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."

2018-05-08 23:41

I'm definitely going to give some thought towards that - but at the very least, I plan on making the basic web layout a lot easier to use.

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

2018-05-08 22:41

I'll go through your homework section by section.

To start with, your lines section is quite well done. You've got a lot of confidence to your execution, which helps to ensure that your marks are smooth and consistent, with no visible wobbling or hesitation. As far as the first priority goes, you've nailed it by focusing on flow over accuracy.

Both are of course important however - so your next step will be to try and try to increase the amount of control you exhibit over your marks, while maintaining that smooth execution. In your ghosted lines and planes exercises, we can see areas where your lines sometimes fall short of their target (resulting in a gap between the end of the line and the intended endpoint. This is the sort of thing you'll want to work on improving, ensuring that you're achieving a confident, smooth, straight line that goes from the start point to the end point without undershooting or overshooting. You are certainly heading in the right direction though, so keep that up.

In your ellipses, you're showing the same kind of confidence, but your control definitely suffers in certain areas, especially the funnels and the ellipses in planes exercise.

• For the funnels, your work's a bit sloppy. Remember that each ellipse should be treating the line that cuts down the middle of each funnel as though it were its minor axis, while the ellipse also fits snugly between the two edges of the funnel. The minor axis cuts through the narrower side of the ellipse. In a lot of cases, you've got it passing through the wider dimension, which would be the major axis instead. You're also having a fair bit of trouble getting the ellipses to fit snugly between the two arcs.

• For the ellipses in planes, work on getting the ellipse to touch the edges of the plane. A lot of yours are floating arbitrarily in the center, without being anchored down to the space. Part of all of these exercises has to do with fitting the ellipses snugly within the space they're given.

Remember that the ghosting method should be applied to every single mark you put down - be it a straight line, an arc, or an ellipse. The ghosting method is meant to help you exert greater control over the mark you're about to make by training your muscle memory before executing with that same bold, confidence.

Your tables of ellipses exercises are generally looking much better. They're a little loose at times, but they're fitting nicely within the space they're given.

Your boxes are fairly decently done. The plotted perspective is spot on. The rough perspective boxes are pretty good, though I have a couple of small remarks to make on this front. The same matters of control I mentioned in regards to your lines section applies here, so keep working on your use of the ghosting method to help improve muscle memory before executing each mark. Additionally, your use of hatching is a bit sloppy - we can see the lines are arcing, bending and hooking towards their ends, and they often float arbitrarily in the middle of their given plane. You want to make sure that they're straight, parallel and consistent, and that they stretch all the way across from edge to edge. Even though they're not an integral part of the drawing, it's important to fight the urge to give any mark you put down a half-measure of effort.

The rotated boxes was definitely a struggle for you. This is fairly normal, as this exercise and the organic perspective boxes are both notoriously difficult. I assign them here largely to get students to think about rotating forms in 3D space a little differently without actually giving you the instruction on how to tackle it (I generally assign the 250 box challenge afterwards as it goes into those principles in detail).

One issue I'm seeing is that for the most part, your boxes aren't actually rotating very much. If you take a look at this image, you can see that the lines of boxes that are beside each other are actually still converging towards the same vanishing point. This tells us that the lines run parallel to one another in 3D space, and therefore there is no rotation.

If you take a look at this diagram from the lesson, you'll see how as the box rotates, the vanishing points slide in one direction, with one VP moving towards the box and the other moving away from it on the other side. So, the convergence of one set of lines of a given box will start to accelerate, becoming more dramatic as one of the VPs moves closer to it, and the convergence of the other lines will become shallower as their VP slides farther away.

It's entirely normal at this point not to be able to apply this just yet. That said, I did notice that you didn't quite do the exercise exactly as it was demonstrated - my guess is that you added the extra rows of boxes because you realized that there wasn't much rotation happening.

Your organic perspective boxes are about where I'd expect them to be at the end of this lesson. There's plenty of room for improvement, but you're starting to show your brain trying to handle these matters of arbitrary rotation in 3D space.

I'm going to go ahead and mark this lesson as complete. I know you said that you'd completed the 250 box challenge already, but if this was before you completed this lesson 1 work, I believe you may have to give it another shot.

Before you do that however, I would like to see the work you did for the 250 box challenge prior to becoming a patron to ensure that you're following the instructions correctly.

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."

2018-05-08 18:31

Thanks for the feedback, and for formatting it clearly. You've raised a lot of good points that I agree with completely, and I hope to address them all.

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."

2018-05-08 16:00

Those are fairly easy to implement, and definitely worth it too. I can see being able to check off one's progress (and have that tracked against one's account) being a particularly useful feature for students.

I know lots of people are particularly fond of community challenges, so something to that effect involving regular warmups could definitely be a fun thing to add to earn a few extra badges.

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."

2018-05-08 15:57

That's actually something I've raised to a few people who've come asking whether drawabox would be appropriate for their younger children. My answer has generally been a pretty firm no.

The stuff we teach here is definitely important - and there are probably little bits of exercises here and there that can be pulled out to good effect - but overall the perspective I approach the topic is one of "OKAY KIDS. You've had your fun, now sit your ass down and get to work."

Of course, I try and emphasize the importance of balancing hard work and accepting the tedium of certain exercises alongside taking the time to draw stuff for the fun of it - but it really does depend on the fact that a student has already found a personal reason that they want to take something like this much farther.

I definitely can't speak from the perspective of anyone who knows anything about children beyond the experience of being one, but had I been introduced to this kind of material before I was 12 or 13, I would probably have grown to dislike it. It's not a guaranteed thing, but I do feel that it has the potential to drive younger students away.

The best thing about elementary school art teachers is that in a sea of tedious school work, painful memorization and standardized tests, art class was an island that focused on exploration and enjoyment. The important thing to me was that I didn't have to do things well. I just had to step outside of my shell and do.

Drawabox on the other hand adds clarity by giving a student a better sense of whether or not they succeeded, and what the mistakes were in specific terms. In that sense, it's really the opposite. Both are important, but I feel that they're an integral part of the development of one's skills at different points.

Of course, again - much of what I'm saying in regards to children is from a fairly limited perspective.

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."

2018-05-08 15:50

I have big aversions to trying to hack existing full-scale solutions due to past experiences resulting in messes that only half-delivered the features I wanted, and looked rather unprofessional in the process. So that's definitely off the table. I totally agree that the flexibility that comes with a hand-made solution comes with the cost of time and effort, but while the times I've done that in the past (usually after fussing with something prebuilt and throwing it out the window) have come with their own array of downsides, I have never regretted it.

In essence, the website's community platform is going to replace the subreddit in every way. I am going to look into the option to feed content from the website directly to it (with reddit API integration, I should be able to give users who've connected their reddit account or logged in using it an easy option to check a box when posting their work to have it immediately posted to the subreddit as well, and even to have the comments on those threads to be displayed on the website). That said, I see reddit taking a turn with their redesign efforts that I feel would erode much of what I've found made it a valuable community platform.

While I have every intention of keeping the subreddit from turning into a ghost town, this whole push is one to ensure that we are as prepared as possible as a community to weather the biblical flood. I'm genuinely pretty worried about how reddit's choices are going to impact the biggest part of this community (and the income tied to it). I don't wanna end up getting fucked after pouring years into stoking this campfire because reddit wanted to stuff inline ads everywhere they could.

In the sense that this will assume the role the subreddit currently plays, it's largely going to be a place for people to post full lesson submissions (or partial if they really need to). Along with that, I'll want them to have easy access to integrate references to parts of the lessons that help describe issues a student may be encountering, or things they may be misunderstanding. Some manner of checklists or rubrics would definitely be a nice thing to have to help those critiquing to keep their feedback structured (and in the spirit of the lessons - I regularly see folks wandering in from outside of the subreddit giving weird, irrelevant feedback à la no rules only tools).

Then there's the badges - people love badges, and it's been a bit sad that I haven't been able to deliver on that front. It means a lot to me that the badges are earned as a sign that one has completed the work and understood the material. So far that's been limited to the subreddit, and more specifically where I've had the chance to review peoples' work (where that was limited to patrons after a couple years). By giving more structure and support to those critiquing, I want to allow the community to somehow award completion badges (that aren't quite as glowy and fancy as the ones i'd award as the great box king). The specifics of all that will require a good deal of working out of course.

As for moderation, there are plenty of folks I've come to trust to make rulings on their own in the community's best interests when it comes to handling problems. Moderating the subreddit's been a non-issue, but I can definitely see a need to take some of the discord mods and perhaps others from the folks there who I feel are trustworthy.

Lastly, I'm certainly going to take the opportunity to try and iron out at least some of the inconsistencies between content that had been written at different times (and different states of exhaustion).

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."

2018-05-08 15:17

I definitely plan to put a lot more time into building out the mobile side of the website and testing it as much as I can to avoid hiccups like that.

Also, I did some digging - I plan on allowing users to login with their reddit accounts, or otherwise connect their reddit accounts to their users. With that, I may be able to give them a simple option to simultaneously post their homework to the subreddit along with being posted to the drawabox community platform. I may also be able to grab comments from the subreddit and display them on the community platform as well, to create a sort of continuous integration between the subreddit and drawabox, giving you and others the same flow of content.

Of course, that's a bit of a guess based on a cursory google search. I'll have to look deeper to figure out the specifics.

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."

2018-05-08 14:59

I'm definitely going to refine the whole roles system and figure out some way to allow community members to award each other completion for lessons in a way that is more structured and meaningful than the self-reporting on discord, but not reserved to those who can be critiqued by me (as it currently is on the subreddit). People love the badges, so I definitely want to try and come up with a satisfying solution to ensure that everyone can earn them by working hard and demonstrating an understanding of the content.

I also have at least been keeping track of certain homework submissions that demonstrate a lot of strong examples. I just need to find out how I want to present them so folks don't get caught up in a whole "i'm not that good i might as well give up now"... as people tend to do.

Thanks for your input!

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."

2018-05-08 14:54

The reason I'm probably going to stay away from prebuilt forum software is that in my past experience, it just shuffles around where you invest the time. Or at least, that quickly becomes the case based on how much customization you're looking to apply. A bit of light customization, and it's great - anything more than that, and you end up putting more time into it because you have to work within the framework provided rather than one that fits the way you think as a developer, and that fits your particular needs.

One of my first major programming projects (admittedly, back when I was in high school) came out of the frustration that came with working with a PhpBB board, which led to me creating a custom solution. Being one of my first endeavours, it too was a complete mess of feature creep and awful code, but it still wasn't a decision I regretted (and my users seemed to appreciate the tailor-made solution as well). Since then of course I've had more experience working as a web developer in a professional capacity, so one would hope that a similar project now wouldn't result in quite as much of an internal mess.

At its core though, I just have a deep-seated hatred for full-on solutions that claim a degree of customizability. It's never been enough for me, and the result has always been unprofessional looking.

Aaaanyway! As far as using smaller, more specific frameworks - I'll absolutely be doing that to save time and effort.

As for the figure drawing lessons, it's not something that's going to happen for a long, long time - if ever. At the end of the day, it's a question of time and ability. I can draw figures reasonably decently enough for my needs, but being able to draw something and being able to describe and explain the process in a way that allows you to teach it to others are quite different. It'd require me to take a considerable amount of time to first retrain myself more formally in figure drawing, and kind of identify my own process, then I'd do the usual thing of arranging it into a set of lessons. I've tried a couple times to do the latter without the former, and it just fell flat.

Granted, that's how I did the other lessons as well - just kind of put them out there and refined them over time by having a lot of people go through them so I could analyze how they absorbed the information I was trying to convey. Unfortunately the quality expected from my lessons is higher now than it was when I started out, and dropping a bunch of half baked figure drawing lessons with the intent to use people as guinea pigs would be pretty damaging. That's the reason I removed the lessons that had been there beforehand. People have a tendency to be most interested in drawing people and characters, so as soon as they'd see drawabox, they'd gravitate towards the figure drawing lessons. Then they'd assume all the content was at about the same level.

It would be nice to one day be able to take the time to work through all of that, and release a lesson plan for figure drawing that I can be proud of, but that's just not feasible right now. Between my job, the critiques, the website expansion and other personal projects that interest me considerably more, there's just no room for it. There's also a wealth of information on figure drawing out there, so when it comes to new lessons I'd like to focus on filling the gaps that other people don't seem to cover too much.

Uncomfortable in the post "Lesson 3: Drawing Plants"

2018-05-08 13:40

I think that would be a fairly wise decision. It sounds to me like you're identifying certain core concepts in your struggles with lesson 3 that are essentially at the core of the earlier lessons, and the fact that you've opened your eyes to them now may make jumping back to earlier lessons an effective way of solidifying your understanding of them.

There is never any shame in going back - just remember not to grind the exercises. Complete the assigned pages for the given lesson, then submit so I can review what you've done and help you identify any misunderstandings.

As for your question at the end there, sort of. It's more a question of what we want to exaggerate in order to sell the illusion that things exist in 3D space. If something's got volume to it, then that's what we exaggerate and try our hardest to convey (often with a simple outer construction followed by a limited number of well planned, well placed contour lines to help describe how that surface turns in space). If however the object is flat, then we have no volume to work with - and so we exaggerate how the object itself flows through 3D space.

At the end of the day, you can think of them being the same thing - capturing how surfaces (be it the surface of a voluminous or flat form) flow through space.

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."

2018-05-08 03:28

I can certainly find ways to expand on how/where individual techniques can be used. But if you've got more to elaborate on, feel free. I'm going to be going back over this whole thread when I start putting together my design plan of how I want to structure the new version of the website, so the more detail you can give in regards to your thoughts and personal needs, the better. Gives me more to sift through, and there's always little gold nuggets laying around where you'd least expect them.

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

2018-05-08 03:24

Advance warning: my critique here is definitely kind of scatterbrained, you'll have to bare with me - I got hammered with a bunch of submissions today, and this is my last of seven after a full day at work. Luckily this has resulted in me ranting about important things that I may not have thought to mention otherwise.

This submission has a nice, healthy mix of solid constructions with strong forms and clear volumes, as well as some that fall a little flat. Some of your strongest include:

• The top 2 on this page

• This bee

• These (excluding the adorable jumping spider)

• I also liked the study on the bottom left of this page, though technically that's not technically a full insect drawing. still cool though, and demonstrates a good grasp of construction and form.

On the other end of the spectrum, some of your weakest included,

• this beetle

• the cricket to the left of this page

• this grasshopper

There's a very clear pattern, and it's not at all uncommon. I see it quite frequently. The issue is that when you move into tackling detail, you have a tendency of doing two things to varying degrees. Firstly, there are signs that when you know you're going to take a drawing into further detail, that you subconsciously hold yourself back from drawing the construction lines as confidently as you otherwise might. As a result, you move onto later phases of construction and detail without having fully convinced yourself of the solidity and threedimensionality (i hereby declare that to be a word) of the forms you've already put down.

By drawing, we are effectively telling lies. Lies that the things we draw on a flat piece of paper are in fact three dimensional objects. The best liars are those who have fully invested themselves in their own lies, and who believe in them completely. At every stage of construction, you must be convinced in the illusion you are trying to create - and if you aren't, then leverage the tools you've been given in previous lessons.

Here's a demonstration of what I mean. You jumped straight from ellipse to layering on those segmented plates without yet having bought into the idea that the ellipse represented a ball, whose surface turned in space. As a result, the segmentation came out quite flat.

Also worth mentioning is the bit I wrote across the top of that page. Detail is all about the cast shadows. Texture manifests as a bunch of tiny forms - the little bumps and layers and divets and whatnot that cause little shadows to be cast across the surface of a larger form. When you've got a series of plates that are layered on top of one another, you get a particular kind of shadow pattern where the shadow is cast from one onto the other. There's a hierarchy there if you look for it, and that's the sort of thing you need to leverage when you want to get into that level of visual complexity.

You've been through plenty of drawing courses, so you've probably noticed by now that I never mention anything about rendering. When it comes to form shadows, I haven't made a peep. This is very intentional. I've found that a lot of drawing courses teach us to convey form through shading. The result of this, I find, is often that the illusion achieved is kind of weak, because that shading is used as a crutch, and a way to avoid learning how to properly convey how those forms turn in space, and how the silhouettes are shaped to reflect this. By steering clear of shading, I force my students to figure out how to convey that sense of form with the tools I've limited them to (which at their core all come down to contour lines).

The contour lines we've been using since lesson 2 are really obvious, manufactured things that are not present in our reference images. So obviously if we were striving to draw pretty renderings of those objects, they wouldn't be of much use. That's why it's important to keep in mind that each drawing you make for these lessons is just an exercise. It's an exercise meant to develop your understanding of construction and 3D space, of how these simple forms can be combined, manipulated and built up to create highly complex, yet structured objects that sell the grand lie that they're not just lines on a page.

Once this grasp of space, and this illusion is firmly ingrained in your mind, you'll be able to draw an ellipse and believe it to be a 3D mass. From there, you'll be able to wrap exoskeletal layers around it directly, grasping fully how they'd curve along its surface. This is ultimately the goal, but since you're not there yet, it's important that you go through all the steps.

And there are a lot of drawings here where you have done just that. The subtle contours you drew on that moth's head and along its legs go a long way to pave the path for other choices you've made that absolutely sell that illusion.

Jumping back momentarily to the whole form shadow thing - I did notice that when you went to add detail to your drawings, that is one way you approached doing it. This is something I want to advise against. There is room for form shadows, but rather than being something we use to convey form, we use it as a tool to convey texture. After all, since we're working with fineliners, which allow us only hard blacks or solid whites, we have to achieve a transition between them somehow. This is where we sneak in our textures. I dig into this a lot deeper on the texture challenge page, so I recommend you give that a read. The long and the short of it is, however - if you're not looking to use it to convey a specific texture, then leave out the form shading altogether. This all but excludes hatching, since we tend to use it as a sort of filler texture for the express purpose of shading.

Ages ago, I mentioned that there were two common issues I was seeing that was holding your work back. I actually touched on the second one already, but to put it plainly, it is that when you jump into detail, you focus too much on the details themselves and get a bit of tunnel vision. This is an issue because the details themselves can very easily come to contradict what our core construction has already described about our object's forms. Remember that every single mark serves as a contour line in its own right, so it can either agree or disagree with what has been described about those underlying forms.

You need to be constantly thinking about those core constructional forms, and often times when it comes to texture and detail, less is more. If given the option to approach texture with a light touch - just a little here, a little extra detail there, etc. - do that, instead of covering everything. This drawing course, and at its essence, drawing in general, is not about capturing a scene in perfect and complete detail. That is something that a camera does, and it does it so well that photographers have to employ a variety of tricks to keep the wealth of visual information from ruining their shot (a task usually handled by the brain as it filters what our eyes see in the world around us).

Drawing is better described as visual communication. That is, our goal is to communicate an idea. Whether that idea is a grasshopper, or a strawberry, or a lush field of poppies under a cloudy sky. No matter how simple or complex the idea, the act of drawing it is a matter of transmitting it into the viewer's head. This does not inherently require us to try to capture every little detail and bit of visual information, as this can often manifest as noise, obscuring and confusing what we're trying to say. Unlike this rambling critique/rant, communication is at its best when it is succinct, clear, and free of all but what is necessary. Where the main ideas are emphasized and clear, and things of lesser importance are left as an afterthought.

This bee, which I pointed out before as being very well done, is an example of succinct communication. The core idea being presented are the forms. The head, the thorax and the abdomen, as well as the legs and the particular way they are bent to carry the insect's weight. They are not obscured or obfuscated in any way. Next, the segmentation of the abdomen - clearly wrapping around the core form and emphasized with the cast shadows you've suggested through your use of line weight. Lastly, and given only a word or two (were this drawing a paragraph), the texture of the fur you've captured - primarily along its silhouette where the slightest marks can achieve the greatest impact. You've made it clear that there's varying degrees of fuzz all over the body, but without really drawing much of it at all. The majority is implied, but that is all that was needed in order to communicate the idea of it clearly.

I'm running up on my character count for this post, so I'll bring it to a close. With all the successful drawings you've got here, you're clearly on the right track. Still, I'd like you to do three more insect drawings. For each of them, I want you to draw them focusing purely on construction. Complete each one separately, and take photographs of them all. Then, once all three have solid constructions, I want you to communicate their texture and detail. Go only as far as you need to communicate the idea of what you see. Focus on cast shadows, and use them to communicate how things are layered, and the general structure of things. Stay away from form shadows, except when necessary as a tool to capture texture in those transition areas between light and dark (as mentioned in the texture challenge notes.

And now I have hit the 10,000 character limit for this post.

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

2018-05-08 02:07

While there are a few issues, the biggest ones (which we'll touch on in a bit) are very clearly a matter of misunderstanding, rather than an problem with your skill level.

Starting with the lines section, you're pretty much spot on here. You're clearly prioritizing flow above accuracy, which is exactly right. The result is that your lines are smooth and consistent. They may be a little off the mark, but that's entirely normal and expected. It'll also improve with practice and time.

The same carries forward into your ellipses, which due to their confident execution, are very smooth and evenly shaped. I did notice that you tend to draw through them a little bit too much - the instructions mention to stick to 2-3 full rounds of the ellipse, but 2 is really best. More than that and you start losing track of the ellipse you're actually trying to draw.

For the most part your plotted perspective boxes are on point. There are a few here and there where you go a bit awry (possibly experimenting, or something else, but most have all their lines going back to their vanishing points.

One of those where things are off can be seen in the bottom right of the middle set on this page (I can see that the page is upside down, but I'm going to refer to the orientation as I see it in the photograph). You can see that top edge of that box's grey face doesn't go off towards any of the vanishing points. There's plenty of that kind of weirdness on the bottom set of this page.

All of these issues tend to come from cases where you start guessing things. The important thing to remember when dealing with perspective where you've got actual vanishing points marked on the page, is that there's generally no guesswork.

Everything has a specific behaviour, and follows some clear rule. If you're unsure of how a line should behave, you can step back and think about those limited sets of possible behaviours and determine how you should draw the line from there.

And that leads us into the real strangeness in this submission - the rough perspective boxes. For the most part, it does not appear as though you're actually drawing these boxes with consideration for the vanishing point itself.

Your linework, and even the construction of the boxes themselves (if you ignore the fact that none of them are actually aiming towards the same vanishing point) are all fairly decent, so this suggests to me that you went into the exercise without fully understanding what was being asked of you.

Give these notes a read. There I detail the three major behaviours lines in this exercise will adhere to. I also recommend that you rewatch the video for this exercise.

Your rotated boxes are decent, and your organic perspective boxes are as well. They both have plenty of room for improvement, but they're exactly where I'd expect them to be for this lesson. They show that you followed the instructions to the best of your ability, and set out on the right path to think through the rotation of forms in 3D space.

We'll work more to really solidify your grasp of these concepts in a bit (by working through the 250 box challenge once I mark this lesson as complete), but first I want you to redo the rough perspective boxes exercise. First reread the notes and rewatch the video I linked above, then give it another shot and submit that portion again.

Assuming you've followed the instructions without any confusion, I'll mark the lesson as complete then, and you'll be able to move onto the 250 box challenge.

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

2018-05-08 01:40

Pretty good work overall! Your arrows flow very nicely through all three dimensions of space, and you're avoiding the common issue where they get a bit trapped in the two dimensions of the page. I'm very pleased to see how you're exploring the depth of the scene, and treating the page as though it were a window, rather than the bounds of what you have to work with.

Your shifting of the degrees of your ellipses in the organic forms with contour ellipses is quite telling - it suggests that you've got a pretty good grasp of how those cross-sections turn in space, and work towards establishing a good sense of the volumes of those sausages.

Your organic forms with contour ellipses are alright, though I do believe that you may want to try overshooting those curves as they hook back around at the edges of your organic forms to really drill that kind of curvature into your mind. At the moment they're falling a little short. Also keep an eye on their alignment to the central minor axis line - many of them are slightly slanted, which tends to help the illusion of the curve wrapping around on one side, but breaks it on the other.

You've definitely made a good start with the dissections, with a good variety of textures, but I can definitely see what you're saying about struggling with having them wrap around the form. The bottom half of the second page was definitely more successful than the top half of that same page, and I can certainly understand why. When it comes to the smaller scales, what you're missing there is the compression that happens when a surface turns away from the viewer.

For clarity's sake, I'm talking about the top left of this page. The scales towards the center (or around the center), where the surface is facing us head-on are drawn at the same size as those closer to the edges. The surface itself however turns away at the edges, which should cause that detail to compress due to this fact. That's why the illusion is not quite selling here. Same goes for the bricks.

It's the same principle as a circle in 3D space. When drawn, it's represented by an ellipse - and as that circle's face turns away from us, the ellipse decreases in its degree, getting narrower and narrower until it flattens into a line.

Here's an example of what I mean.

Moving on, your form intersections are quite well done. You're demonstrating a good grasp of how these forms interact with one another, and how they all sit in 3D space. Your intersections themselves are also fairly well done, though they're more of something I wanted students to try, with no real expectation of success. There were a few issues that I wouldn't usually pick at, but since you were almost there, I figured I might as well point them out: https://i.imgur.com/2ipB3ry.png

Your organic intersections were pretty well done as well, though keep in mind that those drop shadows are cast upon the surfaces of forms - so when the shadow transitions from being cast upon one form to another, there's going to be an obvious change. I went over your page here, you can compare the shadows in mine to yours to see what I mean.

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

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

2018-05-08 01:16

You've actually done a pretty solid job here. I do have a few things to point out, but you're barreling down the right track.

There's only really one issue that's worth mentioning, but it shows up in a few places. Strangely enough however, it doesn't show up everywhere. It has to do with how you're drawing your lines. If you look at your first page of super imposed lines, those marks are smooth and confident. They're not 100% accurate, but when they take off, they maintain a consistent trajectory with no wobbles or bumps.

On the second page however, it's the opposite. They're extremely accurate, but they're a little wobbly and bumpy, where you've allowed your brain to course-correct as you go, rather than trusting in your arm to do what it does best.

The first page is considerably better than the second, because it shows the priorities (flow vs accuracy) in the correct order. Both are important, but a confident execution with no hesitation will always be key. Accuracy will improve with practice, and with the use of the ghosting method, but that confidence comes from how you approach the problem. And you're demonstrating a pretty good grasp of this with your ghosted lines and planes exercises, where you're achieving a pretty good degree of both accuracy and flow.

Going down into your ellipses, you're definitely visibly hesitant here, so you slow down and hesitate when you execute them. As a result, you break the shape sometimes (usually in very small ways, but sometimes more noticeably) to better fit within the spaces you have. Always remember that your brain should only play a role when you're preparing with the ghosting method. Once you execute, your arm has received its marching orders, and should execute them with - you guessed it - confidence.

Your plotted and rough perspective boxes are quite solid. Your rotated boxes are good as far as keeping them consistently together in a structured manner, although you're not quite achieving the full range of rotation. This is a pretty common issue where our brain tricks us to think we've rotated forms more than we actually have (since our brain prefers things to exist on a grid). If you actually were to extend the lines of the outermost boxes and their neighbours, you'd actually find that they were pretty close to converging towards the same vanishing point - meaning the two outermost layers of your boxes are more or less running parallel with one another.

The trick would be to really exaggerate the rotation of those outermost boxes, bringing one vanishing point even closer to the box itself, as it slides along its axis, making that convergence more dramatic.

Your organic perspective boxes are far better than I would have expected from a student at this stage. You're demonstrating a pretty solid grasp of 3D space, and I'm very pleased to see that you drew each box even where it was blocked by its neighbours.

I'm going to go ahead and mark this lesson as complete. I require most students to complete the 250 box challenge. For you, I'm going to leave that as optional (though I would like you to at least read through those notes and watch the video there, as it discusses a few useful techniques). You may feel free to move onto lesson 2.

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

2018-05-08 00:59

Great work overall! Your lines section was very confidently done, and you're applying the concepts discussed in the lesson quite well. There's no real signs of hesitation, and while your accuracy will improve with time, your approach is spot on for producing smooth, consistent marks.

Your ellipses are almost showing the same strengths, though there's just a little bit of hesitation in them that causes them to stiffen up. The same principle applies - ghosting for precision, followed by a confident execution results on a smooth, evenly shaped ellipse. Yours are almost there, but in many of the cases I can see slight inconsistencies where the curvature of your ellipses accelerates or slows down, resulting in a shape that appears a little less than even.

This however improves over the set, and by the time you hit the funnels, you're drawing them with a considerably higher degree of confidence.

Your boxes were pretty solid as well. In your plotted perspective, I noticed that you experimented a little with boxes that fell outside of your two vanishing points, resulting in all kinds of weirdness. This is totally normal - as a box falls out of the circle defined by the two vanishing points (imagine the space in between being the diameter of a circle), you start to get hit by severe distortion.

Your rough perspective boxes are looking good, but watch your horizontals and verticals. Remember that the horizontals need to run parallel to the horizon and your verticals need to run perpendicular to it. You've got a bit of slantyness here and there. (that all assumes the boxes run parallel to the ground plane, which in this exercise, they all do).

Very nice work with the rotated boxes - you've done an excellent job of keeping everything structured and consistent, and have shown a solid sense of 3D space.

When it comes to rotating those forms a little more arbitrarily, as shown in the organic perspective boxes, you've definitely got some room for improvement - but this is totally normal and expected. This exercise is intentionally challenging, and is really only there to force students to think a little differently about how forms sit in space. The rotated boxes was similarly challenging, but you definitely nailed that one.

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 linked on that challenge page before starting the work.

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

2018-05-08 00:49

Overall you're doing a pretty solid job. There are some issues, but as a whole you've demonstrated a good grasp of the material from this lesson. Here are a few things I observed:

• In your super imposed lines exercise, it's quite clear that you were a bit too focused on nailing your guideline very closely, and as a result your line wavered back and forth, instead of being smooth and consistent (and perhaps less accurate). As discussed here, we want the opposite.

• For the most part, you got the ghosted lines exercise correct in this regard. You focused more on being confident and smooth with your execution, while applying the repeated ghosting allowed you to maintain most of your accuracy. Good work here.

• In your planes, it was a bit of a mixed bag. You've got a lot of confident marks, but you also have some that show a considerable amount of hesitation. There are definitely many more that were well done however. It's also understandable that the extra-large ones wavered. You'll work up to those with a fair bit of practice, and it's important to give them a shot, but I'm glad that overall you had a pretty good balance of lengths.

• Overall your ellipses were fairly well done. The same principles apply, where confidence leads to a smooth, even shape. For the most part, you didn't hesitate too much, and were able to draw your ellipses well. You did get a bit stiffer when you started putting the ellipses in planes, but all things considered you still focused on the right priorities.

• For your funnels, I do think you'll want to focus a little more on keeping them correctly aligned with that central minor axis line, so it cuts each ellipse into two equal, symmetrical halves. It does look like you were aware of this, but perhaps haven't yet developed enough control of your arm to get close enough to the ellipse you want. This of course will improve with practice.

• Solid work with the plotted perspective boxes.

• Your rough perspective boxes are well done, and I'm glad to see that you applied the double checking method. Your line quality isn't quite as good as your ghosted lines exercise though, possibly because you applied a little less time to each mark, thinking about the box as a whole, rather than focusing on the integrity of each individual component. Try and give yourself the opportunity to create each mark to the best of your ability, and set aside thoughts of the overall form you're trying to achieve.

• Nice work with the rotated boxes - I can see that you heeded my advice about keeping the gaps between your boxes narrow, which helped with your estimation of your angles, and also kept everything well structured. I noted that you decided not to draw the corner boxes - most people find these to be the most difficult, but all the more reason to tough it out and put them in. Even if it "ruins" the rest of your efforts. At the end of the day, each one of these are just exercises. The only way to ruin it is to neglect to take full advantage of the opportunities to learn that it affords.

• With your organic perspective boxes, you're demonstrating a well developing sense of 3D space. There is definitely room for growth here, but you're doing a little better than I would have expected from a student at this stage, on this front.

I'm going to go ahead and mark this lesson as complete. I'd like you to move onto the 250 box challenge next to help you solidify what you've already demonstrated here in regards to your understanding of how forms can be rotated in 3D space. Be sure to read through the notes and watch the video linked there on that challenge page. The points about drawing through your forms, and the technique demonstrated in regards to checking for mistakes by extending your lines towards their implied vanishing points will be very helpful as you continue to progress and grow.

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

2018-05-08 00:16

I've got quite a few submissions that were dropped on me today, so I'm going to try and focus on the meat of my critique and dispense with some of the filler:

• For your arrows, you've got some nice confidence and consistency to your lines for the most part, but the arrows do feel like they're somewhat trapped in the two dimensions of your page. Try playing with the scale of either end (picking one to be farther away and the other to be closer) and exaggerate them to be larger/smaller to really capture the sense that they're moving through all three dimensions of space. Additionally, vary things up more - you tend to be repeating sets of the same flow, you'll definitely want to change things up more. Actually, as I reached the last page of arrows, I noticed that you were starting to exaggerate your scale and push into the depth of the scene more - so keep that up.

• Organic forms with contour ellipses are generally looking pretty good. You're showing some awareness of how the degree of your ellipses should shift over the set, so that's good to see. Just in case, I'm going to toss you these notes, but from what I'm seeing you probably already understand the principles presented there.

• Your organic forms with contour curves are okay, I'm glad that you're overshooting them slightly to get the sense of them wrapping around. That said, you definitely have some serious stiffness to those curves, while also suffering from somewhat poor accuracy. This suggests to me that you're applying the ghosting method and that you're trying to draw them confidently, but you're hesitating at the last second, kind of getting the worst of both worlds. Keep trying to find your rhythm with the ghosting method, taking your time to really drill that repeated motion into your muscle memory. Once you do execute though, trust in your arms and don't worry about mistakes. You've got some curves that are actually very smooth and confident, so and they also tend to be among the more accurate, so just trust yourself a little more.

• Damnit. I should have looked through all of your pages for that exercise. You definitely improve on that front, although I'm noticing that at times your alignment with that minor axis line can be a little off, so keep that in mind.

• You've got an interesting variety of textures in your dissections, and some are definitely more successful than others. I think what's important to note right now is that you're jumping into the simplification of your textures without fully absorbing what it is that you're meant to observe. So when you go to simplify, you're only working from part of the total amount of information, leaving you with textures that sometimes feel a little cartoony. I recommend that you read the notes on the texture challenge page - there I break things up into phases of learning how to approach this kind of material, and it should help clarify these principles. Antoher thing worth remind you of - on this page, if you look at the texture that looks kind of like cracked glass towards the upper right, remember that you still want your textures to wrap around the rounded form - here you've drawn it mostly as though the surface were flat.

• Your form intersections are pretty solid. You're doing a great job of demonstrating a strong understanding of 3D space and how these forms interact with each other within it. You've also done a pretty great job with the intersections themselves (which are admittedly especially challenging, and not really the focus of this lesson due to their difficulty).

• Your organic intersections are a little mixed. Pages like this one are pretty well done, aside from the tiny bean towards the upper left (when the page is turned rightside up), as it's unclear what that is even resting on. If it were resting on the larger form in front of it, it would be positioned a little differently, wrapping around its surface. Also worth mentioning there - the shadow that larger form casts down towards the left should turn to follow the surface upon which it's cast. It's cast first on another organic form, but then the shadow falls across the floor, so there should be a clear change. This page on the other hand, is extremely confusing to look at, and likely doesn't actually make that much sense. It's important that you keep the structure of forms straight in your head as you draw them - unless you're aiming to be MC Escher :P

Anyway, overall you're doing a pretty good job. Keep up the good work, and be sure to continue incorporating these exercises into a regular warmup routine, along with those from lesson 1. I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete, so feel free to move onto lesson 3.

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."

2018-05-07 22:59

We do actually have a pretty massive discord server.

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."

2018-05-07 22:12

Would some kind of a table of contents style set of shortcuts as a sidebar help in this regard? So you can skip straight to the exercise you want more quickly.

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."

2018-05-07 21:18

.. yeah, i'm gonna ban it.

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."

2018-05-07 20:38

I definitely agree. The self critique resources being separated out definitely wasn't a great call on my part. Once I can figure out how to present the information in a more streamlined fashion, presenting some kind of bullet point checklist of the common mistakes people make right there alongside the exercises themselves would be much more helpful than having them sitting on a separate page.

A reputation system would also be right at home for this kind of community, giving folks more confidence in the fact that they can trust a person's response.

Thanks for your feedback!

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."

2018-05-07 20:01

That leads to a pretty interesting, yet straightforward notion - rather than having your posts bumped strictly by activity within the thread, your activity in others' threads could be a significant factor.

Abuse is always a concern no matter what the solution, but I the bigger worry is having people spreading misinformation due to their own misunderstanding. Perhaps lesson 1 posts are exempt from that factor, so those looking for critiques for lesson 2 upwards can bump their own by helping those still at lesson 1.

I'll also check that book out. So much to think about! Thanks again for your input.

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."

2018-05-07 19:47

That's a very intriguing idea. Definitely a much more organic way of approaching the dissemination of information. Traditional forums are tried-and-true in a lot of ways, but also very rigid, and your ideas here are definitely good steps towards alleviating that. Thanks for the insight!

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."

2018-05-07 19:17

Yep, that's definitely something I'm aware of, and it's one of the reasons I haven't done something like this yet. I actually intended to do this pretty soon after launching the website, but decided to stick around on reddit for all the free publicity.

What I'm basically hoping at this point is that we've grown enough to be able to stand on our own. Most of the places where the lessons are recommended, people are mentioning drawabox rather than /r/artfundamentals, so I'm hoping that the transition won't be too detrimental. It is certainly a risk though, so you've brought up a very good point.

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."

2018-05-07 18:19

The current website will exist as it does now until I'm ready to release the new one. There may be a momentary drop while I'm fiddling with the last little bit of the switch-over, but it won't be more than a day.

As for bringing on other folks, it's not something I'm eager to do, as paying someone fairly for their time and effort will cut into my revenue margins and would cease to make drawabox a worthwhile endeavour from a monetary standpoint.

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."

2018-05-07 17:53

I honestly have no idea why it does that, though I'll definitely look into fixing that bug in the new version of the site.

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."

2018-05-07 17:48

Thanks for the feedback! Once upon a time I had thought a bit about ways that students could mark each other's lessons as complete, but to be completely honest I totally forgot about that. That's definitely something I'll want to tackle in this new website. The idea about rating other peoples' work before doing so for your own is a really intriguing idea, too.

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

2018-05-07 00:35

Based on my records, patreon's been unable to charge you since the month of January 2018, which includes the last month in which you received a critique. I saw that you'd deleted your pledge earlier today, and then repledged just before posting this homework submission.

The unpaid month aside, I'm sure you can understand that I'm not sure if your charge will be declined at the end of this month as well. This is the downside of offering to do critiques up-front, as I have to rely on the student to hold up their end of the bargain at the end of the month.

So, you have a couple options:

• You can wait until next month, by which time we'll be able to tell whether or not your pledge is going to go through

• You can cancel your current pledge and utilize the free homework critiques (by posting your work directly to the subreddit).

Uncomfortable in the post "Lesson 5: Drawing Animals"

2018-05-06 23:41

The last 3 should be full body. It's up to you if you want them to be old or new, it doesn't matter to me.

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

2018-05-06 23:25

This is really, really phenomenal work. You've demonstrated an incredible understanding of 3D space, and how the different forms relate to one another. This is essentially a perfect example of how this lesson should be done. So, rather than pointing out mistakes and such as I usually would (because frankly, there are none worth mentioning), I'm going to take the time to point out everything you did right.

• You made absolutely no guesswork (or at least, none where you could help it). Everything was clearly subdivided, calculated, and hammered out). You made spared no lines, and weren't afraid to put everything necessary down.

• You leveraged line weight to great effect to then pry your object free from the (highly structured) mess of construction lines.

• You were at the same time extremely subtle with your line weight, and never at any point was it overbearing.

• Through the whole time, you demonstrated a great deal of confidence.

All that said, looking over your work shows a remarkable amount of progress. While you demonstrated all of these good qualities althroughout, if you compare things like that initial chair with your later pages, you show considerable growth in your understanding of 3D space.

My favourite page, when compared against those early few, stands in a class of its own. And that's not unique, it's a strong trend in all of your later pages.

You've done a fantastic job here, and should be extremely proud of yourself. Keep up the fantastic work, and feel free to move onto the next lesson. I look forward to seeing your vehicles, as I am certain they'll be just as good, if not better.

Uncomfortable in the post "Lesson 5: Drawing Animals"

2018-05-06 23:16

So you've got a variety of levels of success here. Some of your constructions are a bit catastrophic, and some - specifically your honey badgers, squid and frill-necked lizard - are coming along quite well. It shows progress over the whole set, but there are a few issues that I feel need to be addressed.

The biggest thing I want to hammer home is that in your mind, things are very.. curvy. This is pretty normal to see at this point, and it's an issue we usually address more in the next lesson (because we suddenly jump from organic objects to geometric), but I want to try and hammer it home here instead.

The thing about a curving line is that it's vague. An arbitrary curved line can be seen as representing a range of combinations of segmented straight lines. If you were to take a curve, it could be represented in an approximate way by, say, three straight lines - and you could have any number of combinations of three such lines represent it with equal degrees of success.

In that sense, a curved line is like a vague statement when it comes to visual communication.

Instead, we want to be much more firm in our statements - so, we try and regard our rounded forms as being separated into planes, and when we draw lines along those surfaces, we also break them up into straighter segments. Those segments won't always be completely straight, but in breaking them up in this way, we'll be making them less vague.

So, for instance, when you're carving out the eyesocket of an animal's head, you're usually just drawing an ellipse, which is quite vague. Instead, you want to carve it with a series of straighter lines, showing how the different planes of the head that you're cutting into are oriented in space.

In certain places, I also saw cases where your observation wasn't necessarily the best. The concept of being vague applies here as well. When you look at a reference, you want to identify the strongest, most distinct features (that is, lines, or orientations of certain forms, etc.) and then hinge your entire construction on them. It's not just a matter of placing a ball here, and a ball there - you need to think about how you need those masses to be oriented in order to best capture what it is you're trying to construct.

So, I drew a couple demos for you, along with notes and observations of your won work in relationship with the reference images: https://i.imgur.com/8f8BF2O.jpg

I also have this drama puma demo which I did a while back, since you had the a drawing from the same reference included in this set. It's not as clear as I'm doing more of this in my head through visualization than the kind of concrete construction I want to see from my students, but it may still help as I do leverage the idea of "thinking boxy" quite heavily.

I'd like you to do 5 more animal drawings, with the first two being a redo of the two demos I drew there for you (the toucan and roe deer's head). I'm glad that for the most part in this set, you focused on construction over detail - I want you to stick to that with these additional pages as well. Focus entirely on your forms and construction, don't include any detail or texture whatsoever.

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

2018-05-06 22:18

You've got a great body of work here, with a fair bit of variety in terms of levels of strength. Some of these constructions are excellent - the toaster, the camcorder and the hand sanitizer bottle are all very well done. Others are somewhat more mediocre, but that's pretty normal as you get your head around how these forms are going to fit together in 3D space, and as you figure out what kinds of forms to focus on.

I did notice that, aside from the hand sanitizer, the other objects that had more cylinders involved tended to be weaker. This definitely draws attention to the fact that you didn't yet complete (or at least submit) the 250 cylinder challenge, and seemingly as a result didn't employ certain principles such as constructing cylinders around a minor axis in a number of cases. This definitely held you back in those areas, and is the reason that I mention this at the beginning of the intro video for this lesson.

So, needless to say, I think you'll definitely want to tackle the cylinder challenge to sure yourself up on that front.

One thing that did jump out at me in your kitchen scale drawing was the circular form on the front of the object. From the looks of it, it may have been positioned a little bit arbitrarily. This is the sort of thing that you'd definitely want to do a little more subdivision and leverage those little perspective tricks (like mirroring a measurement across the center of a face) to achieve greater precision.

Aside from those points, you definitely do a great job here of demonstrating to me that you're understanding how these forms interact with one another in 3D space, and how you can combine them to create complex objects. I definitely think you made the right call as far as eschewing most of the detail goes - you focused purely on the core forms, and while the result was simplistic in some ways, it's more that it was complex in all the right places.

Keep up the great work and consider this lesson complete. I do want you to move onto the cylinder challenge as I mentioned, and once you've got that done, you can move onto lesson 7.

Uncomfortable in the post "250 Box Challenge"

2018-05-06 22:07

Nice work completing the challenge. I do have a few things to point out about your set that should help you as you continue to move forwards:

• The first thing that jumped out at me was that you kind of lack variety. You're mostly drawing the boxes at roughly the same orientation, or at least you're grouping many of them as being from the same angle. You're also pretty consistently focusing only on boxes with a very shallow rate of convergence. You should have a balanced variety of boxes, in terms of their rotation/orientation as well as the rate of convergence of their lines. When the vanishing points are very, very far away, those lines wont' converge much - but if you move them closer to the box, the foreshortening will become more dramatic, and the lines will converge more visibly and more quickly.

• When you apply the line extension method, you extended them in both directions. You only really need to extend them towards their implied vanishing point, to identify the nature of their convergence. In fact, extending in both directions can definitely get quite confusing.

To be completely honest, I think that you would have gained a great deal more from this exercise if you hadn't stuck purely to such a shallow convergence for all of your lines. They're largely near isometric (where lines that are parallel to one another in 3D space also run parallel to one another in 2D space).

I am going to mark this challenge as complete, as you certainly did the work - but you should definitely make freely rotated boxes a significant part of your general warmup routine in order to get more practice in with a greater amount of variety.

You are of course free to move onto lesson 2.

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

2018-05-06 21:59

Your lines section is really quite well done. You've got a lot of confidence to your strokes, and you're primarily focusing on the flow of those lines over your accuracy, which is definitely key to executing smooth marks. So keep up the great work there.

For the most part, your ellipses follow the same trend, with confident execution leading to evenly shaped ellipses. There are some minor points I should mention though. If you look at this page, we can see that you're not focusing too much in some of these rows on having the ellipses fit snugly within their intended spaces. Some are well done, but you've got rows where the ellipses are floating a bit more arbitrarily within the space they're given. When doing this exercise, always set out a space in which they are to be contained. This allows you to assess whether or not you actually drew the ellipse you were after or not.

Also, a couple things about your funnels. A lot of your funnels have the sides inverted (so they're narrow towards the ends and wide towards the middle). I strongly insist that you don't deviate from the instructions of the given exercise, and just stick to the exercises I've assigned (in this case, having the funnel get narrow towards the center and wide towards the ends).

Additionally, remember that in the instructions I mentioned that the degree of your ellipses should change throughout the funnel, being very low/narrow towards the center, and wider/more circular towards the ends.

Overall you're doing well in this section, just be more mindful of the instructions of each exercise.

One thing I noticed in your boxes section is that your adherence to the methods covered in the first section (mainly the ghosting method) tends to waver. For example, there's a good deal of chicken scratching visible in your rotated boxes, and some in your organic perspective boxes. It's very important that you get used to applying the ghosting method to every single mark you put down.

It's actually pretty common to see students who really nail the lines section, but when it comes to the boxes, the linework weakens somewhat. They tend to start seeing each exercise as being broken up into "units" of time or effort. In the lines section, each unit corresponds to a single line. In the boxes section however, the same unit of time is then applied to a whole box (which consists of several lines). It's important to remind yourself that regardless of what it is you're drawing, you need to pay the same amount of attention and care to each individual mark you're putting down.

Your rough perspective boxes are generally fairly well done, though a couple things here:

• Watch your horizontals and verticals. Remember that the horizontals need to be running parallel to the horizon line, and the verticals need to be running perpendicular to it. It's easy to end up with a bit of slanting here and there, so just keep an eye on it.

• In regards to the correction method, I'm glad you did apply it in some places, but you really should be doing so to all of those boxes, not just a couple. Furthermore, what you did is not exactly what was instructed - rather than drawing the line from your point to the vanishing point, I want you to just extend the lines you've drawn up to where they intersect with the horizon, as shown here. By looking at the distance between those intersection points and the vanishing point, you can get a more concrete sense of how far off your estimation of perspective was.

Onto your rotated boxes - here, you missed a pretty important part of the exercise. That is, drawing through your boxes. In the instructions, I mention the importance of drawing all of the lines that make up each box, including those on the far side of each form. This helps us to better understand how each box sits in 3D space, and how that changes as the boxes rotate in space. It's key to this exercise.

I am pleased however that for the most part, you tried to keep the gaps between your boxes narrow and consistent - this is quite helpful in keeping the exercise structured.

Lastly, your organic perspective boxes were a decent attempt. There are certainly plenty of issues we'll deal with, but this is completely normal and expected at this point. That goes for both this exercise as well as the rotated boxes - I assigned these now in order to push students to think differently about how forms can be rotated in space, and have no expectation of perfection, or even success.

Now, while there are definitely issues, you should be ready to move onto the next step, so I'll mark this lesson as complete. Next I want you to move onto the 250 box challenge. Be sure to read through the notes on that page and watch the video linked there before starting the work. Follow the instructions to the letter, and don't stray from them. Apply the ghosting method to every single mark you put down, and upon the completion of each full page of boxes, go back and apply the line-extension method explained in the video to identify where you tend to go wrong.

Uncomfortable in the post "250 Box Challenge"

2018-05-05 19:38

Nicely done! You show considerable progress through the set, and continue to improve - up until the last page, where I think nearing your goal may have made you rush somewhat. That's understandable of course.

As you continue to move forwards, you will also want to experiment with the use of line weight to help increase the cohesiveness and solidity of your forms, as that will help kick them up to the next level. There are notes on this topic on the challenge page, so be sure to give them a read.

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

Uncomfortable in the post "Lesson 3: Drawing Plants"

2018-05-05 19:33

I put a considerable amount of time into writing notes directly onto your work, so the written component of this critique will be brief. You're moving in the right direction, but there are several key issues that need to be resolved before you can move forwards.

• When drawing, it is important that you convince yourself that, instead of drawing flat shapes and collections of lines in on a 2D page, you are constructing solid forms that exist within a 3D world, to which your piece of paper is merely a window. There are many signs here that you're still trapped on that flat page, and you need to push to see beyond it. Before you can convince anyone else that what you're drawing is 3D, you must first convince yourself. Think about how everything you put down exists in three dimensions.

• When drawing branches, you are definitely struggling with keeping your lines flowing together, and there are a lot of very visible breaks.

• Construction is about working from simple to complex. You have a tendency to jump ahead and skip steps, attempting to draw complex information without the appropriate scaffolding having been laid down to support it. A big example of this is that you jump into fairly complex edges in your leaves too soon.

• Your observation is also quite lacking - looking at your drawing of this plant, specifically the flowering buds at the top, there's little sign that you observed it very carefully, as your drawing of that section was highly symbolic. You need to ensure that whenever you put down a mark, it is in the attempt at constructing some form that is present in your drawing in some fashion, and that you continually look back at your reference to rebuild your mental understanding of what it is that you're drawing.

Anyway, here are the notes: https://imgur.com/a/9n0h5ag

I want you to do another page of branches, another page of leaves, and four more plant drawings. Take your time, and make sure you're applying the simple concepts from lesson 1 such as extensive use of the ghosting method. While you do execute confident marks in certain places, they tend to lack control - and when you execute more controlled marks, they tend to stiffen up. The ghosting method is meant to balance these out, allowing you to invest a lot of time into preparation beforehand, followed by a confident execution relying on muscle memory rather than conscious thought. That you're not quite able to balance the two just yet suggests that you still need to work considerably on refining your use of the method.

Edit: I forgot to mention, the way you apply shadows on this page and several others is a technique you should avoid, as it results in a highly disjointed effect. Rather than constructing cast shadow shapes, you're effectively just making the line weights unnaturally heavy (and uniformly so over that section). It seems like something of an attempt at breaking up the image without actually giving thought to how the shadows would be cast. Shortcuts like this tend to make things look worse.

Uncomfortable in the post "Lesson 5: Drawing Animals"

2018-05-05 00:47

There's considerable improvement here in your application of the constructional method, with the harpy eagle coming out especially well. The horse's head and torso were also quite successful.

One thing you'll want to continue contending with is the matter of complexity. Remember that while we leverage simplification quite a bit, this is not so our final results are vastly simplified relative to what we're drawing. For example, take a look at your lioness' paws. They are definitely extremely simple, and an actual lion's paw is going to have a lot more to it. Of course, in your reference the paws were not visible, but there's plenty of other reference you could be using to fill in those gaps.

Similarly, while your fox has come along quite well (and is definitely stronger than the lioness), there are still areas where certain strong characteristics of the reference don't come through in your drawing. Take a look at this. As you can see in the comparison, there are combinations flows that tend to be more complex in the reference, which you've oversimplified in your drawing. While we want to simplify the forms we use for construction, we still want to capture the same rhythms and flows that are present.

Anyway, all that is to say that you've got plenty of room for improvement. You have however made considerable strides, and simply need more practice (as one would expect). I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete, so feel free to move onto the next lesson. I think you might find that the next one will force you to think a little differently about these particular topics, as geometric forms make us deal a lot with taking smooth, mechanical curves and breaking them down into boxier approximations before rounding them off at the end.

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

2018-05-05 00:36

I'm not sure anyone truly enjoys failure, but you've definitely found the part in which one can find enjoyment. What you're saying certainly does make sense.

Overall, you've done a pretty fantastic job. I have a couple suggestions to make, but all in all you've done better than most at this stage, and have demonstrated an exceptional grasp of the material, especially towards the end. Like many people, you may have gotten a little trapped in your own head, a little too caught up in your self doubts, to see that you were doing just fine all along.

You've captured an excellent sense of flow with your arrows, and your organic forms with contour lines establish a strong sense of volume. You're doing a pretty good job of following the surface of your forms, and describing how that surface distorts through space in doing so. My only recommendation here is specific to the contour curves - don't leave the central minor axis line out. You'll notice that in the demonstrations, I still utilize it. It's important because it serves as a guide for how your ellipses should be aligned. When you leave it out, you become more susceptible to having your contour curves slant so they no longer run perpendicular to the overall flow of the form, which itself can cause other issues.

Your dissections are well balanced, and you're doing a pretty good job of paying attention to the textures you're trying to capture. What I do want to recommend here however is to steer clear of using those overly hatchy lines. They end up being quite chaotic and uncontrolled, and generally will drive one away from thinking about what kind of marks can be used to capture the specific details they're seeing. You always want your linework to be intentional, the result of clear forethought and consideration, rather than allowing repetition to do the work for you. Fortunately your use of hatching was minimal, though it certainly was present.

Your form intersections were fantastic, and you did a great job of capturing the solidity of the forms, and also demonstrated a great understanding of how they sit in 3D space and relate to one another. The only thing I wanted to point out was that with your spheres in particular, you'd draw through those ellipses too many times (go around 2-3 times total, no more and no less - and 2 is frankly better than 3), resulting in your lines getting quite loose and losing the ellipse you were trying to nail. As a result, you'd go back over it to replace the rougher sphere with a single clearer mark. This is something I advise you not to do in the form intersection video, because attempting to replace linework with a "clean-up" pass tends to result in stiffer lines. By eschewing the clean-up pass, you force yourself to work on tightening up those initial lines without giving up the confidence that keeps them smooth and even.

Lastly, your organic intersections were excellent. You really nailed how those forms sag against one another, and captured their complex interactions.

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

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

2018-05-04 01:26

Ah! Sorry about that. A few of the threads had been locked due to age. I've created new ones, but I'll go ahead and write my critique here.

You've definitely got a lot of great analyses here, but there are also a great many cases where you went a bit off track with what was intended. You certainly did learn from them regardless, but there's an important distinction that I need to emphasize that you'll be able to make use of as you continue on.

In many of these - like the tire, snake, feather, mushroom, pine cone, rose, etc, you didn't follow the instructions of the exercise. Rather than simply doing an extremely detailed drawing of the object in question, the point is to set aside any of its major form information (like the cylinder of the tire), and focus purely on the little bumps and irregularities on the surface of that core form. Think of it as though you're skinning the object and laying that skin flat. The original form is entirely irrelevant - we want to study the texture so we can then wrap it around any form we wish (as we do in the dissections exercise).

Now you do have a lot of instances where you've done the exercise correctly (at least in that regard). Another issue that I see more commonly done though is that you're not always respecting the purpose of that block of solid black on the left side of the longer rectangle in each row. The point there is that I want you to have a sort of goal to aim for when it comes to the sheer density of your texture towards that left side. You need to blend your texture into it to the point that the solid black's border is no longer discernible.

In some cases you did work towards this, like that first hessian texture, but you didn't push the density far enough for it to blend into the solid black. There's still a very clear jump. If you look at my example, you'll see that the texture flows right into it, and you can't actually pinpoint where that border once was.

The reason this is an important skill to develop is that we can't always put in every little scratch and mark when adding texture to a drawing. We can't always record every little bit of visual information, because this is going to make things distractingly noisy, and will result in a lot of unintended focal areas and different portions of the drawing competing for the viewer's attention.

By learning to control our density like this, we can allow the majority of that textured area to become a solid black or white, and focus our texture only in the transition area between. Texture itself just becomes a way of creating a value scale (the greys between white and black). We end up being able to communicate the overall surface texture of a form in this transitional area without being overly distracting or noisy.

Anyway, I hope this clears up some issues. You certainly have put the work in, and have done a lot of intense studying of various textures, so I am going to give you the badge for this challenge.

Uncomfortable in the post "250 Box Challenge"

2018-05-04 01:08

Looking through these was actually quite interesting. For the most part, I think the impact of learning the importance of drawing through your forms, and applying that extension method as conscientiously as you did was pretty significant even near the beginning. Your boxes were already feeling quite solid, and while there were some convergence issues here and there that you were identifying, overall you were doing great.

Then as you progressed, you seemed to get a little... bored. Like you blew all of your gas on those first few pages, drawing a lot of fantastic, confident forms with strong weights and a great sense of space, and then burned out somewhat. Towards the middle of the set, your boxes were more subdued, like your interest had waned and the energy you were putting into these powerful forms had dissipated. They weren't bad, and spatially you were still progressing, but the line quality did drop.

That's.. pretty understandable - this isn't exactly a fun exercise.

Anyway, that said - after that lull in the middle, you started picking up again. Your line weights became confident again, and you finished up quite strong. It was a wild ride. So, overall you're doing great. You've reinforced a pretty strong grasp of 3D space, and leveraged the techniques to great effect - hopefully learning and internalizing the importance of drawing through your forms. You can definitely see the clear difference between these boxes and those you drew for the organic perspective exercise in lesson 1.

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

Uncomfortable in the post "25 Texture Challenge"

2018-05-03 17:28

Old thread got locked, those of you eligible for private critiques can submit your work here (and all others are welcome to submit their work to the main subreddit for a community critique).

Uncomfortable in the post "Lesson 7: Drawing Vehicles"

2018-05-03 17:26

Old thread got locked, those eligible for private critiques can submit their work here (and all others are welcome to submit their work to the main subreddit for a community critique).

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

2018-05-03 17:24

Old thread got locked, those eligible for private critiques can submit their work here (and all others are welcome to submit their work to the main subreddit for a community critique).

Uncomfortable in the post "250 Box Challenge"

2018-05-02 22:27

Yup, you're good to move onto lesson 2.

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

2018-05-02 20:49

Looking great so far! Your linework is extremely confident, and there's no sign of hesitation. This shows me that your priorities are in order, as you're focusing on nailing the smooth flow of your lines before concerning yourself with accuracy. This is spot on, as accuracy will improve with practice, but flow is a matter of approach.

Remember that homework submissions should include the entirety of a lesson's assigned work, so in this case that means lines, ellipses and boxes. Also, imgur allows you to create albums, which can be very handy when getting your work together.

You're on the right track, so keep at it. I look forward to seeing your full submission - and when you do submit it, go ahead and include these pages as well.

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

2018-05-02 20:46

Pretty nice work overall! You've got a lot of confidence to your linework, which results in some nice, smooth strokes and no sign of hesitation, which is excellent.

With your ellipses, you'll definitely want to keep working on tightening things up, but you're definitely showing that you've got your priorities in order (again, a matter of confidence/flow over accuracy). Since you do have that confidence in spades, it's definitely time to work towards improving control. But special emphasis on how you ghost your lines and ellipses, as this is what will allow you to improve that accuracy while maintaining your flow.

Your rough perspective boxes are pretty well done, though I did catch a few lines that were slanting at times. Remember that you want those horizontals to run parallel to the horizon line at all times. It's understandable that you might miss a few, but I believe what I'm seeing there comes more from not putting as much emphasis on preparation before making the mark.

You certainly made a solid effort at the rotated boxes - it needs a lot of work, but that's really expected. I am pleased to see that for the most part you did try to keep the gaps between your boxes narrow and consistent (as instructed in the lesson). I think what still caused you trouble however was similar to your rough perspective boxes - when lines should have been parallel to one of the axes, they still ended up slanted, so it's these issues with your execution that made everything else weaken along the way. As with before, the ghosting method is really the cure here, and taking the time to prepare properly before each stroke.

Your organic perspective boxes similarly have lots of room for improvement, and once again that's intentional. I've dumped you into the challenge or rotating boxes freely in 3D space without actually explaining how to tackle that. This is largely so students would be forced to think about rotating forms differently.

I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete. I want 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 before starting the work. Along with being an opportunity to improve your grasp of freely rotated forms, and 3D space in general, it's also an opportunity to work on your line control, and the use of the ghosting method.

Uncomfortable in the post "250 Box Challenge"

2018-05-02 20:32

You improved on quite a few fronts through this set. Not only did your sense of construction as applied to each box get stronger, with the resulting forms feeling more solid and consistent, but the confidence with which you drew your marks improved considerably.

I do think that you peaked around 150, which was about the time you stopped applying the line-extension method. After that, your lines start to wobble a bit more so they're not drawn with the same kind of confidence, or perhaps the same care as far as ghosting goes. My guess is that that's the point where your patience wore thin. When that happens, take a break. Try to always tackle the work at your best.

Another thing I noticed was that you definitely had more success with boxes where the vanishing points were relatively close, and the rate of convergence was fairly dramatic. This makes a lot of sense, as it's easier to gauge the convergence towards a point that you can see, as opposed to one that's much farther away. That said, this sort of shallower foreshortening, where the vanishing points are off the page and the convergence is more gradual, are going to come up a lot more frequently, as it suggests a much more relatable scale to that box. Dramatic foreshortening tells us a box is really large, like looking at the top of a building from the ground.

So, you're definitely going to want to keep pushing yourself to practice with that shallower foreshortening. Those circumstances are also the ones where you're going to want to employ that error-checking more stringently. You actually did move more towards shallow foreshortening in the second half of your boxes, but that's also where you stopped extending your lines.

I'd recommend going back over them to at least apply the error checking method to the boxes you missed, so you can get a better idea of the type of errors you tend to make.

That said, overall you're doing pretty well, and I'm very pleased with the quality of your linework and your use of linework where your work peaked. Definitely gave the impression of strong, solid forms, and a great sense of 3D space.

Keep it up, and consider this challenge complete.

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

2018-05-02 16:24

Looks like you forgot to include a link to your work! I've recorded this post in my homework backlog, so just be sure to fix the missing link and I'll get to critiquing it later today.

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

2018-05-02 16:21

I don't currently have you down as being eligible for private homework critiques (that's reserved for those who help keep drawabox going through patreon, though if you are a recent patron be sure to check your inbox, as I send out messages to gather peoples' reddit info). You're welcome to post your work to the main subreddit to get your work critiqued by the community.

After glancing at your work though, I think you may want to get your lesson 1 homework reviewed first - especially the ellipses section. I require my own students (the patreon supporters) to start at lesson 1, as the lessons are designed to highlight certain mistakes people tend to make, making them easier to diagnose. Jumping in later on before those earlier issues have been addressed can make it harder to pinpoint those problems.