the rotation of the forms coming along great. The issue here is more that your linework feels kind of sloppy, specifically because of how the hatching lines are rather haphazard. It's true that they're not the main focus of this drawing, but any mark you put down should be shown the appropriate amount of care. With hatching in particular, it's important to ensure the lines stay straight, parallel and consistent, and stretch all the way across the plane from edge to edge. Don't let them bend unintentionally, or hook as lines drawn more quickly tend to do.

Your organic perspective boxes do need work, but that's entirely expected at this point. With this exercise, I've dropped you into the deep end of the pool before really teaching you how to swim. The purpose was to get you to think differently about rotating forms freely in 3D space, and so you'd have some context by which to situate yourself when we dig into that subject further.

One trend I did notice is that where your parallel lines should be converging (as they move off in the distance, they have a tendency to diverge instead. This is something you'll want to keep an eye on.

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 and watch the video linked there on that page before starting the work, as the techniques discussed there should help a fair bit.

Uncomfortable in the post "Lesson 7: Drawing Vehicles"

2018-05-09 23:50

You start out alright. Your construction on the first two pages are careful, conscientious and measured. You're patient and willing to take the time to subdivide wherever needed, and you generally avoid relying on guesswork where it can be helped. This shows that you have the capacity for patience, and that you are absolutely able to draw these things properly.

By the end of the set (with the exception of this boat), you're guessing the vast majority of things, focusing on drawing oversimplified details, and in a lot of cases throwing construction to the wind.

What I see here is that whenever you approach a drawing knowing that you're going to add detail, your brain decides to switch to wanting to draw something impressive. Something with a lot of flare to it, something to make you feel like an artist. Of course, that has nothing to do with this lesson. This lesson's about construction, it's about understanding the forms that make up complex objects and how they relate to each other in 3D space.

We're not here to draw pretty, impressive things. Each drawing is an exercise, and we're meant to learn from it. We may as well be burning them at the end regardless of how nice they look, because the point isn't to create something beautiful. It's to learn.

Now, for most students when I see this issue, I'll have them draw however many pages with no detail whatsoever, so they focus on construction and really grind it down. In fact, I've probably had you do that very same thing more than a few times. And when you focus on construction, you do what's necessary, for the most part. You probably could stand to go further. For example, on this page you built your wheels as basic cylinders - there's a lot more to be done form-wise there without delving into what we regard as superficial detail. You could have placed inset ellipses on the end of each cylinder to create the inner portions of the tires, and hubcaps, etc. That's all form, after all. But anyway, you're definitely going in the right direction when you know you're not going to delve into trying to make a drawing pretty.

When you DO decide to take a drawing "all the way", you lose track of all those good habits.

So, we're going to do it a little differently. I want you to draw five vehicles. I want you to first draw each of them focusing purely on form and construction with no superficial detail, taking that as far as you possibly can. Subdivide wherever needed, draw through all your forms, and so on. Do this for all five vehicles, then take pictures of your work.

Then come back and add detail. Observe carefully, make sure every mark you put down here is with the intention of capturing some feature you see in your reference, and take it as far as you want.

One other thing - do all your work in ballpoint pen this time. Set the fineliners and brush pens aside for now. Also, use a ruler as much as possible, and if you can get your hands on one, use an ellipse template as well (though those can be expensive, so I totally understand if you can't). Use ballpoint for everything, including adding line weight. Try to avoid hatching, but if you must, make sure it's neat and tidy, not scribbly and chaotic like this.

Uncomfortable in the post "Lesson 3: Drawing Plants"

2018-05-09 23:37

Here are some things I noticed while looking over your work:

• You're definitely making a concerted effort to play with how your leaves flow through space, so that's great. I did notice however that your attempts to add detail were a bit simplistic. You didn't actually need to add detail here, or work from reference (i'm not sure if you were adding it from your imagination or if you were actually looking at images). It's completely normal to have a somewhat simplified idea of what these textures would look like, but when you do look at reference images, try to look more closely at how the features - like little holes and cracks in dried leaves - are grouped, and how they tend to be spread out across the surface. Our brains will generally do a pretty awful job of simplifying what we see, and a lot of important information gets tossed out in favour of notions like "are holes here".

• When you're adding complex edge detail on top of the basic flowing leaf shape, make sure that you don't zigzag those features with a continuous line. Instead, build directly off the previous phase of construction and draw each feature independently. When an edge changes direction, that's often a good sign that you'll want to lift your pen and start another stroke with its own independent flow. I demonstrate this in these notes.

• On those notes I also mention that your line quality has a tendency to be a bit stiff and hesitant. This is something I noticed across your entire set, so it's definitely at the core of how you're drawing and something you need to focus on. The ghosting method is all about putting all of your preparation into a preliminary phase, then executing with full confidence, trusting entirely in your muscle memory. A lot of people will hesitate, worried about making mistakes and ruining a drawing - but it's this hesitation that causes one to draw more slowly, guide their hand a little more with their brain and stiffen up. You're not slowing down to such a degree that there's considerable wobbling, but that stiffness is definitely apparent.

• Your branches are coming along, though you'll want to continue working on having those segments flow together seamlessly. You have a tendency to hook bend them slightly when they end, resulting in noticeable tails along each line. Those tails need to be aimed towards the next ellipse, so your following segment can run directly over it, blending them all together.

• The pitcher plants are definitely suffering from that sort of stiffness I mentioned, but otherwise the construction is pretty solid. The only other thing I'd recommend is the same as what I recommended in regards to the leaf edge detail and avoiding zigzagging. In this case, it's the opening of the plant's mouth - build each of those little starry-spikes off an internal ellipse.

• Do find that when you draw leaves that are part of an actual plant - like the potato plant, for instance, you focus less on pushing their sense of flow through space. Often times, the photographs we look at may appear to be a little more stiff at times, leading us to draw leaves that effectively look stiffer even though when we look at a photo, the leaves don't feel that way. What I want you to do is, instead of focusing on replicating the photograph you're looking at, focus on communicating the essence of that object. We know that the leaves feel like they flow in a lively manner, so you need to exaggerate that. After all, we're not performing the same task as a camera might - we're visually communicating the idea of a plant and all that goes into it. So try and push and emphasize how each leaf flows through 3D space by really thinking about how that initial flow line moves through all three dimensions rather than just placing a mark on a flat piece of paper.

• Take a look at this page of notes. I actually posted it to patreon and the subreddit almost a year ago, so you may not have seen it, but it contains a fair bit of useful information. It came to mind when looking at this page. I can see that you tried to leverage contour lines to make the balls look more rounded, but the stiffness of the lines as well as the fact that they're fairly straight through their center made them read as much flatter than you intended. Really try pushing that contour line's curvature, and whenever possible, orient a contour ellipse towards the viewer.

• Your second hibiscus attempt is definitely stronger than the first (as far as the little pistils go). That said, you probably would have benefitted from allowing the whole drawing to take up more of the page so the smaller forms wouldn't get quite as cramped. As a result of that cramping, the marks in that area tend to be quite sloppy and indistinct, causing them to generally flatten out. Always give yourself as much room as you can on the page, as your brain will benefit from more space when thinking through spatial problems.

• Your second attempt at those pitcher plants near the end are definitely quite a bit stronger - though your decision to largely skip the segment-method discussed in the branches exercise resulted in rather wobbly lines. Rather than giving up on the technique because you can't quite nail it, it's better to give it additional practice so you can gain a useful tool in your belt. In addition to this, your details are definitely quite simplified - when you're drawing, ensure that you keep looking back at your reference, and try to use each mark you put down to capture a specific feature you see on the reference image, rather than seeing something like spots and deciding to simply draw arbitrary spots. Building up this habit will train your eye to pick up on the core of each texture, which will allow you to simplify them without going cartoony. I expand on this in the texture challenge notes.

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

• One page of branches

• 3 drawings of plants - focus on leafy plants.

Work on the confidence of your linework, and focus on the act of visual communication.

Uncomfortable in the post "Lesson 5: Drawing Animals"

2018-05-09 22:44

From Discord:

WAY better. The deer head is fantastic, the toucan is definitely an improvement. The chicken is pretty solid (though you're gonna want to work on how you lump those additional masses on - try and think of it more like you're taking a bunch of putty and like wrapping it around the object. It's gonna need some more wrap-around to feel more stable. Also you made the angle of that leg a little extreme so it feels off-balance.

The kangaroo is superb. Excellent construction, very three dimensional. The quokka's a bit shit though. Head's okay, arms/legs are weird and not particularly well observed.

All in all, you've made considerable progress and I'm really impressed by that kangaroo. You've got a ways to go, but you're on the right track and at this point it's just a matter of practice, and training your eye.

I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete, so feel free to move onto lesson 6. I think you'll find that it'll challenge you to go even further with this boxier manner of thinking, and it'll in turn have an impact on how you draw organic objects in the future.

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

2018-05-09 22:37

Here are some things I noticed while looking over your work:

• Your organic forms with contour ellipses are coming along okay, though I noticed that you weren't drawing through the majority of your ellipses as instructed. As a result your ellipses tended to be a little stiff at times - not too bad, but definitely something that needs to be improved upon.

• I also noticed that there isn't too much shifting in the degrees of your ellipses, so they read as being at the same orientation relative to the viewer. Generally you'll have a bit of a shift in that degree as you look at different cross-sections of an organic form, as I describe in these notes.

• Your organic forms with contour curves are coming along well. The only thing I notice issues with is the alignment of those curves. If you picture the full ellipse of which each curve is just a portion, that central minor axis line ought to be cutting it into two equal, symmetrical halves down its narrower dimension.

• You've made a lot of good pushes into handling texture with your dissections. You've tackled a number of different textures, and have used close observation to inform the kinds of marks you've made (as opposed to less thoughtful approaches). I did notice a little bit of sloppy/random behaviour in the prata bread texture, but overall you're trying to be intentional with your mark making. Keep that up.

• Your form intersections are pretty good, though your use of hatching is pretty sloppy and haphazard, at least on the first page. It gets somewhat better in the later ones.

• Your organic intersections definitely need work. To start with, your contour curves are nowhere near as strong as they are in the earlier exercise. Secondly, I can see that you're not actually drawing each form in its entirety, which stunts your ability to understand how each form sits in space. If you look at my demonstrations and instructions, you'll see that I draw each and every one individually and completely, unconcerned with what would generally be hidden - I use line weight in a few key areas to help clarify the overlaps afterwards. Try to think of it as though, one by one, you're piling water balloons on top of one another, and watching how they sag over each other. Stick to the same, simple sausage forms for each one, rather than varying them too much in scale. You are getting there, but I think instead of thinking more about each individual one, you focus on increasing the quantity of forms.

Before I mark this lesson as complete, I'd like you to try two more pages of organic intersections.

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

2018-05-09 13:48

Alright, I do think you should give it another try. This time, focus on the following:

• Like I mentioned in regards to the lesson 1 stuff, work on your control. Try to maintain the same confidence, but work on getting your lines to fit between the start and end points without undershooting/overshooting (and of course, apply the ghosting method).

• Whenever you draw a line, think about which other lines in the box you need it to be parallel with (meaning, which lines you need it to converge with towards the same point). This doesn't apply when you're drawing the initial Y, but as you add more lines you need to always be thinking about which other lines your next one needs to be converging with. In a lot of cases your convergences aren't actually bad, it's just something to keep thinking about as you draw the boxes.

• Don't be sloppy with applying those hatching lines. Like I mentioned in regards to your rough perspective boxes, keep your lines parallel, consistent, and stretch them across the plane from edge to edge.

The challenge is basically an opportunity for you to improve the control of your linework, so keep that in mind.