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

2017-05-18 21:19

Generally pretty well done, though here are a few things to keep in mind:

• For your organic forms with contour curves, you neglected to include the central minor axis line, which is extremely important for lining up those curves and ellipses. Keeping them aligned properly helps maintain the illusion that they're wrapping around, and it can be considerably more difficult to achieve that same illusion when a line is misaligned.

• You're definitely making a good start with your dissections, but there's a lot of examples here that show a particularly limited amount of attention actually being paid to your references. You're working a fair bit from memory rather than direct observation - for example, look at your birch bark texture - I guarantee you there's a lot more going on in a piece of birch bark. The trick is to ensure that you don't spend long periods of time drawing without looking at your reference. The moment we look away, your brain will start oversimplifying what you saw, resulting in memories that don't contain much specific information. Instead, you want to spend most of your time observing, looking away only for a second or two to put down a couple marks before returning your gaze to your reference material to refresh your memory.

• Your form intersections and organic intersections were quite well done.

I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete, just keep the points about your minor axis and paying closer attention to your reference images in mind. Additionally, you may want to take a look at the notes on the 25 texture challenge, which expands on the idea of how your brain processes information.

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

2017-05-18 01:36

Definitely a good start, but I've got a lot of things to point out that should help you stay on track:

• For your super imposed lines, you're drawing those lines confidently which is good, as it helps you avoid wobbling. That said, before actually putting the line down, you should absolutely take the time to line the tip of your pen up with the starting point of the line rather than just striking at the page and hoping for the best. I talk about this a little more [here](Fraying/Separation on Both Ends). I actually do see examples where you do line your pen up more carefully, so just be sure to do this for every case.

• When ghosting your lines, you are not quite carrying over that same sense of confidence, and as a result your lines have a tendency to waver somewhat. This occurs with pretty much all of your linework (ellipses included), and it happens because you hesitate when you execute the mark. You're afraid of making a mistake, and as a result you slow down so your brain has the chance to guide your hand. Every time your hand goes off track, your brain course-corrects, which is visible as a wavering or wobbling of your line. Instead, you should invest all of your time in the preparation phase of the ghosting method, then execute the mark with a smooth, confident, persistent pace. You want to trust in your muscle memory and shut your brain off somewhat. Ultimately you will make mistakes, but the smooth flow of your lines is more important and should be a higher priority than your accuracy. Accuracy will improve with practice, but a wobbly line must be dealt with by changing your approach. This is a common issue, and I even talk about it in this comic.

• As I mentioned above, the same issue hits your ellipses, and it causes them to become quite stiff and uneven. You'll find that the whole 'drawing through your ellipses' thing that I stress so much may not feel entirely useful until you start drawing them more confidently. Drawing through your ellipses helps you recover somewhat from drawing without your brain guiding your hand. During the first round, your muscles get familiar with the resistence of the paper against your pen, the shape you're after, and so on, and the second pass allows your muscles to self-correct somewhat without losing that flow and smoothness. If you draw slowly, that second pass has no value, and either way your shape ends up stiff and uneven.

• In some places I did notice that you drew through your ellipses a fair bit (and in other places, you didn't draw through them at all). I recommend keeping it to two full rounds of each ellipse - no more, no less.

• For your rough perspective boxes, be sure to go over your completed work as described here. This will help you identify areas where your estimation of perspective is off. This is totally normal, and expected, of course. By identifying where you make mistakes, you'll learn where to focus your attention.

• Also for the rough perspective boxes exercise, some of your hatching there is a little bit sloppy. In some cases it's okay, but generally you want to make sure you draw each line purposefully, keeping them parallel and consistent and ensuring that they stretch all the way across the plane from edge to edge. Sloppiness will just bring the overall presentation and quality of your drawing down, merely because you didn't put in as much time as you could have.

• You made some pretty solid attempts at the rotated boxes exercise. This exercise and the organic perspective boxes exercise were really meant to be quite challenging, and beyond the capacity of the students at this stage, because I haven't gone in depth into rotating boxes freely in 3D space. One recommendation I have for this exercise though is to keep the gaps between your boxes small and consistent - you did a decent job of this, but generally where things started to fall apart, it was where your gaps got large. We keep them small so we can use neighbouring edges as hints when drawing new lines, as explained here.

• Your organic perspective boxes do need work, but as I mentioned above, that's totally expected. One thing I did notice however that is worth pointing out now is that you seem to have attempted to add line weight (which is good), but you did so with very small chicken-scratchy lines. Always avoid chicken scratching like this. You want each line to be made up of a single, well-planned mark, resulting from the use of the ghosting method. Hairy lines like this severely undermine the solidity of your forms, and they generally look really bad.

I'm going to mark this lesson as complete, but I'd like you to move onto the 250 box challenge next. This is both to get you more practice with rotating boxes freely in 3D space, and also to let you work on your use of the ghosting method. Make sure you continue practicing the exercises from this lesson as warmups however, picking two or three exercises at the beginning of each sitting to do for 10-15 minutes. Once you move past lesson 2, you'll also include those into the pool of exercises you choose from for this warmup. In particular, you should definitely focus on those ellipses in order to make them smoother and more confident.

Before starting the 250 box challenge, make sure you read through the notes on that page, especially the tip about drawing through your forms. This in particular should help you better grasp how each box sits in 3D space.

Oh, one last thing: ease up on all of those self-deprecating notes. Students, especially younger ones, will often do this as a means of protecting themselves from the sting of critique - even if they don't realize that this is the reason. Yes, your work isn't fantastic - it's not supposed to be. You're just starting out. So there's no need to point out the things you didn't like, or whatever else. Just leave the commentary out and focus on the exercises themselves.

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

2017-05-18 01:20

There's definitely some good stuff here, but overall from your work and from what you mentioned when submitting it, you are definitely being distracted by your texture-woes. You're attempting to take on too much all at once, and as a result are not doing particularly great in either area. That isn't to say either is bad, but there are definitely some issues that you probably would have avoided had your attention been focused on one thing at a time.

In terms of your construction:

• You're being somewhat sloppy. When laying in your initial forms, take the time to make them feel solid and three dimensional - don't treat it like you're laying down a loose sketch that will be solidified later. Make sure your contour curves wrap around the object in a way that really describes how the surface flows through space. Draw your "blobs" as ellipses, and draw through those ellipses, as that it's relatively simple to make an ellipse feel solid (as long as the shape is even) and build on top of that.

• Apply the ghosting method everywhere. This is really just an extension of the previous point, but I can see signs of you drawing rather erratically in certain cases (more where you get frustrated with something, and respond to that frustration by drawing more rather than stepping back and thinking about your approach). One mark per line, don't correct your mistakes by drawing another line on top.

• You'll notice that your smaller drawings tend to be more stiff - this is normal, as this kind of construction consists of spatial problems, and our brains tend to handle them better when given more room to think and work.

• Always consider how different forms connect to one another. You'll often see in my demos that I draw an ellipse to specifically show the intersection shape between two balls/blobs - this really grounds that intersection in reality. If you leave it all in your head, it's less likely that you'll really believe that you're drawing 3d forms yourself. The first step to convincing other people that your drawing is three dimensional is to convince yourself, and to buy into your own illusion.

For texture:

• You're scribbling a fair bit. If an area should be filled in, make sure it's filled in completely - don't leave little slivers of white behind, as those will cause your drawing to become very noisy, drawing the viewer's eye to certain places unintentionally.

• The thing about more texture flattening your drawing out is perfectly normal. Ultimately, your construction communicates certain things about how your forms sit in 3D space, and how the surfaces flow through it. Texture sits on those surfaces, and just like contour lines, they will also describe that deformation. If the texture contradicts what the construction says about your drawing, you will find that your drawing flattens out. For example, if you draw a sphere, and then draw straight lines across it, that sphere will immediately become a flat circle. It is for this reason that you need to be very careful about what lines you choose to put down on a drawing and not scribble or draw in any sort of uncontrolled or unplanned fashion. Less is often far better than more, and holding yourself back to think and observe your reference will often be a much better use of your time than drawing more.

I'd like you to do four more pages of insect drawings, but I want these to include no texture whatsoever. Focus entirely on your constructions, and make sure that at the end of every successive pass of construction, that your forms feel solid and three dimensional. Solidity is your goal, not detail.

If you're interested in delving into texture separately, I recommend the 25 texture challenge. Keep in mind that it is meant to be done over a long period of time, in parallel with the other lessons. Texture takes a fair bit of time to sink in, as it requires you to work on your ability to observe and study without relying on your memory (continually looking back at your reference instead of drawing from what you remember), and eventually leans on your capacity to organize the visual information you've pulled from your reference. It's quite complex on its own, and is not the sort of thing that sinks in by simply grinding it out in one sitting.

Uncomfortable in the post "Lesson 3: Drawing Plants"

2017-05-18 01:05

I believe you're generally moving in the right direction with these. The only thing I want to mention is that you've got to continue pushing yourself to draw confidently, from your shoulder, when drawing those stems. I know it's an easy place to make a mistake since you're trying to get your lines to run parallel fairly close together, but ultimately hesitating out of a fear of messing up will hold you back. You've got to prepare all you can with the ghosting method, then accept your fate and execute boldly and confidently.

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

Uncomfortable in the post "250 Box Challenge"

2017-05-18 01:01

Looks like you're doing pretty well! I definitely think it would have been better had you drawn each box independently rather than in scenes, but ultimately there's not much you can do if you happened to forget. I mean, aside from drawing another 250 :)

Ultimately the reason drawing individual boxes is better is because it allows you to focus on the construction of each one. When drawing a bunch within the same scene or space, there's a lot more to worry about, and it will generally cause you to split your attention. Getting the hang of them individually will allow you to deal with certain problems and sort them out before moving onto having more together, which will introduce its own challenges.

So your constructions are generally looking pretty good, but I do have a couple suggestions about how you approach the corrections phase. Firstly, don't worry about little aesthetic issues, like lines fraying or separating. Instead, focus on lines that throw off the construction of a box - where their angles were incorrect. From there, you can actually draw in the correct line with your red pen.

If you have trouble identifying those kinds of mistakes, you can use the method mentioned in the challenge notes:

Each box consists of three sets of four parallel lines, each set having its own vanishing point. When going over a box in the correction phase, you can extend these lines two to three times their original length towards their implied vanishing point. This will give you a better sense of how these lines behave as they converge. Ideally all four lines of a given set will converge towards a single point at roughly the same rate. By extending these lines, you will start to notice how some lines within a set converge more quickly than others, which implies several points of convergence instead of just one. By being able to spot these mistakes, you should be able to learn from them that much more effectively.

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

Uncomfortable in the post "250 Box Challenge"

2017-05-16 20:49

I definitely see a fair bit of improvement throughout this set, especially as you reach towards the ends. You've got a lot of great corrections in there as well. Over time you will find that your mistakes become somewhat harder to identify though, so when that happens, try applying the following method:

Each box consists of three sets of four parallel lines, each set having its own vanishing point. When going over a box in the correction phase, you can extend these lines two to three times their original length towards their implied vanishing point. This will give you a better sense of how these lines behave as they converge. Ideally all four lines of a given set will converge towards a single point at roughly the same rate. By extending these lines, you will start to notice how some lines within a set converge more quickly than others, which implies several points of convergence instead of just one. By being able to spot these mistakes, you should be able to learn from them that much more effectively.

Also, I encourage you to play more with your line weights as you practice these, as they'll really help to push your boxes to the next level by reinforcing that illusion of solidity.

Keep up the good work and consider this challenge complete.

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

2017-05-16 02:36

There are some improvements, but overall you're not quite there yet. I'd like you to give the same two pages another shot.

Your lines are certainly cleaner in your form intersections, but you really should be drawing through the ellipses for your spheres. Additionally, the instructions in the lesson recommended that you avoid any forms that are stretched in any one dimension, as it tends to make the exercise (which is already difficult) considerably more challenging and will ultimately distract you from the primary goal. Lastly, you're not drawing through any of the boxes, which would help you better grasp how each box sits in 3D space.

For the organic intersections, the individual forms are certainly somewhat better. That said, in terms of the drawing conveying a sense of how those forms interact with one another (resting atop each other, sagging where their weight isn't supported, etc.), it's not quite there. Take a look at the three forms on top of the large one - the middle one seems to cut through the larger one rather than wrapping along its top. The one to the left is just kind of standing there arbitrarily. This tells me that you're not quite thinking about them as 3D forms, but more as shapes on a flat page.

I suggest that you slow down, read through the lesson and exercise descriptions again and take your time. I'm expecting to be very busy with work tomorrow and the day after, so rushing likely won't get you a critique any faster. Better that you put the time towards understanding the material instead.

Oh, and when you resubmit, create a new imgur album with the two pages. Since I gave the original critique earlier today, I can remember which ones are new and which ones aren't, but as time passes, it can get more difficult to recall.

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

2017-05-15 21:19

Looking pretty good. You're definitely moving in the right direction, but I do have a few helpful points to remark upon:

• Your arrows are coming along well. One suggestion I have is to try to plan your arrows such that they move from a point farther away from the viewer towards a point closer to the viewer. This will help you think about the three dimensional space to which your paper is merely a window. Right now you're a bit stuck in terms of thinking about things that move across the two dimensions of the page, without moving much in that third dimension.

• Decent work for the organic forms with contour lines. For your contour ellipses though, work on drawing them more confidently (they're quite hesitant right now, which causes your lines to wobble). For your contour curves, same thing about confidence - but also, don't come back over the line with an additional stroke. I think you may be trying to apply the idea of 'drawing through ellipses' here, just on the curving segment instead. Unfortunately there's no benefit to that, since you have to lift your pen up in order to move back to the beginning, so try to just do one stroke here.

• Also for the organic forms with contour curves, give these notes a read. They should help explain how the degree of each ellipse/curve comes into play, and how to change the degree depending on the orientation of the ellipse relative to the viewer.

• For your dissections, your textures are showing a pretty good start. You're demonstrating a lot of patience and care, which is definitely key. The one area where I think that is holding you back however is how exactly you spend your time. Looking at your work, I get the impression that for most of these, you spent a good deal of time observing and studying your reference, followed by a good deal of time drawing. This results in you drawing from your memory of what you saw - unfortunately, our memory has a tendency to oversimplify things, and can sometimes go so far as to make things look cartoony. In your case, the result wasn't quite so far down that spectrum - instead, it just had a very subtle repetitiveness to it instead. When drawing from reference, I recommend observing carefully, then taking only a moment to put down a couple marks before returning to your reference to refresh your memory. It definitely is time consuming, but this will help you capture more specific marks and consider what gives a texture the illusion of being rough, smooth, wet, sticky, etc. in a deeper sense.

• For your form intersections, there's a few issues here that I'd like to highlight. In general, remember that this exercise is not really about the intersections themselves. It's about understanding how to draw different forms within the same space so they feel consistent and cohesive. The intersections are a more challenging addition that you are not expected to be able to grasp just yet - rather, I just want you to start thinking about it. On the first page, a major issue I'm noticing is that you're going over your lines way too many times. Firstly, for your straight lines, you should be executing each line with a single mark. You can come back later to add line weight, but your lines here look like you draw a bunch of lines on top of each other with very little planning or application of the ghosting method. Because of this, they look very hairy. For your ellipses, drawing through them is important, but you're definitely doing so too much on this particular page. Two rounds is ideal, three is okay, but any more than that is way too many. Later pages are definitely cleaner, but here you've gone in the opposite direction - you're no longer drawing through your ellipses at all, and when you try and add line weight, it's more like you're trying to go extremely slowly and carefully to "clean up" your lines. You've got to take the time to prepare before drawing, but when you do execute your marks, you must do so confidently. That's what the ghosting method is about.

• For your organic intersections, notice how each organic form is extremely wobbly? I don't mean the lines themselves, but rather how the forms are wiggling around. This should generally be avoided, as it undermines the solidity of the form you're trying to construct. Smooth, simple consistent lines feel solid - wavy, complex lines feel less so. For now, I want you to focus on constructing simple forms that feel solid.

Before I mark this lesson as complete, I'd like you to do one more page of form intersections (draw confidently, use the ghosting method - and don't go over your lines with a second pass to clean them up), and one more page of organic intersections (simple, smooth sausage forms).

Uncomfortable in the post "250 Cylinder Challenge"

2017-05-15 21:02

Very nicely done! Your cylinders are looking very solid and well constructed. The only recommendation I have as you continue to move forwards is to also try your hand at constructing cylinders by starting off with a box. Specifically constructing the circular end of a cylinder within a flat plane can be quite challenging, and is worth practicing (there's a video linked in the challenge page about that particular topic that's worth watching).

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

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

2017-05-15 21:00

Nice work! I really like your bold, confident linework. It definitely goes a long way to push the solidity of your forms.

Your arrows are flowing very nicely through space. Your organic forms with contour curves are generally quite well done too, though I do want to stress the importance of ensuring that your contour ellipses and contour curves align to the central minor axis line such that they are cut into two equal, symmetrical halves. This alignment is pretty important.

Your dissection textures were exceptionally well done, so great work there. Just remember that this lesson is meant to be started off as any old organic form with contour curves exercise, so that when you apply your texture, it's to something that feels fully solid. I know those lines will get in the way of your textures, but ultimately the goal here isn't to create something pretty, but rather to grasp what it means to work with solid, three dimensional forms, and in this case, specifically to wrap texture around them. Still, the textures themselves are very well done, and demonstrate exceptional attention to detail.

Your form intersections are looking good. The intersections themselves aren't always correct, but you're doing exactly what I'm interested in seeing - this exercise is all about learning how to draw forms that exist in the same space together whilst feeling consistent and cohesive, with the intersections being an extra addition that is very challenging and demands a much greater grasp of 3D space (which will develop with time). By taking a stab at the intersections as you have done here, you've basically gotten your gears turning in regards to those kinds of spatial problems.

Lastly, your organic intersections demonstrate a good grasp of how these different, floppy forms relate to one another, and how they support each others' weight in certain areas, and sag in others.

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

Uncomfortable in the post "250 Cylinder Challenge"

2017-05-15 01:13

I definitely think your linework gets much more solid after the first several pages. Keep in mind though, you should be drawing through all of the ellipses you draw for my lessons, and doing so confidently. Confidence really is the key - if you hesitate when drawing something (usually due to being overly focused on drawing something clean and pretty), your lines will wobble and will generally come out stiff. Drawing confidently does mean that you have to accept a likelihood of making mistakes (especially earlier on), but this is simply the way things are. Mistakes happen, and everything we draw here are just exercises. There will always be more opportunities to do better.

Anyway, aside from that you're doing great. I'm glad t osee that you played both with drawing your cylinders purely based around the minor axis, as well as starting from boxes. Keep up the good work and consider this challenge complete.

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

2017-05-15 01:09

Pretty nice work! Just a few things that I'd like to mention:

• For your dissections, you're doing okay, but I do see a few signs here and there that you observe your reference for a while, seem to get the jist of what's going on, and then rely on somewhat structured randomness (squiggles of a certain sort, or a particular kind of pattern) fueled largely by what you remember having seen. While this isn't serving you too badly, our ability to remember information like this is inherently flawed. You can read as to why in the lesson section of the 25 texture challenge, and long with how you can combat this.

• Keep in mind that the form intersections exercise is not actually about the intersections themselves, but rather about being able to draw many 3D forms within the same space without them feeling inconsistent (I mention this in the instructions). The intersections part is largely just to start getting your brain thinking about these particular kinds of mental challenges, which for the time being are definitely going to continue to be very challenging to you. As long as you make a solid attempt at them, you'll find yourself beginning to consider these kinds of problems from different angles, and it will ultimately get clearer with time. Don't feel bad about the fact that it's difficult right now, as it's supposed to be.

• For your organic intersections, the exercise was done fine, I just wanted to point out that your application of shadow is messy as hell. Hatching wasn't the greatest choice here (and in this particular case, was sloppy to begin with). Never rely on any kind of scribbling or randomness - all of your lines should be purposeful and planned. In this particular case, you should try to fill your little cast shadows with solid black, as hatching generally results in really high contrast (which draws the eye of the viewer unintentionally).

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

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

2017-05-15 00:59

Overall this is really quite well done! You're doing a great job of capturing the various forms that make up your constructions, and are demonstrating a well developed sense of three dimensional space. Your constructions exist in all three dimensions, and play with the dimension of depth specifically instead of just going across the flat two dimensions of the page you're drawing on.

If I had to pick on a couple things that might be what looks off to you, here's what comes to mind:

• I notice that you have a bit of a tendency to draw your initial construction more timidly, as though you're purposely trying to hide that linework from the final result. This inherently gives the overall drawing a much less confident feel, and the underlying construction ends up feeling less solid. Confidence really is the name of the game here - do not focus on the end result, and always make sure you're drawing every stroke with full confidence. This will inevitably mean that your construction will show through much more, but this is perfectly fine. These are all just exercises. Their purpose is to push both your grasp of 3D space, and also your ability to imbue your forms with an illusion of solidity (which comes from that confidence). You can always come back on top of your confident lines to add a little subtle weight here and there to help organize your linework, but even in this case it's important that you add that weight with confidence, applying the ghosting method and opening yourself up to the possibility of making a mistake. If you add that weight slowly, being super-careful in order to follow the line that already exists, you will end up with stiffer linework.

• I did notice that the legs you draw have a tendency of feeling a little stiff. Take a look at step 4 on this demo. Notice how I draw each section of the leg as a single, flowing enclosed form? Try that, as it should maintain the flow a little bit better. In your attempts, you tend to be jumping in with more complex shapes (specifically drawing in how each section fits into each other, rather than "drawing through" the forms and sorting out the intersection afterwards.

Anyway, you're generally doing quite well, so 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"

2017-05-13 21:26

Ironically, rushing will only take you longer. It's one of the many lessons I try to teach students as they move through these lessons.

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

2017-05-13 19:54

There's a lot of instructions that you seem to have missed. It's extremely important that you read through the lesson content as many times as is necessary to absorb it. There's a lot of written content there, and I know english isn't your first language, so you may find that you'll need to read through it several times, and even reread an exercise's instructions each time you sit down to work on it.

• For your arrows, you're generally doing decently. One thing I did notice though is that the arrows generally seem to move across the two dimensional page, rather than through 3D space. When working on these, try and imagine in your mind a point farther away from the viewer, and one closer to the viewer, then try and draw your arrow flowing through space between those two points. This will help you think in terms of all three dimensions, rather than just the two of your paper.

• You didn't draw through many of the ellipses for your organic forms with contour ellipses. You need to be doing this for every single ellipse you draw for my lessons, without exception.

• You did not draw the minor axis line for your organic forms with contour curves as instructed. This is extremely important - each curve is really just the visible portion of the larger ellipse, and that ellipse should always be aligned to that central minor axis line so that the minor axis cuts each ellipse into two equal, symmetrical halves down its narrower dimension.

• Your contour curves also aren't creating the illusion that they're really wrapping around a three dimensional form either. First off, I recommend keeping these forms as simple as possible - basic sausage-like forms like the one in my demonstration are fine. Secondly, look at how in my example the curvature of the contour line accelerates as it reaches the edge, and eventually it hooks back around in a way that makes us imagine how that line continues to run along the object's surface along the other side. Yours don't do this - if we were to project where your contour lines would continue, they'd fly off the shape. This in turn breaks the illusion that the lines run along the form's surface, which is the main purpose of a contour line - to give us a visual hint as to how that surface flows through 3D space. Here are some additional notes on this fairly common issue.

• As a side note, give these notes a read.

• Your dissections definitely do need work, but that's fine for now. This exercise is really here to let me gauge your observational skills so I could ultimately point you in the right direction. There are two primary things that stand out to me. Firstly, you work from memory, rather than observation. You look at your reference for a while, then spend yet another while drawing. Give the notes on the texture challenge, as they explain why this is not the best approach. As for doing the challenge itself, you're welcome to - though remember two things. Firstly, this challenge is not meant to be all at once like the other two. It's meant to be done alongside other lessons, over a long period of time. Secondly, drawabox is primarily about construction - establishing the illusion of form and three dimensionality, and combining these forms in a way that feels solid and believable. Texture and detail is more often when tackling these rudimentary concepts a distraction. Students who are to preoccupied with learning how to draw lots of detail will often ignore the underlying construction, which is by far the more important part. So as you continue to move forwards, try and separate your efforts to understand how to texture. You may even want to just focus strictly on construction for now, and leave texture out entirely.

• The reason I asked you to do the 250 box challenge before moving onto lesson 2 was specifically because you were not ready to tackle the form intersections. That said, you also seem to have very much missed the instruction about avoiding any forms that are too stretched in any one dimension (like long boxes, long tubes, etc.) so as to keep the exercise from getting even more difficult than it already is. Another thing I noticed is that you have a tendency to draw your initial construction for each form faintly, then go over it more carefully to "clean things up". This is an approach you should avoid from now on. Make sure you draw every line with full confidence - don't worry about the end result, or focus on making a pretty picture. All we are doing here are exercises - we could throw them all away upon completion and we would not have lost a thing. The point is to learn how to draw forms that feel solid and confident. Draw through all of your ellipses, apply the ghosting method to each line you put down (when you try to draw cleaner lines, I can see that you're drawing slower, which makes your lines more wobbly). You CAN add line weight to help clarify key overlaps as discussed in the 250 box challenge, but the important distinction there is that you are not replacing lines with cleaner ones. You are adding additional weight to emphasize lines that already exist, and you are doing so by using the ghosting method. If drawing more confidently causes you to make a mistake, that's not a big deal.

• Another issue with your form intersections is your use of hatching lines. Any line that goes on the surface of a 3D form plays the role of a contour line and describes how that surface flows through 3D space. If you apply straight hatching to a curved surface, it will read as being flat. I recommend avoiding hatching altogether for these form intersections.

• Despite suffering from the same issues I mentioned about your organic forms with contour curves, your organic intersections still manage to demonstrate a reasonable grasp of how the different forms relate to one another, and how they exist together in 3D space.

Before anything else, I want you to complete and submit the 250 box challenge. Make sure you're drawing through each box as instructed. Then once I've marked the challenge as complete, do the following:

• Two pages of organic forms with contour ellipses

• Two pages of organic forms with contour curves

• Two pages of form intersections

Before you start each exercise, make sure you reread its instructions.

Uncomfortable in the post "250 Cylinder Challenge"

2017-05-13 19:29

Well done! Very well done, in fact. You've paid careful attention to your ellipses' alignments with your minor axes, you've practiced starting from a box for many of these cylinders, you're exhibiting a well developing use of the ghosting method, and your ellipses are confident and even.

There's only one thing that I want to point out to you. Take a look at cylinders 223 and 179. There may be others, but these are the examples that I noticed. Notice how the ellipse is noticeably slanted? Make sure you watch this video from the challenge page about the particular criteria that determines whether or not an ellipse represents a perfect circle in 3D space. There's two key criteria - the alignment of the minor axis to one of the vanishing points, and the contact points with its enclosing plane above and below being aligned towards the vertical vanishing point. In these examples, the contact points are not aligned in such a way that the ellipse would be considered circular in 3D space.

That said, I also saw plenty of examples where you approached this correctly. Since it's a little obscure and not everyone watches that video, I figured it was still worth pointing out.

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

Uncomfortable in the post "Lesson 7: Drawing Vehicles"

2017-05-13 19:22

I definitely get the sense that you're getting overwhelmed by the subject matter, and the very scale of it, and as a result you're losing grip on the basic principles and rules covered in the lesson. When dealing with much of this construction, that before you draw any given feature - like a wheel, for instance - you establish everything about the exact position and space it will occupy beforehand by subdividing your major box forms.

Take a look at this tank. Though you did your basic subdivision of the overall boxes, you positioned the wheels through pure guesswork. The smaller wheels overlap (which doesn't really make any spatial sense, since these things cannot occupy in the same space), and there's no clear grasp of how these different components relate to each other in space.

What I'm seeing is that you're generally drawing and subdividing a box, and then mostly just winging it from there. This car for instance - there's no relationship between the body or angle of the car to the initial box you constructed, and most of it was drawn from pure observation with little to no actual construction or consideration of rudimentary forms.

At least, that's for the first half of the lesson.

Now, this carriage is much, much better. The positions of the windows feel more solid, and while the ellipses of those wheels are quite uneven, the overall construction holds up much better and there seems to be considerably less guesswork, and much stronger understanding of the underlying forms.

This airplane also demonstrated a much stronger grasp of the principles in the lesson. And while your go-kart doesn't use much subdivision or anything like that, I must commend you on an excellent example of observation. Not really in line with the lesson, but still very carefully done, and a demonstration of a skill that does come into play in a big way once your construction is solidly determined.

Because of the uncertainty and weakness in the first half of the lesson, and the wide array of subject matter (where you could potentially understand how to apply the principles for some objects, but not for others), I'm not going to mark this lesson as complete yet. Instead I want to see another eight pages, where I hope to see much stricter adherence to the lesson's points on construction. Additionally, for those eight pages I don't want you to get into any detail whatsoever. Whenever you add an extra element to a drawing, consider whether or not you're thinking about it in terms of adding a new three dimensional form. If it's just something being pasted onto the surface of an existing form, leave it out. If it's something you really need to think about in terms of its occupying 3D space, draw it in using construction.

Uncomfortable in the post "Lesson 5: Drawing Animals"

2017-05-13 19:10

It's true that you're visibly struggling with texture, but what I do see is a growing grasp of construction that is being impeded somewhat by a split focus. That is, split between construction and detail. This is actually very common, and the solution for now is to leave texture and detail out.

Basically, due to the fact that you've been fighting pretty hard with texture, when you approach a drawing, that is what is on your mind through the whole drawing process. So when you should be focusing on observing the general proportions and basic structure of a particular piece of reference, your mind is at least partially distracted.

I do have a few tips that I want to share with you:

• Construction is made up of several successive passes, starting off simple and gradually piling on the complexity. As a rule, before moving onto the next pass and adding more forms, or breaking your forms down further, make sure that what you've constructed thus far maintains the illusion of being three dimensional. Looking at your drawings, you start off with three ellipses - one each for the head, ribcage and pelvis. Ellipses are two dimensional, and so it's easy to regard them as not being particularly solid. They're mutable, and can be ignored easily in favour of some other lines (something I'll get into in a bit). Before you move onto the next phase, make sure you take your ellipses/circles and turn them into proper balls. Rather, make sure that you do whatever is necessary for you to be able to perceive them as three dimensional forms. Here are some options. A rule I like to impress upon people in regards to the illusion of form is that it is something that a drawing starts with, and that while moving from constructional phase to constructional phase, it can only be maintained or lost. Not added or gained. Now this isn't entirely true, but thinking in this way will help you avoid pitfalls that ultimately make your construction feel weak or flat.

• Once you're working with proper 3D forms, you must respect their solidity. Take a look at this bison, specifically its head. We can clearly see the ellipse you started out with. In your next constructional phase, you more or less ignored its solidity and used it as a loose approximation of the space the head occupied, rather than the core element of the construction around which the rest of the forms were arranged and built up. As a rule, never ignore a form. We aren't drawing something arbitrary or abstract - we are effectively placing forms in a three dimensional space, and once they're there, they cannot be forgotten. They can only be built on top of, or carved into. The thing about carving is that it is a three dimensional act - we do not cut away two dimensional slices - instead, we need to think about the actual three dimensional form that is being carved away, in order to maintain the solidity and three dimensionality of what remains.

• The addition of any piece of information, form or otherwise, must be supported by what is present from the previous constructional phase. You cannot jump from ellipse to full head, as you appear to have in the bison drawing. The ellipse does not provide enough of a structural scaffolding to support the information required by the overall head, and therefore you need to consider more rudimentary forms - by adding a rudimentary, boxy muzzle attached to the original sphere, and carving out eyesockets before placing the eyeball (which in your drawing was treated more like a sticker being pasted on the surface of the underlying form). Here's a demo from the lesson that touches on some of this.

• Again, the same bison drawing. It's proven to be a good example of important issues to be aware of. There's two separate issues I want to mention in regards to its torso. Firstly, the ribcage mass is meant to actually represent the ribcage itself. As such, consider its size, length, and even angle so that you're effectively placing a large ball where the ribcage would be. If you can't identify these things about the ribcage from your reference image, find some others to fill in the gaps of your understanding. Same goes for the pelvis, which tends to be at a bit of an angle.Secondly, notice how between the pelvis and the ribcage, the pelvis gets pinched in on both sides? This severely breaks the illusion of form, and is a kind of pattern you want to avoid. When building a rudimentary sausage-like form, try to keep the lines through its length as parallel as possible. The curvature should be in the same direction on both sides, rather than mirrored. You can then add extra bulk and volume using more organic forms piled on top.

• When it comes to legs, it can be useful to actually leverage the gestural quality of (2D) shape over (3D) form. This may seem a bit contradictory, but bare with me. Shape is very good at conveying flow, while form excels at conveying solidity. We can achieve a balance of both by establishing the legs as simple shapes with some gesture and flow to them, then leveraging contour curves at the joints and at key connection points (avoid placing contour curves through the length of a shape, like in the middle of the calf, focus on where the flow changes) to reinforce it with solidity. For example, take a look at this.

Lastly, slow down. Pay more attention to your reference, and make sure you do not work from memory. What you want to do is study your reference, identify a form or detail consisting of just a few lines, look at your page to draw it in, then return your gaze to your reference. This is the case for both your construction and your texture - much of it is built from what you remember seeing, rather than what you actually see.

On the topic of texture, you should give the 25 texture challenge a look - but only once we've gotten construction down more solidly.

I'd like to see 8 more pages of animal drawings, with no detail or texture whatsoever. Construction only.

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

2017-05-12 00:05

In general, you did quite well, and you definitely demonstrated a great deal of patience and focus throughout the lesson. There's only one issue, and while it's one that's pervasive through the entirety of the lesson, it's also fairly common and one that merely requires a change in your approach to overcome.

Long story short, you're drawing too carefully. This may sound like one of those "well my greatest weakness is that I just work too hard," deals but in this case it's a legitimate issue. When drawing, we have two major priorities. We want our lines to be accurate, and we want our lines to flow smoothly. Your first priority is currently the former - you're really focusing on staying on-track, going from point A to point B. You're also pretty good at it, all things considered, but in a good deal of your linework, there's a subtle yet noticeable wobble, and a sort of stiffness that speaks to the second priority being left a little by the wayside. Your lines don't flow particularly smoothly.

This occurs when you take too long during the actual execution phase of the drawing process. Remember that the ghosting method breaks the mark making process into three phases.

1. Find a comfortable angle of approach, rotating your page as necessary, and set down the point on either end of the mark you'd like to draw.

2. Prepare to draw by ghosting through the drawing motion, building up muscle memory and effectively giving your arm its marching orders.

3. Execute the mark.

That last step should receive the smallest time investment - each mark should be executed with a confident, persistent pace, just quick enough to keep your brain from interfering and attempting to guide your hand as you draw. When we draw slowly, this hesitation allow our brains to course-correct as we go, which effectively manifests as a wobbly line. Drawing more confidently helps us avoid this. Over time you'll find that you'll be able to shut your brain off at slower speeds, but for now you're likely going to want to draw fairly quickly.

To compensate for the inevitable decrease in accuracy, we invest our time in the second step - preparation. We do whatever we can to give ourselves the best chance of drawing the mark correctly, and once our pen touches the page to start execution, we've committed. Any mistake that will occur from this point on effectively has already happened, so it cannot be avoided. Therefore there is no sense in hesitating. If you do happen to have a mistake, it's not that big of a deal. These are all just exercises - even the drawings in later lessons are just exercises. You'll always have another opportunity to do better.

As I mentioned before, this issue is quite common - so much so that I also provide a similar explanation in comic form.

Aside from this issue - which impacts all of your lines, ellipses included - you're doing great. So, I'm going to mark this lesson as complete. I'd like you to move onto the 250 box challenge next. This will give you the opportunity to get used to executing your marks more confidently, and will also let you further develop your grasp of 3D space. Your organic perspective boxes were reasonably well done, but you definitely will benefit from getting more time in working through the challenges of constructing arbitrarily rotated boxes

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

2017-05-11 23:52

Pretty well done. Your arrows and organic forms are solid. Your dissections are generally good, though I encourage you to give the lesson section of the texture challenge a read. I don't expect students to have read over it before completing this exercise, of course, but now that you've given it a shot, I can that you'd benefit from more careful and continuous observation (avoid long periods without looking back at your reference), and also avoiding the use of any kind of randomness or scribbling (which I noticed in a couple textures, though generally you were pretty good on this front).

For your form intersections, you're doing well but don't approach this exercise in two steps (a rough sketch followed by a clean-up pass), as this will rob your drawing of any sense of confidence. Draw your first pass with confidence, don't try to make your lines faint or hide them. This will ensure that your ellipses come out fairly even, and that your forms feel solid. From there you can add a bit of line weight to clarify overlaps (as discussed here), but don't make the mistake of trying to replace lines with cleaner ones. All you're doing is emphasizing lines that already exist, and doing so with the ghosting method. That means drawing each stroke confidently, rather than slow-and-steady. I noticed that some of your spheres definitely suffered from you slowing down while drawing, as you tried to hit them in a single round.

Remember that these are all just exercises - the point is not to make a pretty drawing that you can pin on your fridge. The point is to learn to draw confidently and to gain a deeper understanding of how to use your arm, and how to understand 3D space.

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

Uncomfortable in the post "250 Box Challenge"

2017-05-11 23:31

Congrats on completing the challenge. Here are a few recommendations that should help you as you continue to move forwards:

• Try drawing bigger. The construction of boxes is definitely taxing to one's spatial awareness, and spatial problems tend to benefit a fair bit from having more room to think. Conversely, I do see a tendency for students to draw smaller when they're less confident with a specific subject matter. In turn, drawing smaller also makes it much more challenging for them (since they're restricting the amount of space they have to think).

• I noticed that as you went through the set, you were drawing a lot more boxes with particularly dramatic foreshortening. I often see this, because it tends to be easier if you bring the vanishing point much closer to your box (as those that are farther away are much harder to estimate). You definitely want to vary this a lot more, between having a good number of boxes with shallow foreshortening. Shallower foreshortening is something that will tend to be much more useful, as it implies a much more relatable scale, and will be found in most objects you end up drawing. Dramatic foreshortening speaks more to a massive scale - like looking at the top of a building from the ground.

• I saw your last few boxes where you tried to add some line weight. Make sure that in the future, when you attempt this (which you absolutely should play with more), you try to be more subtle with that extra weight. If you make your lines too thick, it will really start to flatten your drawing out. Just a little extra weight is really enough to make something pop. Additionally, make sure you apply that weight with the ghosting method, just like with all other lines you put down. Draw the lines confidently, don't go slow-and-steady, or this will cause your lines to wobble. Just make sure that you compensate for the inevitable loss in accuracy by investing lots of time in the preparation phase, ghosting through the drawing motion and so on.

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

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

2017-05-09 21:45

Definitely an improvement, although you definitely should work on getting your contour curves and contour ellipses to fit more snugly between the two edges of the organic form. Your ellipses are also looking a little stiff. Make sure you're continuing to practice the exercises from previous lessons as warmups, and also make sure you're rotating your paper in order to find the most comfortable angle of approach when drawing any line or ellipse.

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

Uncomfortable in the post "250 Box Challenge"

2017-05-09 21:43

Whenever you like. Now's a good time, but you can choose to explore it later as well. Just make sure you give those notes a read before you tackle the form intersections in the next lesson.

Uncomfortable in the post "Lesson 5: Drawing Animals"

2017-05-09 21:41

I think you've got a lot of good stuff going on here, but there are definitely some key issues that I'm seeing.

• You're not drawing through your ellipses. You should be doing this for every ellipse you draw for my lessons. I noticed you were doing this in later drawings, so that's good. Just make sure you do it for all of them.

• As you move through this set, I can see you getting somewhat more relaxed with your construction, skipping steps, and generally 'winging-it' more than you should be. As a result, your end result suffers considerably. Here's an example. The dog in the upper left is fine, and pretty solid, though we can see how its legs aren't clearly defined as 3D forms. Now I'm all for using the gestural nature of 2D shape to capture the flow of the legs, so long as we are mindful enough to reinforce their three-dimensionality at the joints and where they connect to other forms (like the torso) using contour curves and contour ellipses. I can see an ellipse at the hip joint, but it's not actually connected to the thigh itself, which weakens that illusion of solidity. Moreover, leaving those shapes open ended as you did really flattens them out (you do this with a lot of your other animals, like your deer). Then there's the drawing below it, where that sloppiness has gone much further, leading to the legs altogether falling apart.

• Your birds are quite lovely. This is not an issue, I just felt like pointing that out.

• That elephant at the end was a great experimentation in the use of solid black shadow shapes to make your construction pop. I do feel pushing the line weights elsewhere in the drawing would have helped though.

• When it comes to fur textures, while you're moving in the right direction by focusing your efforts along the silhouette of the forms, you're definitely going quantity-over-quality, with a lot of your tufts being quite poorly crafted. Try to design each tuft carefully, as a few well placed details of this sort can really pull the weight of the entire drawing, while a lot of really rough ones will just make it feel cluttered and noisy. Additionally, there's lots more information on texture in the 25 texture challenge.

I'm going to go ahead and mark this lesson as complete, but I do want to recommend that when you practice for yourself, try to do drawings with no texture or detail whatsoever. This will force you to pay all of your attention to the construction phase, and will help you keep from getting distracted. When we know we have the texturing to look forward to, we tend to think only about that, resulting in sloppier work in earlier stages.

Uncomfortable in the post "Lesson 3: Drawing Plants"

2017-05-09 21:30

These are definitely better. I do want to recommend though that you work on your ellipses, as right now they're still feeling somewhat stiff. Make sure you're ghosting them beforehand, executing them with a confident, persistent pace, and drawing them from your shoulder. Also, I hope you're continuing to practice the exercises from lessons 1 and 2 as part of your warmup.

I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete, so feel free to move onto the next lesson. As for your question, there are sometimes going to be situations where what you're drawing falls into the one-in-a-million position of basically asking to be drawn in a way that makes them look flat. The solution in this case is to remember that you are not forced to draw exactly what you see. It is well within your right to either exaggerate a slight angle or curvature (which both of your examples do have, though they're minimal), or to simply add one of your own to something that has no visible curvature at all. We are not held hostage by our reference material. At the end of the day, I usually treat these drawings as though I'm drawing one of whatever object is depicted. Not necessarily the exact same one, in the exact same position - just one that is very similar, in a very similar setup.

Uncomfortable in the post "250 Box Challenge"

2017-05-09 21:25

I can definitely see significant improvement over the set. At the beginning you were definitely struggling a fair bit, but by the end you seem to have grasped a good sense of how your boxes sit in 3D space. Here's a few things to keep in mind as you continue to move forwards though:

• A lot of your boxes feel like they're more or less positioned in the same way. I feel like you were aware of this yourself, especially later on, but I do want to stress the importance of varying your angles and trying to mix things up.

• As you moved through the set, you seemed to find fewer and fewer mistakes. If you find that you're having trouble identifying where your estimation of perspective is off, there's a method that was described in the challenge notes that may help. Try applying it to one or two of your completed pages. I've pasted it below:

Each box consists of three sets of four parallel lines, each set having its own vanishing point. When going over a box in the correction phase, you can extend these lines two to three times their original length towards their implied vanishing point. This will give you a better sense of how these lines behave as they converge. Ideally all four lines of a given set will converge towards a single point at roughly the same rate. By extending these lines, you will start to notice how some lines within a set converge more quickly than others, which implies several points of convergence instead of just one. By being able to spot these mistakes, you should be able to learn from them that much more effectively.

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

Uncomfortable in the post "Lesson 5: Drawing Animals"

2017-05-09 21:21

I'm not really sure what happened, but between this submission and your last one, your work exploded in quality. Either you've been cheating on me with another, better teacher (i'mkidding), or you just really like animals! Either way, you're doing great.

Your constructions are confident, your textures are well balanced and organized, and you're demonstrating a solid grasp of how all of your forms fit together.

The only thing I want to mention - and honestly I'm not entirely sure if I want to say this, because whatever you're doing seems to be taking you in a good direction, but I'm going to say it anyway because otherwise I'd be offering you nothing but praise - is that when you draw your initial masses, I see a lot of signs that you are at least to start with treating them as being two dimensional ellipses rather than solid 3D forms. Basically, when you lay those forms down, before you move onto furthering your construction, try and flesh them out as being actual balls with volume that exist in 3D space rather than just simply shapes sitting on a flat page. Once you regard them as being more solid and tangible, you'll find yourself less likely to have them floating somewhat arbitrarily within your construction, and you'll find yourself abiding by them a little more strictly. This in turn should help add more solidity and structure to your construction, making everything ultimately feel more real and believable.

Anyway, keep up the great work and feel free to move onto the next lesson.

Uncomfortable in the post "250 Box Challenge"

2017-05-09 20:23

Pretty decent work. In general you're doing pretty well, but I've got a few things I'd like to point out. Firstly, it looks like you're only identifying a few mistakes. This is generally okay, as looking at your work I can understand that you've reached a point where your mistakes become more subtle and less noticeable. In this case, it may help to apply the following technique (copied from the challenge page) in order to better identify where things are a little off:

Each box consists of three sets of four parallel lines, each set having its own vanishing point. When going over a box in the correction phase, you can extend these lines two to three times their original length towards their implied vanishing point. This will give you a better sense of how these lines behave as they converge. Ideally all four lines of a given set will converge towards a single point at roughly the same rate. By extending these lines, you will start to notice how some lines within a set converge more quickly than others, which implies several points of convergence instead of just one. By being able to spot these mistakes, you should be able to learn from them that much more effectively.

The other thing I wanted to mention was in relation to your use of the ghosting method. Looking at your lines, there are some cases where your lines waver somewhat and stray from being entirely smooth. This is, in my estimation, due to the approach you're using, and the question you asked kind of lines up with that.

When applying the ghosting method, the fact that your arm blocks your view of the line you're drawing is largely irrelevant. Reason being, the ghosting method splits drawing up into separate phases. First you identify a comfortable angle of approach, turning your page as necessary. Then you repeatedly ghost the drawing motion in order to build up muscle memory. These first two steps require you to be able to (mostly) see the line you're trying to draw.

The last step - execution of the mark - does not require you to have an unobstructed view, as the point is not to rely on your conscious brain to drive the motion of your hand. It is your muscles that drives your hand as you draw, repeating the same motion you've ghosted several times over. The point is to draw confidently, with a persistent pace, so as to keep your brain from interfering (as this causes one to wobble). So, when the ghosting method is applied correctly, your question becomes less of a concern.

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

Uncomfortable in the post "Lesson 3: Drawing Plants"

2017-05-09 19:44

One thing that really stands out to me is that when drawing many of your leaves, you jump into a level of detail more complex than you're meant to. Specifically, the lowest level of leaf construction I often see in your drawings involves a wavy edges, rather than a simple curve flowing from the stem of the leaf to the tip. The point of this initial construction is to establish its flow through space - not to worry about any internal details. For examples of what I mean, take a look at the "Other Demos" section of the lesson.

The thing is, I do see examples where you use a simple curve on one side of the leaf, but end up going more complex on the other side. For example, the bottom one on the right side of this page.

Additionally, on a much more subtle level, I'm noticing signs that you're a little bit timid when putting down your line weight, in a way that suggests that you're preoccupied with the idea of creating a nice end result (actively trying to hide your constructional line work so it doesn't mess with potential details you may add).

In general you're demonstrating a decent grasp of 3D space, but I'd like you to do another three pages - specifically geared towards showing me that you can draw each stage of your construction confidently, focusing on the strokes you're putting down right then and there, and not getting caught up in trying to hide them for later.

Uncomfortable in the post "Lesson 3: Drawing Plants"

2017-05-08 22:29

These are certainly looking better. There's definitely room to grow, but you're moving in the right direction. I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete, so feel free to move onto the next lesson.

Uncomfortable in the post "250 Box Challenge"

2017-05-08 22:24

You can either move onto the cylinder challenge, or go straight to lesson 2 - that's entirely up to you. The texture challenge is better left for after lesson 2, and it's meant to be done in parallel with the lessons over a longer period of time instead of allowing it to hold up your progress through the main lessons.

Uncomfortable in the post "Lesson 3: Drawing Plants"

2017-05-08 00:34

Rather than writing things out again, here's a page of notes and overdrawings.

Read over those, then do another two pages. Think more about how each object is made up of simple forms. Also, don't go into texture or detail - focus entirely on the underlying construction, and understanding how each form sits in 3D space.

Uncomfortable in the post "250 Box Challenge"

2017-05-08 00:13

Very nice work! Your constructions are looking solid, and your use of line weight is very effective. The only thing I noticed is that you don't seem to have gone over them to do much in the way of identifying mistakes and correcting them. If you're having trouble finding mistakes, I recommend going over a page or two as described here:

Each box consists of three sets of four parallel lines, each set having its own vanishing point. When going over a box in the correction phase, you can extend these lines two to three times their original length towards their implied vanishing point. This will give you a better sense of how these lines behave as they converge. Ideally all four lines of a given set will converge towards a single point at roughly the same rate. By extending these lines, you will start to notice how some lines within a set converge more quickly than others, which implies several points of convergence instead of just one. By being able to spot these mistakes, you should be able to learn from them that much more effectively.

That should help you identify the particularly hidden or hard-to-find mistakes, and will allow you to keep progressing rather than plateauing. This is a natural thing people tend to face at this point.

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

Uncomfortable in the post "250 Box Challenge"

2017-05-08 00:09

Nice work! Your constructions feel fairly solid, and you're doing a good job with the line weights to reinforce that illusion. I'm also very glad to see that you're extending those lines to get a sense for how your lines behave as they move towards their implied vanishing point. By looking at those, you seem to have caught your tendency to draw lines that diverge ever so slightly, and are correcting them nicely in green. Keep up the good work, and consider this challenge complete.

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

2017-05-06 17:52

Definitely a notable improvement. Just make sure you continue to be mindful of how your curves (and the larger ellipse they are a part of) align to the central minor axis lines. Often times it's much more difficult to achieve the illusion of the curve wrapping around if it's not aligned perpendicularly to the overall flow of the organic form.

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

Uncomfortable in the post "Lesson 3: Drawing Plants"

2017-05-06 17:50

While I do think you're moving in the right direction, there are a few important things I want to bring to your attention:

• The constructional method is all about going from the simplest possible expression of a form and building up from there. You have some decent examples of this in many of your leaves, but you've also got some that definitely undermine this concept. One strong example is the leaf with three separate sections in the middle of the first page. Additionally, the leaves on this plant are considerably wavier and therefore more complex than their first pass ought to be.

• You're very focused on detail and texture, but there are a few issues with how you approach it. From what I can see, when drawing the underlying construction, your mind seems to be jumping a few steps ahead, as though you're already focused on how you're going to try tackle detailing the drawing. It's extremely important that you not let your mind stray from the step you're on. When you're putting down the initial construction, you need to be focusing on how those forms sit in space, how they flow through space, and how they relate to one another. Your focus needs to be on building up the illusion that what you're drawing is three dimensional. If you end up focusing on detail at this phase, you're going to end up with a drawing that feels flat. The other issue is that while I can see signs that you're improving on this front, you do need to push yourself to work less from memory and more from direct observation. When beginners try to carry over detailed information, they'll look closely at a reference for a while, then draw for several minutes. Then they'll repeat this process. Whenever you look away from your reference, your brain starts throwing away important pieces of information and simplifying things into cartoony representations of what they actually are. This is ultimately what you end up drawing from when you work from memory - even if the memory is just a few moments old. Therefore it's important that you look away only for a second or two to put down a couple of marks before returning to your reference image. I talk about this more over at the 25 texture challenge.

Looking at your branches exercise, one thing that stands out to me is how at the end of each line segment, we can visibly see how your lines diverge. The exercise has you draw down to the next ellipse/cross-section and then overshoot it slightly, then start again at that ellipse and repeat. What you need to work on is ensuring that the overshooting and the subsequent line overlap nicely so you don't end up with these little bits diverging, as it tends to look somewhat more chicken-scratchy. This often means taking more care when overshooting to make sure you keep it on a similar trajectory as what the subsequent line will have.

I also noticed that in your actual plant drawings, you tried drawing long stems and other tube-like forms all in one go, instead of following the method covered in the branches exercise. This may have been because you didn't like this sort of divergence issue. That said, the result here was that your lines were considerably more stiff and less confident, and the resulting forms did not feel entirely solid. Your best bet here is to continue working on decreasing that divergence, and ultimately using that method in your larger drawings.

While overall you're making a fair bit of progress, before I mark this lesson as complete, I'd like to see one more page of the branch/stems exercise, and then three more pages of plant drawings. For these plant drawings, I want to see construction only - no detail or texture whatsoever. I believe you should be able to focus more easily on construction if detail is taken out of the equation for the time being.

Uncomfortable in the post "Lesson 5: Drawing Animals"

2017-05-04 20:47

Pretty solid work! In general you're showing a lot of great examples of construction, and are applying a lot of the principles I've covered quite well. There's only one thing that I want to emphasize to you:

At the end of each successive phase of construction, I want you to be fully convinced that the forms you've laid down are three dimensional. I noticed a bit of a tendency in a lot of areas to start off with initial masses that read more as being loosely two dimensional (so starting off with ellipses/circles rather than balls). This has the potential of trickling down and resulting in somewhat flatter overall constructions down the line.

Now it's very clear to me that you do have a solid grasp of construction and three dimensional form - you've got a lot of great, highly dynamic examples here, especially with your dogs and horses. In places such as the bison and rhino at the top here however, letting yourself start out flat can often make it much more difficult to punch through into the third dimension later on. The rule I generally follow is that the illusion of form is something you either start off with and maintain through each successive pass, or something you lose. Not something you can add later on.

Now that I've gone over that, I'm going to tell you something seemingly contradictory: 2D shapes are great at conveying the gesture and dynamism found in legs/arms. Where 3D form can communicate solidity and weight, they also come with a sort of stiffness that can get in the way of showing how a leg may be twisting while in motion, or even the liveliness when posed statically. Shape on the other hand is great at giving the impression of action and flow.

It is entirely possible to combine these two. I approach legs often by capturing the general flow of an entire limb (if the limb is relatively straight, I'll draw each side of the shape with a single line so as to maintain that continuous flow). Then before this constructional pass is over, I'll strategically place my contour curves in very select locations - usually where that limb connects to the torso, possibly at the knee, and so on, careful not to overdo it. This way we're able to maintain that original flow but reinforce solidity just enough.

So, one last thing - if part of a body is cut off in your reference image, don't just leave the drawing open-ended. Either find other reference to fill in the gaps, or at the very least, cap off that open bit so as to maintain the illusion of 3D form. So if you're drawing a tree trunk, and the base of the tree isn't visible, make sure you cap off the part that's cut off with an ellipse. Leaving it as two parallel lines that suddenly stop really flattens things out.

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

Uncomfortable in the post "Lesson 3: Drawing Plants"

2017-05-04 20:35

So you've got a lot of examples of solid progress here, but I am noticing some underlying issues that we should be able to deal with. First and foremost, I'm not entirely sure how big the pages you're drawing on are but I encourage you to use as much room as you have for each drawing. This will allow you to draw more confidently, using more of your arm and body.

The pitcher plant I think is a good example of your drawings getting too cramped, and resulting in linework that is quite hesitant and uncertain.

Additionally, remember that we're drawing objects that exist in three dimensions - some of the drawings here that feel a bit weaker do so in part because they seem to exist more on the flat plane of the page they're drawn on, rather than having the page serve as a window to a larger three dimensional space. This may sound a bit lofty and abstract, but there's an easier way of thinking about it:

Three dimensional space has that third dimension. The dimension of depth. We don't necessarily automatically think about it, or think about the option for the forms we draw to plunge further into the depth of a scene, as beginners. Forcing yourself to consider that, especially with exercises like the arrows from lesson 2, and the branches and leaves from this lesson, can help you to push your willingness to exploit it.

More than anything, it's very important that you convince yourself that you're drawing three dimensional forms - your own willingness to buy into this illusion comes through in your drawings. If you believe a circle you've drawn is actually a sphere, your brain will resist you when you try to draw a straight line across it - it'll demand that you arc your line, wrapping around that sphere's surface.

Here's a few other more specific, more minor suggestions:

• Draw through all of your ellipses. I noticed your ellipses stiffening up, especially when you attempt to hit them in a single round.

• Remember to draw from your shoulder, not your wrist or your elbow.

• Do not go overboard with your contour lines. We are not building wireframes here - a couple well thought out and well executed contour lines that do their job of running along the surface of a three dimensional form are far more effective and produce a far stronger illusion than a dozen drawn quickly and sloppily.

• While I'm open to drawing contour lines in any direction (longitudinal, latitudinal, or something in between), I often find that running along a cross-section perpendicular to the general flow of a form is best especially when dealing with cylindrical forms. The reason is simple - if I can capture the line as a very simple curve or ellipse, I don't have to worry about ending up with a disjointed line. An ellipse is one of the basic things we practice, and so we're far more effective at using them as contour lines than, say, the lines you drew going down the length of the left side of this page, where the line goes over different bumps, having its flow and direction change.

After reading what I've said here, I'd like you to do two more pages of plant drawings. I think you've already had some interesting successes, especially with the copy of the potato plant demo, but overall I want you to push the illusion of three dimensional form, explore the dimension of depth and consider how forms flow from being farther away to closer to the viewer. Also, remember - draw bigger! Your sketchbook honestly may be somewhat restrictive, though I don't know how large it is.

Oh, one last thing - draw with greater confidence. I can see a lot of signs of hesitation, where you're afraid of either making mistakes, or drawing lines that may interfere with your ability to make a drawing clean later on. We are not at all concerned with the end product. We are not producing beautiful drawings, we are performing exercises, whose purposes are to help us better understand form and construction.

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

2017-05-04 19:52

Looking good! Your organic forms with contour curves are solid. The intersections are of course going to have plenty of room to improve, but basically as we continue to move through the course and expose ourselves more to challenges that force us to think about how different forms relate to one another, this will definitely improve. Pointing out which ones are right and wrong at this stage isn't going to be particularly helpful, so we'll leave it at that.

I'll go ahead and mark the lesson as complete, so feel free to move onto the next one.

Uncomfortable in the post "Frequently Asked Questions: I compiled a bunch of questions I felt were being asked rather frequently, so read through this list before asking your own."

2017-05-04 15:39

• Your ellipses should fit snugly inside of those planes, touching each of the edges at one point ideally. All this exercise is for is getting used to placing arbitrary ellipses within an enclosed space like this without losing the smoothness, confidence and flow of our ellipses. Remember that maintaining an evenly shaped ellipse is the highest priority, even if that means sacrificing your accuracy.

• Ghosting at a confident pace is ideal, to build up the appropriate muscle memory, so the answer to that is more or less yes.

• It's ultimately up to you, but there are a few factors to consider - firstly, how much work are you willing to do for each exercise. The amounts are in pages, but ultimately that leaves that decision very much up to you. Secondly, especially when dealing with the challenge of constructing forms in 3D space, our brains benefit from a little more room to think through the spatial problems. Personally, I've always been most comfortable working on loose-leaf A4 sheets of printer paper.

• Nope, no plans on making videos for lesson 1.

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

2017-05-03 20:10

Your drawings here are very well done. You're demonstrating a strong understanding of how the objects you're drawing break down into simpler forms and how they all fit together. You put contour curves and other similar techniques to good use, taking enough care with each one to make it effective without drawing too many. I also see you taking advantage of many natural details within the drawing that serve as contour lines on their own.

The issue with finding center lines will definitely improve with practice - specifically as you continue to develop your understanding of how all of these objects exist in three dimensions. I think you're already well on your way to that, but don't be afraid to do things wrong - it's those mistakes that will help you fine-tune your sense for where those center lines are actually positioned along a form.

Usually I'd encourage students to avoid skipping any steps, but ultimately whatever you're doing here seems to be working well for you. Ultimately the goal is to internalize the kinds of things we draw explicitly right now, so we go from having to put those marks on the page to simply being able to see and understand them with our mind's eye. This is the sort of thing that takes a lot of time and practice to develop though, but far in the future the goal is to be able to "skip" a lot of steps (although skipping isn't the best word for it, which is why I said 'internalize' before).

Since whatever you're doing is resulting in a clearly demonstrated understanding of form, I'm not going to ask you to modify that at all. If in the future I see signs of your grasp of form becoming more relaxed and sloppy, I will point that out - but for now, keep doing what you're doing.

As for suggested lines (sometimes they're referred to as lost-and-found lines), they're a great technique especially when it comes to adding additional details or when your goal is a beautiful end drawing (unlike our exercises, which are really more about the process and what they teach us). I wouldn't worry about doing that for the basic constructions of things, since solid, continuous lines play a big role in reinforcing our understanding of form and space, but in general it is a useful tool that will come in handy in the future.

Anyway, 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"

2017-05-02 20:09

Very solid work all across the board. Your organic forms convey a great sense of volume, your dissections' textures were varied and very carefully executed with a lot of time clearly dedicated to simply observing and studying, and your form and organic intersections demonstrate a strong grasp of three dimensional space, and keeping your various forms consistent with it.

The thing about the actual intersections themselves though, I mention in the lesson that they're not really the focus of the lesson, and they're naturally more complex than I'd expect students to be able to manage successfully right now. That said, I do want students to give it a shot so they can start thinking about how these forms cut into one another.

So in that regard, the only guidance I can offer here is to actually try putting in those intersections. You start by following your gut, and you will make mistakes, but these mistakes are entirely necessary to start getting a sense of how these different pieces fit together. It will take time, but if you don't make the attempts, you will end up holding yourself back.

The only other thing I wanted to mention was in regards to your organic forms with contour curves. Don't draw in the ellipses first, then draw your curves on top, Just draw the curve - the exercise is very much about trying to grasp the full curvature of the surface without relying on an ellipse. Many students have a tendency not to have their curve wrap around the form properly, so it's important to figure that out. I don't think you'll suffer much from that problem based on what I'm seeing here, but it is something I need to weed out.

So, before I mark this lesson as complete, I want to see two things - one page of organic forms with contour curves without the ellipses drawn in first, and one page of form intersections. The form intersections CAN be one of the pages you already submitted, I just want to see the actual intersections being attempted.

Uncomfortable in the post "250 Cylinder Challenge"

2017-05-02 19:56

Nicely done! I'm loving the variation - constructing strictly around a minor axis, constructing inside of a box, varying proportions and so on. I did notice some here and there that weren't quite sitting in their enclosing planes too well though, so I strongly recommend taking a look at this video if you haven't already. Getting an ellipse to sit right in a plane can be rather tricky, and can definitely take some getting used to.

Anyway, keep up the great work - and again, sorry for making that mistake yesterday. I'll go ahead and mark this challenge as complete.

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

2017-05-02 19:51

Nicely done. Your arrows flow nicely through space, and your organic forms are looking solid and capturing that illusion of the curves running along their surface and wrapping around quite well. Did want to mention though, when doing this exercise (specifically with the contour curves), make sure you include the minor axis line in there so you have something to align your curves to.

Your dissections are alright although they are definitely showing signs that you could observe and study your reference images more closely, and also more frequently. It's normal for beginners to rely more on their memory than they should - it results in a lot of cartoonier results, where the brain has tossed out key information in order to be able to process the vast amount of data being observed. The best way to tackle this is to ensure that you keep looking back at your reference, taking only a second or two to put down another mark before returning your gaze and refreshing your memory. Also, try and ask yourself questions about what specific kinds of details give the surface the particular illusion of seeming rough, smooth, wet, sticky, etc.

Moving on, your form intersections were generally well constructed. I do recommend though that you'd benefit from reading through the notes on the 250 cylinder challenge to get a better grasp of how important the minor axis is when constructing cylinders and cones. There should also be some more specific demos for different forms in this large dump.

Lastly, solid work on the organic intersections. I definitely get the impression that you fully grasp how these forms exist in 3D space, and how they interact with one another. Keep up the good work.

I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete, so go ahead and move onto the next one. Don't forget to continue to practicing the exercises from lessons 1 and 2 though - picking two or three at the beginning of each sitting to do for 10-15 minutes total is a good way to keep sharpening those basic skills.

Uncomfortable in the post "250 Cylinder Challenge"

2017-05-02 01:05

Ahaha, yeah. I try to quietly keep track of people who haven't paid up, but who have received critiques. I don't like the idea of going knockin' on doors demanding money, so this way I can act all high and mighty when they ask for a critique again.

.. and apparently make an ass of myself. I was so excited for the opportunity, too!

Uncomfortable in the post "250 Cylinder Challenge"

2017-05-02 00:55

AAAH. This was totally my mistake. I somehow attributed your username to a different patreon account who hadn't been paying (though they didn't ask for critiques so I'm not terribly concerned about them). I'm so sorry for messing up with this. I'll go ahead and add your submission to my backlog, you should get a critique on it tomorrow.

Uncomfortable in the post "250 Cylinder Challenge"

2017-05-02 00:41

It looks like every attempt Patreon's made to charge you for your pledge over the last two months has been declined, so you're no longer eligible for homework critiques.

Uncomfortable in the post "Lesson 3: Drawing Plants"

2017-05-01 20:32

While your first page of leaves starts off pretty weak, the rest of the set is considerably better than before. I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete, so feel free to move onto the next lesson.

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

2017-05-01 20:30

These are definitely better, just make sure you put more effort and focus into keeping your curves (and the larger ellipses they follow) aligned to your minor axis. The weaker ones from this new set tend to fall short in that area, while the stronger ones have a tendency to align correctly.

As for your question - what you think of as the images in your mind are actually not images at all. They're indistinct, difficult to describe, there's not much flesh or substance to them. If you were to try and focus on the specifics, you'd find very little there. That's the difference between an artist who's had loads of experience and often comes off looking "talented" and one who's just getting started.

As we learn to observe the world around us and study it (often by drawing it directly in exercises known quite aptly as 'studies'), we gradually build up a collection of information in our brains known as our 'visual library'. It's from this library that we fill in all of the meat of our imagined ideas, and when it's fairly bare as yours likely is right now, we find it considerably more difficult to put it down on a page. It's got nothing to do with talent, it's a matter of experience and exposure to the world.

The more you draw from life and reference, the more studies you do, the more you'll build up this visual library, and the more details you'll be able to pull out when attempting to flesh out an original drawing.

Anyway, I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete. Feel free to move onto the next one. From lesson 3 onwards, we start doing studies, both to build up one's understanding of construction and to start teaching you how to fill out that visual library.

Uncomfortable in the post "Lesson 5: Drawing Animals"

2017-05-01 20:24

It's coming along well. There's certainly room for improvement, but that will come with additional practice. Here's a couple things I noticed that you can change in your approach though, which should help in the long run:

• Try to avoid cutting legs off. If they're not visible in your reference image, try to find other reference images to fill in the gaps. Leaving things open-ended like that will decrease the solidity of the resulting construction.

• Don't draw your construction lightly and go over it with a darker, clean-up pass. Draw everything confidently, don't worry about trying to hide things so you end up with a nicer "final" drawing. We're not doing any final drawings here, these are just exercises and pushing yourself to draw your constructions with greater confidence and boldness will further help develop your understanding of those underlying forms.

• For the legs specifically, you may want to play with treating them a little more like 2D shapes. I know this goes against my whole "forms forms forms, 3D 3D 3D" mantra, but everything has its purpose. 2D shape is very effective at conveying flow and gesture, and legs tend to require a lot of that. In order to tap into that benefit of 2D shape whilst maintaining the form and volume of your construction, just be sure to apply contour lines at the joints, but don't use them in places like the middle of a leg segment, as it can cause things to stiffen up a little. You'll notice in most of my demos in the 'other demos' section of the lesson page, I tend to be quite 2D with the limbs, then I come back to strategically reinforce that volume in key areas (like the joints and connection points).

Anyway I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete. Be sure to continue practicing this stuff on your own, but I think you should be ready to move onto lesson 6.