Uncomfortable in the post "250 Box Challenge"

2017-05-01 20:15

Generally you're doing well, though I have a few concerns. I noticed that your lines are looking somewhat sketchy a lot of the time. I know you're using the ghosting method, but I think the sketchiness is coming from when your lines go off-track. It's important that you break the habit of correcting those mistakes by drawing another line on top - you need to leave those things alone, as it's a nasty little habit to get into.

That's why I encourage you to do your corrections with a different colour, and after you've completed the boxes. That way the whole process of reflecting and correcting is distinct and separate from the process of actually drawing. Additionally, I wanted to point out that using such a thick pen for your corrections (the orange one) isn't terribly effective, as it's difficult to see where the correct line would have been. If you can find a red or blue ballpoint pen, that would be much better.

Lastly, if you're having trouble identifying mistakes (there's almost always going to be mistakes on most of your boxes - as they get less significant and less noticeable, it'll be harder to pick them out), here's an approach you can use to find them:

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.

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

2017-04-30 21:18

I'm glad that comic was able to motivate you to get back on the horse! Generally you've done a pretty decent job, but there are a few areas that could benefit from some extra focus.

• Your arrows are flowing nicely. One additional thing you can consider when doing this exercise is how those arrows flow from a point farther from the viewer to a point closer. Basically a lot of your arrows stay at roughly the same level of depth, flowing mostly across a relatively two-dimensional space.

• You're doing a great job of trying to get those contour curves to wrap around the organic forms, and I'm glad to see that you're really pushing how they accelerate their curvature as they reach the edge, and how you're even playing a little bit with overshooting them. One area that can improve however is to keep a closer eye on the curves' alignment to those central minor axis lines. Basically these curves are just the visible portions of the larger ellipses, and those ellipses need to be aligned to the minor axis line that describes the general direction of flow of the organic form. Keeping them aligned essentially keeps each circular cross-section perpendicular to that direction of flow, which in turn can help you better reinforce the illusion that the curve is wrapping around correctly.

• Additionally, give these notes a read. They may help you better grasp what the degrees of each ellipse/curve describes about how that cross-section is oriented relative to the viewer. I definitely see that you play with the direction of those curves, so I think you're moving in the direction of getting a better grasp of how these things sit in 3D space. These notes should help solidify that understanding.

• Your dissections are coming along well - you're doing a good job of experimenting with lots of different textures and taking the time to observe and study them carefully.

• Generally good work on the form intersections, but I do have a couple suggestions. Firstly, the instructions did say to avoid using any forms that are stretched in any one dimension, like long cylinders, long boxes, etc. You've got a fair number of stretched cylinders and pyramids in there. Keeping your forms relatively equilateral in all three dimensions eliminates a lot of the extra complexity of foreshortening and perspective that is bound to make a difficult exercise an even greater struggle. Secondly, make sure you draw through those boxes and other forms, as covered in the 250 box challenge. This will help you better grasp how each box sits in 3D space.

• Your organic intersections are coming along well, though you've definitely got to watch out for the alignment of those curves relative to the minor axis line.

I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete. Feel free to move onto the next lesson, but make sure you continue practicing the exercises from lessons 1 and 2 regularly as part of a warmup routine. 10-15 minutes of 2-3 random exercises from the lot should be good at the beginning of each sitting.

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

2017-04-29 16:51

Pretty well done! Your arrows are looking solid, and demonstrate a good grasp of how they flow through three dimensions of space, instead of just spanning across the flat plane of the page. Your organic forms are reasonably well done, though I think it may help to read through these notes to better understand how the ellipses' degrees should vary at various points through the organic form.

For your organic forms with contour curves, you're doing quite well, just don't forget to include the central minor axis line, as it's important in terms of being able to align the curves/ellipses correctly.

Your dissections demonstrate a lot of solid studying and care, along with a wide variety of textures and experimentation. The only thing I want to mention here is that you should always remember that as a texture reaches the edges of a rounded surface (as that surface turns away from the viewer), the texture itself is going to be compressed. So if you had a bunch of speckled dots on a surface, all spread out evenly, you'd have many more dots much closer together along the edges of the organic form than in the dead center where the surface is pointing directly at the viewer.

Your form intersections were reasonably well done - just a couple things. Firstly, draw through your boxes, as covered in the 250 box challenge. Secondly, the instructions specifically stated that you should avoid forms stretched in any one dimension, like long cylinders. This brings a lot of perspective distortion/foreshortening into the mix and overcomplicates an already difficult exercise. Keeping things more equilateral in all three dimensions makes the exercise more manageable and can keep you focused on keeping your forms consistent and cohesive.

Your organic intersections are generally okay, though there's definitely room for improvement here. The contour curves were applied with somewhat less care as they were in the contour curves exercise, so make sure you're not slacking on that front.

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

Uncomfortable in the post "Lesson 3: Drawing Plants"

2017-04-29 16:45

Nice work! You're definitely paying lots of attention to the basic principles of construction, and are focusing on establishing your basic, simple forms rather than getting too caught up in all of the complexity present in each object you draw.

I can see that you are definitely interested in going into detail and texture a fair bit, so on that note I have a bit of advice for you. What we're effectively doing in all of this is not just drawing, but it's communication through a visual medium. Every mark we put down serves a purpose to convey an idea to the viewer. The marks of our initial construction describe how a form sits in 3D dimensions, how surfaces deform through space, and so on. The marks we put down for our textures communicate the features that exist there, so as to describe that surface quality. If it's rough, bumpy, wet, sticky, smooth, etc.

A problem can arise when the marks present in a drawing contradict each other. Features of the underlying construction could state that a surface is rounded, while the lines used to build up texture and detail can instead communicate that the surface is flat. This is what generally makes a drawing look off - different channels of communication insisting different things.

So it's very important to always remain aware of the underlying construction when putting down your texture and details. Always remember how your textural marks must wrap around forms (getting more condensed around the edges of a rounded form, and so on) in order to always reinforce the same idea that is communicated by the previous construction. Because of this, it's also generally better to draw less rather than more when putting down texture. We don't necessarily have to replicate every detail and mark present in our reference image - all we're doing is communicating a concept to build up an illusion. The viewer's eye, if everything fits together properly without contradiction, is often more than willing to fill in the blanks.

The last thing I want to mention - and I expand on this somewhat in the texture challenge is that texture is generally really just made up of a lot of other small forms present on the surface, and the marks that we actually see and draw are shadows. So if you have a series of bumps on a surface, it will naturally look rather cartoony if you draw those bumps as little circles with a continuous enclosing line. Instead, consider the fact that light hits that bump on one side, causing the shadow to appear more strongly on the other. This also means those bump-shadows can blend together into a larger continuous shape.

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"

2017-04-29 16:28

You're repeating a lot of the same mistakes here. For example, you included the central minor axis line in only a couple of the organic forms, and most of your curves still don't quite wrap around the forms convincingly.

Here's a few things you can try:

• Keep your forms simple. There's no benefit to making them complex, it'll only distract you from what you should be focusing on. Stick to simple sausage forms.

• Apply the overshooting method described here to help your mind tie the curvature of the contour line to that of the full contour ellipse together.

Here's some overdrawing to show why your contour curves are wrong. Those red arrows coming off your curves show how the viewer interprets their extrapolated trajectory - basically, they're flying off the forms, and therefore do not convince us that they're resting on the surface of that form at all.

Give them another shot.

Oh, and yes - since the lines themselves run along the surface of a form, they are technically all ellipses so at the ends where the circumference is completely visible from our viewing angle, they'd be shown as ellipses rather than partial curves.

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

2017-04-29 16:17

Before we get into the critique, I do want to point out that you've effectively made one submission every day for the last four days. There's a couple of issues with this:

• It raises the serious concern that you're rushing and not focusing as much on each and every stroke you put down as you could.

• You may not be taking breaks when you should be - working while tired will result in sloppiness, which in turn will cause you to practice bad habits. You should take breaks regularly and spread your work out in order to achieve the best results.

Additionally, you do need to give some thought to whether or not the number of critiques you are requesting reflect what you are giving in return for them. While it isn't terribly common, I try to point this out to students who have a tendency to submit too frequently - this service is extremely cheap because it's a communal thing. There are supporters who don't submit for critique or do so rarely, there are supporters who submit a couple times a week, there are supporters who give several times more than others and so on - and it's all pooled together so I can be compensated fairly for the time I put into the lessons, and into reviewing homework submissions. When any one student submits very frequently, they are taking a disproportionate amount of that pool for themselves (relative to the amount they're putting in), and are therefore taking that time away from others.

Anyway, onto the critique.

Your arrows are looking pretty solid - your execution of those lines are particularly well done, as they flow fairly smoothly despite maintaining an irregular parallel pair of strokes (keeping the two sides of the arrow evenly spaced out). One thing I want to point out however is that your arrows tend to be restricted to moving across the page - keep in mind that these arrows exist in three dimensional space. As such, you should push yourself to play with having those arrows move from points farther away to points closer as well, in order to play with the dimension of depth. Actually setting out such points before drawing your arrow can help.

Your organic forms with contour ellipses are alright - I can see you shifting the degree of your ellipses as the form itself turns in space, though I think you should give these notes a read if you haven't already. They may help you make the decision of which degree should be used at a specific location.

Additionally, your ellipses here are so-so. Some of them are a little stiff, so make sure you're drawing from your shoulder. You also want to work on keeping the ellipses consistently aligned to the central minor axis line - you're not doing a bad job of this, but there are places where you seem to lose focus on this point.

Lastly, the same issue I raised about the arrows can be applied here as well - always remember that these forms are three dimensional, and therefore don't just flow across a flat page. Try to play with the depth dimension as well.

Your organic forms with contour curves aren't great. I can see you making attempts to wrap your curves around those three dimensional forms, but often times they don't convincingly rest on the surface nor give the impression that they're wrapping around at the edges. As the curve approaches the edge of a rounded form, its curvature is going to accelerate before hooking back around. Here's an example of what I mean. Additionally, here are some notes and a video on the subject. This is a common issue, but definitely one we need to tackle. I strongly recommend using the overshooting approach mentioned in the notes I just linked, as it helps force you to think of the curves as being the visible portion of the full ellipse. Also, while it can be difficult to properly draw the central minor axis line, working on keeping your contour curves aligned to it will make it easier to convey that illusion that they're wrapping around the form.

Your dissections aren't bad, though I strongly encourage you to avoid hatching at all costs, at least when drawing with these pens. There's a couple reasons. It's a decent technique with pencils, where the graphite tends to build up together using a range of values, but when done in ink - especially fineliners/felt tip pens - it will create a lot of alternating dark/light spots which contrast heavily with one another and draw the viewer's eye unintentionally. Secondly, and perhaps more importantly, hatching is regularly used as a short-hand for "I didn't want to leave this area blank, but I also didn't want to bother to look more closely to see what texture exists on this surface." When we're used to just applying hatching to everything, we tend not to think more deeply about what we're actually trying to depict. There's also nothing wrong with leaving a surface blank - and you do have some examples here where you didn't use hatching, and you were fine with leaving surfaces blank, and they tended to be much more successful.

Another issue that is somewhat related is that you should, at all costs, avoid any kind of random, unplanned strokes. Beginners often feel that textures are chaotic and unruly, because it's easy to be overwhelmed by all the visual information present in a texture at first. They'll respond by seeing chaos, and therefore drawing chaos. Textures are virtually never chaotic - there are flows and rhythms present that all follow their own rules. The first step to being able to see and identify them is to respond to being overwhelmed by stopping and thinking, instead of scribbling. In your dissections, you've demonstrated that you currently do both - at times you hold yourself back, at others you don't give yourself enough of a chance to observe and study what's there.

If you're interested in learning more about approaching textures, take a look at the 25 texture challenge. This challenge is meant to be done over a long period of time, in parallel with other lessons, rather than all at once, so don't try to do it in just one sitting. The notes there are definitely worth reading though. Ultimately drawabox is not focused on texture and detail, as it's quite easy to become distracted by it and ignore the real meat of the lessons, which is more about construction and form, so you'll find that I don't touch on it too much in other lessons.

Your form intersections need work - but not for the reason you raised. As mentioned in the lesson, the exercise is about understanding how to draw forms within the same space such that they feel cohesive and consistent. The actual intersections themselves are a much more difficult spatial problem that I want students to start thinking about, but that I do not expect them to be able to wrap their heads around yet.

Your boxes aren't great. You've got a lot of near plane/far plane size relationship issues, and generally your understanding of 3D space still isn't there yet. This isn't particularly strange though, considering how quickly you've been tearing through the lessons. Additionally, your line quality here isn't great. A lot of your ellipses are stiff and uneven, and while your straight lines are definitely better than they have been in the past, it still doesn't look to me like you're applying the ghosting method particularly carefully.

The stretched forms - which you mentioned you realized was a mistake afterwards - definitely did not make this exercise remotely easy for you. By keeping your forms more equilateral in all three dimensions, you cut a lot of the additional challenge that perspective brings to the table out, allowing you to focus on keeping the forms consistent and exploring space at a more manageable scale.

Your organic intersections are okay, though they do suffer from the same weak contour curves I mentioned before.

I want you to do the following:

• One page of organic forms with contour ellipses

• Two pages of organic forms with contour curves

• First, look over the box challenge material notes again and practice it until you feel comfortable. Make sure you apply your corrections as I mentioned in my last critique, and get used to identifying the more obvious issues where lines diverge where they should converge.

• Then do two pages of form intersections with boxes only

• Then do two pages of form intersections with whatever forms you choose.

I do not want you to submit this before May 5th.

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

2017-04-29 15:31

Your arrows are generally looking pretty good. I'm glad to see that you're exploring how they'd flow through 3D space, including moving from further away to closer, rather than just going across the page.

Your organic forms with contour ellipses are moving in the right direction, but your ellipses are definitely noticeably stiff. Notice how they don't generally come out evenly? This is because you're hesitating when you draw them. You're afraid of making a mistake, and holding yourself back because of it.

When it comes to mark making - specifically executing those marks - we always want to approach them with a confident, persistent pace so as to keep our brain (and our fears) from interfering. Beforehand we should invest all of our time into preparing the stroke (as the ghosting method demands), but once you put it down, you basically need to accept that any mistake that will occur is already effectively written in stone the moment your pen touches the page. Mistakes are perfectly fine - we need them to grow and learn. These are just exercises and drills - if you screw up, there's ample opportunity to do better in the next one. So, when executing a mark, trust in your muscle memory and don't let your conscious brain interfere. Ensure that you apply the ghosting method and draw your ellipses from your shoulder. From there, trust in your muscle memory and just let yourself make those mistakes.

Your organic forms with contour curves definitely improve over the set. I did notice though that you're not including the central minor axis line in most of these (you did in a couple). Definitely make sure you do this, in order to help train your brain to understand how those curves need to be aligned. This alignment will ultimately help you to better demonstrate how those curves wrap around each organic form.

You certainly do struggle with those dissections, but this is completely normal. Ultimately this is an exercise where I'm throwing you in the deep end just to see how you handle it. There's no expectation for you to nail it on this first attempt.

That said, it does highlight some issues. First of all, before we even get into the textures themselves, the forms you're building on top of aren't done nearly as well as your last page of organic forms with contour curves. This shows me that you're more than likely getting distracted by the fact that you'll have to eventually add texture, and are likely rushing through to get to that main stage rather than focusing on the step you're at at any given moment. When doing a task, focus only on that task. Thinking ahead will cause you to work sloppy, and will result in a poor foundation on which to build the next step.

Secondly - and this definitely improves by that last page - you start off with a tendency to work from memory. When beginners look at textures in their reference images, they usually stare at their reference for a while, then set about drawing for yet another while. The problem with this approach is that we have notoriously crappy memory when it comes to really specific visual details. As soon as we look away, our brains go to work simplifying and filtering that information, so as to be able to process it as efficiently as possible. By doing these kinds of studies, we gradually rewire our brains to retain more information.

That said, simply repeating this beginner's approach isn't terribly effective. Instead, you need to force yourself to keep looking back at your reference - draw for only a second or two before you look back at your reference, and each time ask yourself what gives that particular surface the illusion of being bumpy, smooth, wet, sticky, rough, etc. As I said before, your last page definitely does a much better job of conveying that complexity, though there's certainly more room for refinement. And of course, that's totally normal and expected.

Drawabox isn't really focused at all on texture and detail, because I don't want to distract students from the importance of learning how to construct and depict the illusion of form and volume (similarly to how you had a tendency to construct the organic form sloppily because you were distracted by the thought of adding detail). That said, if you do want to learn more about this, take a look at the texture challenge. This challenge is meant to be done over a long period of time, in parallel with the rest of the lessons, so if you do decide to look into it, don't try to do it all at once.

Your form intersections are generally well done - you've been able to capture the forms together such that they look like they exist in the same space as one another with a consistent sense of scale and perspective. My only issue here is that your linework - especially when you add line weight - is wobbly. This goes back to the same issue I raised about your stiff ellipses. You've got to apply the ghosting method to every mark you put down, prepare diligently before executing your marks confidently. Don't be afraid to make mistakes.

Your organic intersections are alright, with the first page being somewhat better than the second. One thing I do want to point out about that second page is that hatchy shading you added along the edge of one of the forms. Experimentation is good, so I'm not against you trying out things like this, but I did want to point out that those kinds of lines tend to do more harm than good. Keep in mind that any line that runs along the surface of a form will describe how that form distorts through space. Those lines don't really follow that surface, so they end up communicating something different about the form, contradicting the other contour lines. Additionally, they end up being very noisy and draw the viewer's attention due to the high contrast they produce (with all the alternating black/white). Drawing the viewer's attention unintentionally is generally something you want to avoid.

Before I mark this lesson as complete, I'd like to see you do two pages of organic forms with contour ellipses. Additionally, I'd like to see one more page of organic forms with contour curves - being sure to draw the curves confidently and align them to a central minor axis line. You're not doing too badly in this area, but I definitely feel like we need to cement the idea of them wrapping around the forms a little more solidly, since it was somewhat weaker when you got into the dissections.

Uncomfortable in the post "Lesson 7: Drawing Vehicles"

2017-04-28 17:47

Your cylinders are generally looking good. I'm glad that you're playing with both constructing cylinders purely from a minor axis, as well as from a box. Just make sure you've watched those two videos in the lesson about ellipses-in-planes, as they can be a little tricky to get your head around.

I think your work has definitely improved - specifically in terms of your forms feeling more solid and more consistent. The forms seem to align to each other more appropriately, leading to fewer cases of disjointedness. That isn't to say there aren't minor alignment issues (like the airplane's engines), but they're less noticeable and will certainly improve with continued practice.

That's one thing to keep in mind - the amount of drawing I have students do through these lessons definitely seems like a lot, but ultimately it's a drop in the bucket in relation to what's necessary to really solidify one's grasp of all of these concepts. Effectively my goal here is to teach you how to think about drawing, and how to best spend your time when practicing.

I do have one tip that I want to offer though. So I noticed that in your drawings, you tend to do your construction, then you go over your drawing with a heavier pen, replacing your lines with 'cleaner' ones.

This particular approach is not a great idea, but the reason is a little confusing so bear with me. Basically the issue lies with the difference between replacing lines and emphasizing them.

When we replace our lines (like a clean-up pass),we're purposely trying to draw in new lines without the flaws of our old ones. Think like doing a rough sketch in pencil, then going over it with pen. When putting the ink down, by virtue of what we're trying to do, we naturally go slower, and draw with much less confidence. Our lines will waver more frequently.

When we emphasize existing lines instead (which is what we attempt to do when simply adding line weight to key areas), we do not go over the entirety of a drawing. We apply those weights strategically in order to emphasize overlaps (as explained here), and we don't fuss with the idea of trying to perfect the linework. We ghost those lines like any other, and draw them just as confidently - just as accepting of any mistakes that may result.

One thing you should look at in regards to all of this are your 'cleaned-up' cylinders. A good example of this is the mufflers on the back of your motorcycle. The original ellipses curve noticeably more than your cleaner lines do, so the resulting clean cylinder actually doesn't read as being nearly as solid.

As for your struggles with those motorcycles, there definitely are a lot of itty bits that complicate matters immensely. That's something you'll learn to deal with over time, but what's important here is that you accept that these things are in fact more forms that should be constructed. When we start tackling stuff like this, we tend to have a threshold for how significant in form and volume something has to be before our brain even thinks to include it as part of the construction, rather than as a decoration that can be pasted on.

As we continue to immerse ourselves in this, and continue to practice, that threshold decreases - we start to think of much more of the nitty-gritty tiny nonsense as being actual solid forms, and less as simply being stickers. One approach that may help to increase your development in this regard is to simply stop drawing things that one would classify as decoration, detail, or stickers. Basically draw only that which you are willing to construct, and push yourself to make the object as recognizable as possible. Usually you'll find that the decorations aren't necessary to make something look like, well, something.

Anyway you're moving along well so I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete. Congratulations on completing the dynamic sketching material!

Uncomfortable in the post "250 Box Challenge"

2017-04-28 17:13

Your work's coming along well! I'm glad to see the plethora of corrections as well, you definitely pushed yourself to hunt your mistakes down and correct them to the best of your ability. As you continue to move forwards, it's worthwhile to start exploring line weight, as it can definitely help give your linework a little more dynamism. You'll find more information about that on the challenge page, in the other tips section.

Additionally, as you continue to improve, your obvious mistakes will decrease and you may find it more difficult to find things to correct. Rest assured, there still will be mistakes, but they'll just be harder to find. Here's an approach you can use to help identify them:

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. Keep up the good work.

Uncomfortable in the post "250 Box Challenge"

2017-04-28 17:09

Looking pretty good! Your line weights are definitely solid, your constructions are coming along very nicely, and it seems that you're catching a lot of your more significant mistakes and correcting them properly.

Just a couple things to think about as you continue to move forwards:

• Work on that overshooting of your lines. Confidence is definitely the most important part of the ghosting method and mark making in general, but once you've got a handle on that, you definitely want to start working on improving the control of where your line ends (ideally without decreasing the confidence of your strokes).

• As your mistakes become less frequent, you'll find that they're somewhat harder to detect due to their subtlety. Here's an approach you can use to help identify them: 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.

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

Uncomfortable in the post "250 Cylinder Challenge"

2017-04-28 17:05

You're definitely heading in the right direction. There are however a couple issues I want to point out.

First and foremost, when you draw your cylinders inside of boxes, you're doing something very peculiar with the farther end of your cylinders. For some reason you're purposely making that ellipse very small, rather than actually filling in that far plane of the box. This simply doesn't make any sense.

The way an ellipse fits into a plane does not change based on its position relative to the viewer, or its position relative to the overall form. By definition, what you've drawn there is more akin to a cone with its tip cut off - the radius of the cylinder decreases as it gets further away.

Now if we had no box at all, it could potentially look correct, but it would be telling us that the rate of foreshortening on the cylinder is fairly dramatic (while the box was more shallow). I do think that this was just a weird slip-up that you didn't notice, and simply ended up continuing to do, but it's definitely a weird one.

The other thing I wanted to point out was that many of your cylinders are rather squashed. This isn't bad or wrong, but I want to make sure of the fact that you're aware of this. Basically, as discussed in this video (linked from the challenge page), not every box is a cube, and not every plane is a square. Therefore if you already have vanishing points set up in a scene, or other things that already imply specific vanishing points, your ellipse may not necessarily represent a circle. For this reason, it is very possible to end up with cylinders that feel as though they're compressed in one particular dimension, like they've been constructed from ovals instead of circles. That video goes over the criteria necessary for an ellipse to represent a circle in 3D space.

Anyway, I'll go ahead and mark this challenge as complete. You're doing a pretty good job of using your minor axes (though there are several cylinders where you neglected to include them, which is definitely something you want to avoid). Just be sure that you understand the issues I raised, and maybe do a little more practice in this area for yourself to ensure that you're able to apply that information.

Uncomfortable in the post "250 Box Challenge"

2017-04-27 22:28

Nice work! Your boxes are pretty solid in terms of their construction, and your use of line weight is generally pretty good. I do see a few cases (188, 189 stand out) where you made the internal lines a little darker (from the looks of it, making the point that comes out closer to the viewer heavier), but I'm glad that you did not continue with that. Experimentation's fine, so I'm glad that you tried it out, but this did have the negative impact of breaking up some of the cohesion that having slightly darker lines enclose the silhouette of a box tends to give.

Since your boxes are generally coming out pretty well, you will naturally have more difficulty identifying mistakes (as they're going to be much more subtle now). Here's a method you can use to help pick them out:

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. Keep up the great work.

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

2017-04-27 22:25

Not bad. Your arrows are solid, your dissections show a lot of interesting experimentation and your form intersections show a really well developing sense of space. Your organic intersections also demonstrate a pretty good grasp of how those forms interact with one another.

One area where you didn't do so well however were your organic forms with contour curves - based on your work, I know you can do this, but your work is incredibly sloppy here, so you're not at all capturing the illusion that the curves are actually running along that rounded surface, wrapping around and continuing back along the other side.

• Give the notes on this page a read

• Give these notes a read

• Give this video a watch

I know for a fact that you can do better than this, so I'd like you to do two more pages of the organic forms with contour curves exercise before I mark this lesson as complete.

Uncomfortable in the post "250 Box Challenge"

2017-04-27 22:21

These are better. Still plenty of room to grow, but definitely an improvement in your use of the ghosting method. As for the lopsidedness you're finding when applying that extending method for finding mistakes, it's likely because you're applying the method to some of the lines, but not others.

Just so you know how to apply this approach, I grabbed a couple random boxes of yours and went over them here. This does not include the actual corrections, but rather just the identification of mistakes. Watch out for that tendency to make lines diverge instead of converge. Also, it's common to end up with a sort of illusion where you can see a box two ways (since we've drawn through them). To help clarify which side of the box is facing the viewer, filling in one of the front-facing faces can serve as a visual cue.

Anyway, keep up the good work. As I said, still plenty of room for improvement, but I'll go ahead and mark this challenge as complete. Feel free to move onto the next lesson, but be sure to continue practicing this stuff.

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

2017-04-27 22:12

Your arrows are looking pretty solid, especially after the first page. The second and third page show a good understanding of how they flow through 3D space, moving both across space, but also from points farther away to points closer to the viewer.

Your organic forms with contour ellipses are alright, though there's definitely some noticeable sloppiness to your organic forms with contour curves. Firstly, make sure you continue to draw your central minor axis lines through these, as they're still helpful in regards to aligning your curves. Remember that the curves themselves are just the visible sections of the larger ellipses, so they still need to be aligned perpendicularly to the general flow of the form in order to have the best opportunity to get them to wrap around the form believably.

There's a lot of deviation in your pages for this particular exercise. Your first page of organic forms with contour curves are okay, although the y-shaped form on the far right gets progressively more sloppy as you go down its length, and the one to its left is definitely misguided (although it was probably just experimentation gone wrong). Your second page is somewhat better, though at times still sloppy. Alignment is important of course, but also take more care in drawing each individual curve. The third and last page for this exercise largely fails in the area of getting those curves to believably wrap around the forms. You definitely stop concerning yourself with the quality of the curves and just draw arbitrarily. This pattern tells me that you were likely doing the exercises for too long, and should have taken a break instead of pushing forwards. Working tired will make you sloppy, which in turn will cause you to practice bad habits.

Your dissections are a good start, and there's a lot of experimentation here. One thing I do see you relying on a lot is treating your pen like it's a pencil, and attempting to shade in areas with light hatching. There's a few things I'd like to point out about this:

• Firstly, it's generally not a great idea to try and apply techniques meant for one medium to another. At least, in this case it's not. A pen - especially a felt tip pen, which is required from lesson 3-6 - doesn't have the kind of range of values you can produce with a pencil. The marks you put down don't blend together to create a continuous fill, instead it results in a noticeably noisy and high-contrast space filled with alternating light and dark marks. This becomes distracting and draws the viewer's attention unintentionally. I advise you to avoid hatching from now on.

• Another point about hatching - it tends to be used as a sort of filler that beginners often use. Instead of taking the time to carefully observe their reference, they'll often become overwhelmed by all of the visual information and just decide "well this area has some stuff in it" and then just fill it in with non-descript hatching. Because of this, allowing yourself to use hatching becomes a crutch that keeps you from expanding your observational skills.

• Lastly, your particular use of hatching shows me that you're attempting to use texture/detail as tool to help add light and shadow to your object, which in turn you're trying to use to establish the illusion of form and volume. While many follow this methodology, I say it's backwards. Instead, the illusion of form and volume should already be established by your construction, and additional information laid down with contour lines. It's for that reason that successful organic form exercises (which this particular exercise is meant to start off as) already look three-dimensional. Instead of using texture as a tool to establish light and shadow, lighting should be used as a tool to help describe the surface of a form. Remember that what we're doing is communicating an idea visually - we've established the form of that idea, next we want to communicate the texture and tactile quality of its surface. This texture is really just made up of smaller forms - little three dimensional bumps, holes, cracks, etc. that run along that surface, and the lines we see as 'texture' are really just the shadows they cast. We can use shadow to describe these elements in order to build up a certain illusion that the object is rough, smooth, bumpy, sticky, wet, etc.

On the same train of thought as that last point, you don't need to cover an entire drawing in texture and detail. What we are not doing is making a perfect reproduction of a drawing, with full beautiful detail. As I mentioned before, we're just communicating. Think of it like describing an object verbally - you wouldn't explain every little hair or pore on someone's arm. You'd remark on some of them, and leave one's imagination to fill in the rest. Drawing is much the same.

Now, texture is not something you're expected to have any mastery or understanding of just yet - this exercise was added here just to see where you are, and what kind of direction I should push you in. Additionally, texture isn't the main focus of these lessons - drawabox is more about construction, the use of form, etc. That said, if you're interested in learning more about how to tackle texture, take a look at the 25 texture challenge. Be sure to note that this challenge should not be completed all at once like the box or cylinder challenges. It's meant to be completed over a long period of time, in parallel with the other lessons.

Moving on, your form intersections were fairly well done. You do have a tendency to still use particularly dramatic foreshortening on some of your forms (when drawing a large collection of forms, keeping the foreshortening shallow will help you maintain a more consistent sense of scale), and you should make sure that you draw through all of your boxes (I see that you did it for some, but not for others).

Your organic intersections conversely aren't that great, and largely suffer from a lot of the issues I mentioned in your organic forms section. I believe that getting more practice in that area will help you with this exercise.

Before I mark this lesson as complete, I'd like you to do two more pages of organic forms with contour curves.

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

2017-04-26 20:35

So I have to ask - how much time did you put into reading my critique, and applying it in your revision? It still looks very rushed. Here's some more direct notes on your issues with contour curves.

I want you to do the requested revisions again - and this time, don't draw two massive forms and call it a page. The point here is for you to get some practice in, not to do a couple and move on. There's no point in doing the lessons just to get them over with. Fill 8.5x11 pages with ten organic forms each. I want to see two pages for each of the three organic form exercises (contour ellipses, contour curves, intersections).

Uncomfortable in the post "250 Box Challenge"

2017-04-26 19:15

So when it comes to speed, we're not really looking for a compromise between accuracy and flow - what we want is to find the lowest speed possible where your brain is unable to interfere and cause your lines to wobble. This means that even if you're overshooting or arcing your lines, that's perfectly fine. Those are problems that will be dealt with later by practicing. Wobbling and wavering is the first thing you want to get out of the way. Not all problems need to be dealt with simultaneously, and since wobbling is more a matter of technique, that's the first thing to resolve.

Additionally, take your time - you submitted this roughly eight hours after you received my critique, so either you started beforehand (in which case you missed my advice) or you really tore through them. The ghosting method really demands a lot of time for you - taking care with each and every stroke, finding the correct angle of approach, ghosting through the motion to properly build up muscle memory, and so on. If you rush, or if you don't take breaks when you need them, you will be sloppy. So even if this sort of thing takes days and days, you need to give each mark as much time as it requires.

Usually I'd mark the challenge as complete, as the criteria really only requires the completion of the 250 boxes, but you still need work in this area so instead I'd like you to try the 250 boxes again. Additionally, when it comes to the correction phase, you corrected a small fraction of the issues in your perspective. If you're having trouble identifying those mistakes, try 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.

It would be a good idea to go over this set again with your red pen, trying to identify mistakes, before attempting the challenge again.

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

2017-04-25 19:57

Your linework is very bold and confident, but there's one overarching problem - you are rushing. Your arrows are good, your dissections are pretty decent, your form intersections are okay (the over-thick line weights end up flattening things out) but your organic forms are really sloppy.

Contour lines run along the surface of three dimensional forms, so anything that breaks that illusion - like an ellipse not fitting snugly between the edges of the form, or a curve flying beyond the form itself - undermines their purpose. Think of it like taking a cylinder and drawing with a pen over its shaft. That line cannot somehow fly off the cylinder, nor can it go into the cylinder. It must remain on the surface.

For the sake of simplicity, the forms we're dealing with are effectively just flexible tubes, so their cross-sections are going to be circular. This means that the ellipses that represent these circular cross-sections all need to be aligned to the central minor axis line, such that the line cuts each one into two equal, symmetrical halves down its narrower dimension. Keeping this alignment straight will help you maintain the illusion that each curve or ellipse fits correctly.

I want you to give these notes a read, then try the organic forms with contour ellipses, contour curves and the organic intersections again:

• http://i.imgur.com/1rv8Qb4.jpg

• The self critique notes on wrapping curves around your forms

• The video linked from the above self critique bit

So I did mention that the confidence of your linework is great, but what's equally important is that you apply the ghosting method beforehand to ensure that your marks are as accurate as possible. Of course, we don't worry about accuracy so much while executing, but we need to invest as much time into our preparation phase to compensate.

Uncomfortable in the post "Lesson 3: Drawing Plants"

2017-04-24 23:37

Yup, those are totally fine. While they may not be insects or arachnids, they are arthopods (the family to which all of these belong). But 'Drawing Arthopods' didn't really have the same ring to it.

Uncomfortable in the post "Lesson 3: Drawing Plants"

2017-04-24 21:30

Fantastic work! You're definitely nailing all of the major points I wanted to see for this lesson. You're doing a great job of capturing flat shapes as they flow through three dimensional space organically. You're also establishing solid volumes and really pushing that sense of solidity. Lastly, you're building up your constructions from simple components and building up complexity in successive passes, never skipping steps or jumping ahead.

I really have no critique to offer, so keep up the great work and feel free to move onto the next lesson. I genuinely hope you'll leave a little room for me to offer some helpful advice in the next one :P

Uncomfortable in the post "Lesson 3: Drawing Plants"

2017-04-24 20:47

Your confidence generally does improve over this set, but there's a few key areas that I'm noticing in general:

• You're drawing pretty small - I may have mentioned this before, but when it comes to spatial problems (like construction), our brains require much more space to think through them, especially as beginners. Conversely, when we are not confident in our ability to do something, we tend to shrink down our drawings, with some part of us feeling like it'll help hide our mistakes. This in turn has the opposite effect of making things considerably stiffer and more awkward.

• You have this tendency to draw your centerlines for your leaves and petals only part of the way, having the overall shape then encompass around it. That center line should go all the way to the end of the leaf, not stopping short. This line defines the flow of that shape, so if it stops early, you're guessing the rest of the way.

• I can see when trying the step exercises, and facing similar challenges in your drawings, you attempt to draw the entirety of a complex stem with a single line. If you look over the instructions for the stems exercise, you'll see that I recommend completing them in segments, focusing on getting those segments to flow into one another naturally. This goes back to the idea of complexity vs. simplicity - a line with lots of waves and curves will naturally be more complex than a single curve. As a result, it helps a fair bit to deal with them in sections (as long as those sections flow together and don't end up looking chicken-scratchy). You should still be applying the ghosting method appropriately to each stroke, of course. Basically when you try to draw each one in a single stroke, you end up drawing rather slowly-and-carefully, resulting in overly stiff lines that don't flow well.

I'd like you to try doing another two pages of the leaves exercises, two pages of branch exercises, and then three pages of plant drawings. Don't go overboard with the contour lines in your leaf exercises, they're not really serving any purpose.

Uncomfortable in the post "Uncomfortable's Unsolicited Advice: There Are Always Dragons"

2017-04-24 08:53

They are not. Any particular reason you're asking?

Uncomfortable in the post "Uncomfortable's Unsolicited Advice: There Are Always Dragons"

2017-04-24 00:38

Famous last words: "This dragon seems pretty reasonable."

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

2017-04-23 22:23

Nice work! I can definitely see a lot of clear signs that you're internalizing the lessons, and understanding the objects you study as collections of basic forms rather than getting caught up in their unimportant details. There is definitely room for growth, in terms of really solidifying what you're already getting your head around, but you've got a lot of great examples here already. The headphones are an interesting case especially - the drawing itself shows a great grasp of form and construction, although the encompassing box was more or less ignored. To be fair, the box probably wasn't the best choice for this considerably more curve-based construction, and to a degree I think you understood that and didn't entirely chain yourself down. either way, the drawing was still marvelously successful.

I also liked this one quite a bit, though I'm not sure what it is - a pencil sharpener perhaps? You handled the curves very nicely, pushing them off until the boxier construction was taken to its furthest extent. As a result, the object came out looking quite sturdy and solid.

Overall, one pattern I noticed is that your ellipses do need work - it's understandable that you'd be somewhat more timid and hesitant when drawing these complex objects, where each drawing requires a considerable amount of work and setup. It's certainly difficult to draw your ellipses with more confidence, and to draw through them as you're supposed to, given that the impact of a mistake seems large. Ultimately though, while each drawing takes a lot of time and investment, you need to force yourself to accept that each one is just another exercise, or a drill. One of many. The resulting drawing doesn't matter, what does is what you learned from it - and drawing those ellipses hesitantly will not teach you much about how to approach them correctly. Prepare all you need, but you will come to the point where your pen touches the page, and you need to trust in your muscle memory, and accept that if something may go wrong - and that's perfectly okay.

Anyway, I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete. I noticed that you haven't yet completed the cylinder challenge (as recommended at the beginning of this lesson), so you should probably tackle that and use it as an opportunity to get some more practice with your ellipses before moving onto lesson 7.

Uncomfortable in the post "Uncomfortable's Unsolicited Advice: There Are Always Dragons"

2017-04-23 22:13

Haha, I appreciate the kind words. To be fair though, the content I make for drawabox, as well as the critiques I do, are largely for my benefit in one way or another. It helps keeps the patreon campaign going strong, and also maintains a steady rate of traffic to the website. Even back before drawabox, when I was making lessons and doing critiques on this subreddit with no patreon or ad revenue, I was consciously building the foundation for something of value though I wasn't sure what at the time.

I certainly do like helping people, and the thought that this free resource might help guide people into a meaningful career, or even an enjoyable hobby does inspire me to keep going, but it's really just the icing on the cake.

Uncomfortable in the post "Uncomfortable's Unsolicited Advice: There Are Always Dragons"

2017-04-23 17:57

You're absolutely right. As I was working on it, I started to realize that the story was really veering towards building up the expectation that doing your best will always result in success, and that really wasn't the message I wanted to send. By then the only fix short of redoing a good chunk was to change the wording around and add that explanation at the end. Really not an ideal situation, but oh well.

Really, the more I think about it, the more the overall premise wasn't the best choice for this particular lesson. Still, I wanted to draw the little guy fighting a dragon :D

Uncomfortable in the post "Lesson 7: Drawing Vehicles"

2017-04-23 00:56

Overall, I think you're definitely moving in the right direction. Your general approach, sticking primarily to rudimentary forms, following construction as far as it will take you and so on is definitely going well. Your grasp of boxes has definitely come along way.

There are a couple of things I'd like to point out though:

First and foremost, your cylinders need work. It's actually a specific issue that's giving you some trouble - drawing ellipses inside of planes. This video on the subject was included in the lesson, though I'm not sure if you had the chance to watch it. The important thing there is that in order for an ellipse to represent a circle in 3D space, it needs to meet two criteria.

1. Its minor axis needs to run perpendicular to the surface on which the ellipse sits. Basically what this means is that if your ellipse sits on a plane whose horizontal lines go off towards the right vanishing point in 2 point perspective, your ellipse's minor axis needs to intersect with the left vanishing point.

2. Your ellipse touches the plane that encloses it at four points, one on each edge. The top and bottom points must align to the vertical vanishing point. In two point perspective, this just means that those two contact points must be directly above/below each other.

If your ellipse does not meet one or both of these criteria, it cannot represent a circle.

Another related issue that I noticed is that you tend to have a bit of an issue in terms of aligning boxes to one another. Specifically when you're trying to position your wheels, you seem to be having trouble keeping it parallel with the main body of the vehicle.

Lastly, your golf cart raised the main issue that comes from plotting actual vanishing points on your page - you're forced to keep them no further apart than the width of the paper. In this case, it resulted in some pretty dramatic foreshortening. While it isn't wrong, it does look a little weird.

I think you're definitely moving in the right direction, but cylinders are still quite difficult for you so that's an area you'll definitely want to practice. That said, I think you've encountered a fair bit of success in this set - for example, I really like your dog sled. Unconventional choice, but really well executed!

Anyway, I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete. There's definitely lots of room to grow, but you're on track. Considering that you only started four months ago, I think you've improved by leaps and bounds. Congratulations on completing the dynamic sketching material!

Uncomfortable in the post "250 Box Challenge"

2017-04-23 00:44

Pretty nice work! I especially like that you're not afraid of drawing your boxes quite large. This definitely has a tendency to help our brains think through spatial problems, so it's good to see. The only issue I see is that while you clearly put a lot of thought into your corrections, there's certainly a better way to approach that.

Basically, in this phase all you should really be doing is identifying lines that are wrong, and drawing in a different colour, what the line should have been. This doesn't relate too much to wobbly lines or anything like that, but rather focuses on where your perspective is off. You certainly wrote a lot of notes, but ultimately just going through the process of actually figuring out what the correct line in that situation would be will likely help much more.

If you have trouble identifying areas where your perspective is off, here's a method you can use to make it a little clearer:

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. Keep up the good work!

Uncomfortable in the post "250 Box Challenge"

2017-04-23 00:38

Pretty nice work. The only issue I'm seeing here is that your corrections phase wasn't terribly useful. When going back over your completed boxes, what you should be looking for is instances where your lines are, quite simply, not correct. Wherever you find this, actually draw in the correct line with your red pen.

If you're having trouble identifying these kinds of issues (they can be obvious in some areas, and quite subtle in others), here's a technique you can use to identify them:

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.

I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete, but it is definitely in your best interests to go back over these pages and try to do your corrections again. Keep up the good work.

Uncomfortable in the post "Lesson 3: Drawing Plants"

2017-04-23 00:34

So at this point there isn't a going to be much benefit from critiquing this work since issues I raised for lessons 1 and 2 cover most of it. There's just a couple things I want to point out though:

• For your branches, one thing you really need to work on is getting those segmented lines to flow into one another more seamlessly. This likely means applying the ghosting method more, and probably just practice in general. Your lines have a bit of a tendency to curve slightly when you finish them (so just after passing an ellipse), and when you start drawing your next segment, these curving bits stick out making it look like chicken scratch at a larger scale.

• I think this drawing in particular is a good example of construction, and I wanted to point it out. While your larger ellipses are still rather loose, in principle you're doing a good job of constructing each form to completion and combining them to create something more complex whilst maintaining the relative solidity that comes from the individual basic components.

• You have a bit of a tendency in other drawings to focus too much on detail, even in your leaf drawings. Remember that in all of my lessons, the main focus is construction and form. Detail is effectively superfluous and unnecessary at this point, and you may want to make a point to actually try drawing the bulk of your homework without it. You can do it for a couple pages near the end, but if you cut it out from the majority, you'll find yourself being forced to really think about those basic forms and how they all fit together.

• As I mentioned in lesson 2, draw bigger to give your brain more room to think through spatial problems.

Once we've addressed the revisions for lessons 1 and 2, and completed the box challenge, give this lesson another shot.

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

2017-04-23 00:22

So there's some good here, and some less good. One thing that stands out to me in particular is your organic forms with contour lines. The way you've tackled this exercise gives me the impression that you may not entirely understand what these contour lines represent - or moreover, that you aren't yet able to consider how these forms exist in 3D space.

Ultimately while we are drawing on a flat piece of paper, one of the first things we want to train our brain to do is to no longer regard it as a two dimensional plane. What we're doing is creating the illusion of a third dimension, the impression that this page is just a window into a deeper world in which our drawings reside. Once you yourself start being convinced and fooled by your own illusion, you will start to find that your brain forces you to draw in line with this illusion.

For instance, if you draw a sphere on a page, it's really just a circle. But if you believe it's a sphere, you will find that your brain fights against you when you try to draw a straight line across it. To your brain, the surface of that sphere curves in space, so the line would have to carve around that surface, resulting in a curve rather than a straight line.

The first step towards getting your brain to do this is to divorce yourself from the two dimensional world. Right now, a lot of your drawings tend to exist at one level of depth. Your organic forms move across the page, but don't move in the dimension of depth. They don't shift from being farther away from you to being closer. Same goes for your arrows.

For the arrow exercise, try to force yourself to draw an arrow between two set points - one point being far away, and one point being close. Try to consider how the width of that arrow will be smaller when it is distant, and how it swells when it gets closer. Then try the same thing with your organic forms - remind yourself that they're not sitting on a flat surface, they exist in a three dimensional world.

Secondly, I want you to give these notes a read. All of your contour ellipses and contour curves (which are effectively the visible portion of full ellipses) are more or less drawn at the same degree. Remember that each ellipse represents a circle in 3D space, and its degree describes its orientation. I talk about this in this video as well. So, once you're thinking about how the form moves through three dimensional space, consider how the orientation of these circular cross-sections changes, and vary the degree of your ellipses accordingly.

Thirdly, keep those ellipses and curves aligned to the minor axis line, such that the minor axis cuts each ellipse into two equal, symmetrical halves. This will keep the cross-section perpendicular to the general flow of the organic form. Additionally, I noticed that a lot of your curves and ellipses don't sit snugly within the form - they're often floating somewhat arbitrarily, which breaks the illusion that the lines actually sit on the surface of these forms.

Moving on, your dissections do bring to light some issues, but this exercise was another one of those first-exposures rather than a test of any sort. The point was largely to find out how far along you are with that sort of thing, and what we need to work on. So what I'm seeing is that you have a tendency to oversimplify, almost cartoonify the details you're reproducing in your drawing. This happens because it's effectively what our brains are naturally built to do. We look at something, and as soon as we look away, our brain starts to simplify and reduce the amount of information it needs to describe what it saw. This results in a lot of extremely important information being tossed away.

Because of this, you cannot trust your memory. Instead, you must continually observe and study your reference image, looking away only for a second or two to put down a couple marks before looking back and observing it once again. Ask yourself as you look at the object, what makes it look rough/smooth/wet/bumpy/sticky/etc. What visual qualities give it that particular texture? What is creating that illusion that you interpret in that specific manner?

Now, texture is not the primary focus of my lessons, so for now you should focus most of your time on construction. Understanding how forms sit in 3D space, how they fit together, and so on. That's an area you definitely need to focus a lot more on. That said, once you feel more comfortable in that area, you may want to take a look at the additional material in the texture challenge.

Onto the form intersections. In many ways, you did quite well in this. I can see you drawing through a lot of your forms, constructing cylinders and cones around minor axes, adding line weight and so on. The ones where you draw all of the lines of your boxes (rather than just drawing those that would be visible) are much more successful. That said, there is still room for improvement. My recommendation in the lesson 1 critique to go through the 250 box challenge will help here.

One other point on this matter - if a form's going to be cut off the edge of the page, don't bother drawing it. It doesn't end up being of much use at that point. This exercise is all about that illusion of 3D form thing, and as soon as a form gets cut off, it doesn't end up being terribly useful practice to that end.

Lastly, your organic intersections. I definitely agree that you struggled quite a bit here. A good deal of it has to do with the matters I raised with your organic forms, and generally understanding how each of these forms sit in 3D space. There are a few additional things that you can change in your approach that will help, however.

Firstly, draw bigger. This is very much a spatial problem, and in order to deal with these (especially as beginners) our brains require a great deal more room to think. Often times we draw smaller when we're overwhelmed with a particular challenge, feeling that it will help hide our mistakes, or simplify the problem - but instead, it causes us to stiffen up and makes it considerably more difficult.

Secondly, try to tackle this exercise one form at a time. Focus on creating one organic form that feels solid and voluminous. Draw it in its entirety, as if it was the only thing you were putting down on the page. Don't overdo your contour lines. You definitely have a tendency of putting down loads, largely because you don't yet fully understand what each one's purpose is. Those lines are just there to communicate how those rounded surfaces distort through 3D space - just two or three are often more than enough to build this illusion. There's no need to create a wireframe, and it can make your drawing much more cluttered.

So once you've got one form there, flopped limp onto an imaginary surface, add another. Imagine that you're taking another simple sausage form and just dropping it on top. Consider where it lands, where its weight will be supported by the first one, and where it will sag. Draw it in its entirety once again, don't worry about where one form occludes another. You can always add line weight later on, and even simple cast shadows to signify what is on top of what. From there, you repeat it several more times, each time with a new independent form being added to this pile.

So, once you've completed the stuff I asked for in my previous critique, I want you to do the following:

• One page of arrows

• One page of organic forms with contour ellipses

• One page of organic forms with contour curves

• One page of form intersections

• One page of organic intersections

Uncomfortable in the post "250 Box Challenge"

2017-04-21 23:38

Nice work completing the challenge. Here are a few areas you can focus on:

• First and foremost, your lines are definitely still somewhat wobbly. There's two different kinds of lines you've got here - your basic construction lines, and the ones you used to add line weight. Both should be approached with more confidence upon execution, relying on the ghosting method to build up muscle memory, and then relying on that muscle memory to drive your hand (instead of going slowly and hoping your brain will keep you on track). If you let your brain drive your drawing motion, the line will wobble, because that's effectively what you're asking it to do - to have your brain course-correct as you go if you ever end up going off track. Instead, even if you're not fully accurate, you want to train yourself to be confident enough to maintain the same trajectory your line started out with. This means that once you start drawing the line, you're basically locked in - you need to be willing to make those mistakes, rather than being too afraid to stumble. Remember, the ghosting method is all about planning and preparing as much as you need, then committing to a course of action.

• For your corrections, you focused your attention in the wrong place. At this point, your wobbly lines are irrelevant - what you want to look at is whether or not the lines you've drawn appear to be correct in terms of perspective. If they're off, draw in the correct mark. It is by reflecting upon these mistakes that you can gradually develop your understanding of 3D space.

Here's an additional trick you can use if you can't quite identify what's wrong with a given box:

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, while you certainly do have room for improvement, but you're making good headway. Keep up the good work.

Uncomfortable in the post "Lesson 3: Drawing Plants"

2017-04-21 17:51

I checked through my records and wasn't able to find your username listed as a patreon supporter - if you happen to be one, make sure you've sent me your username through patreon's messaging system.

Also, it's really important (and required) that those seeking critiques from me submit their work in order. Basically, the lessons are structured in such a way that each one makes it much easier to detect issues with the concepts covered there. Later lessons make it considerably more difficult to really pinpoint what the issues are.

The free community critiques (which you can receive by just submitting your work to the main subreddit) are less strict, but it's still a good idea to get a critique on the previous stuff before advancing to later lessons.

Uncomfortable in the post "250 Box Challenge"

2017-04-20 20:32

Oh I wouldn't say that at all. Looking at these, your line quality seems to be fairly consistent across the board. Your lines flow pretty well, and as a result your boxes feel fairly solid. One thing you could try however to kick your boxes up to the next level is to play with your use of line weight. There's notes in the 'other tips' section of the challenge page that talks about this.

Another recommendation I have is to draw your boxes a little bigger. This will help you further explore your mental model of 3D space. Often people draw things smaller to remain in a sort of comfort zone where fewer things can go wrong - this can have the negative effect of causing lines to cramp up however. I don't see this to any significant degree from you, but it would still be beneficial to vary the sizes of your boxes more.

Lastly, here's an approach you can use to help identify perspective mistakes. They can definitely become more difficult to detect by eye as they become subtler, so this should help you find mistakes that may otherwise go unnoticed:

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.

Uncomfortable in the post "Lesson 3: Drawing Plants"

2017-04-20 20:27

Looking good! In general your work here is fairly well done, but I definitely notice an increase in your confidence and flexibility as you push through the set. You start off decent, though a little more timid and perhaps more concerned with the little details than the underlying construction. As you move onwards however, I can see your regard for construction and your understanding of the forms you're working with, and the space you're working within, strengthening considerably.

I can also see that you're learning your lessons - looking at this page, the flower pot on the left was okay, but since you didn't draw full ellipses for some of the decorative rims, they didn't come out that well. The pot on the right however was considerably more solid, as you drew them all the way around, allowing you to maintain a much more consistent stroke.

I think you're doing a great job, so 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"

2017-04-19 19:43

Yup, though don't forget to draw through your boxes and to apply the same principle to those lines as well.

Uncomfortable in the post "250 Box Challenge"

2017-04-18 20:20

I think the steadiness of your hand definitely improves after the first couple pages. Overall, you're doing well, but there still is room for progress. While it's great to see that you're definitely pushing yourself to identify and correct mistakes, here's an approach you can use to find those that are a little less obvious:

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, another recommendation I have for you is to draw your boxes somewhat larger. Constructing these forms is very much a spatial problem and especially as we start getting used to this it can help a lot to give yourself more room to think and sort things out. We actually have a tendency to draw smaller when we're not confident in our ability to do something (like drawing small will hide our blunders), though it actually causes us to make more mistakes.

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

Uncomfortable in the post "250 Box Challenge"

2017-04-18 20:03

Your boxes are coming along well. As you continue to progress with these, you may find that the mistakes you make end up being somewhat more subtle and harder to detect. As this becomes the case, here's an approach you can use to help identify where things are going wrong in less obvious ways:

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, consider this challenge complete. In the future, you may want to also consider playing with the line weight of your boxes to really kick them up to the next level. You'll find notes on how to tackle line weight in the 'other tips' section of the box challenge page.

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

2017-04-18 19:59

That spider's looking really nice. Solid forms and constructions there. I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete, but I do have one additional piece of advice to offer. Contour lines in the legs can be a little bit tricky as it's easy to overdo it considering how small and cramped they tend to be. Additionally, it can be quite easy to have them come out somewhat stiff.

Instead, legs are a particular case where it can help to treat them somewhat more as 2D shapes at first in order to take advantage of the natural gestural quality you get out of it. Then to reinforce the illusion of form, place contour curves at the joints as well as where those forms might connect to anything else (or come to a close). Basically the idea is that if you have a tube of considerable length, you can still maintain that illusion as long as the ends of that tube are solidly reinforced and capped off with proper ellipses.

Uncomfortable in the post "250 Box Challenge"

2017-04-17 16:33

Looking pretty good! Your general confidence and your understanding of 3D space definitely improves over the set. I did notice however that as you push through, your mistakes become somewhat more subtle and more difficult to detect. In this case, the following approach should help:

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.

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

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

2017-04-16 17:15

Looking good. The only thing I want to stress is that I can see that you've gone through some effort in your praying mantis drawing to draw your underlying lines more faintly. Avoid this in the future, as more timid linework will always prove to be a fairly flimsy scaffolding for your drawing. Make sure that every mark you put down is confidently executed, rather than attempting to hold back to keep lines less visible. You can always go back in to apply more line weight to help accentuate certain marks over others and organize your drawing.

Keep in mind as well that adding line weight is inherently different from outright replacing an underlying mark with a "cleaner" one. Adding line weight is the act of emphasizing certain existing marks, rather than replacing them.

That said, the spider at the end is looking quite nice, and definitely makes a big step towards selling the illusion of form and tangibility.

And now I don't want to look at these creepy things anymore 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"

2017-04-16 17:08

Looking pretty good. Just a few things to keep in mind:

• For your organic forms with contour lines, make sure you draw the central minor axis line for all of your organic forms - both those with contour ellipses and those with contour curves. This line is what you want to be aligning those ellipses to (and since the curves themselves are just the visible portion of a larger ellipse, the same rules apply for them). This will help you ensure that they're running perpendicular to the flow of the overall form.

• Your dissections are coming along fairly well. Always remember above all else that you want your textures to wrap around the forms - at times this can be forgotten as you get caught up in the intricacies of your textures. Just remember to compress the textures along the edges of the form, as those surfaces turn away from the viewer. You did a good job of this with your octopus tentacles, but not too well with your wood stock and the leopard skin. Additionally, while your work here is coming along well, you definitely will want to push yourself to pay closer attention to your reference images - specifically to keep yourself from working from memory. The second we look away from a reference image, our brains start processing and simplifying the information we gathered, rendering it considerably less useful. In order to avoid this, it's important to spend lots of time observing your reference, then take a moment or two to put a couple marks down before looking back at your reference to reconstruct a more accurate mental model of what you're trying to reproduce. I go into this in greater detail in the texture challenge.

• Your form intersections are done fairly well, but one thing I want to really stress is the importance of not drawing in two steps (a rough lay-in, followed by a clean-up pass). The clean-up pass is actually the problem, because when trying to ensure that our lines are tidied up, we have a tendency to draw much more slowly and less confidently, which ruins the flow and evenness of our lines and shapes. Instead, push yourself to put down every mark as confidently as you can, accepting that these marks will be the final lines that make up your drawing. Afterwards you can go in to add line weight here and there, but there is a key difference between this and a clean-up pass. A clean-up pass seeks to replace messier lines with cleaner ones. Adding line weight is about emphasizing lines that already exist by confidently applying a little extra weight to them in specific places, largely to clarify overlaps of forms. Don't get me wrong, you're generally doing a good job here, but those spheres definitely need work - since they're drawn considerably more timidly, they came out rather uneven and don't read as being terribly spherical or three dimensional.

Your approach to drawing pyramids is spot on - that is exactly how I explain it in this demo. You may find other useful information in this large demo dump, linked in the sidebar.

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

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

2017-04-16 16:58

Your understanding of construction definitely improves over the set. I'm especially liking that fly, as it feels particularly three dimensional and believable. The ground beetle is also fairly well done.

There are a couple issues that I'd like to bring to your attention though.

• Draw through your ellipses to keep them even, and therefore have them read as solidly as possible. You are doing through some of them and not others, although even when you draw through them there's a visible sense of timidity to how you put the mark down, as though you're hesitating and attempting to hide them. Draw with more confidence.

• Remember that your initial lay-in is a collection of solid forms, not arbitrary shapes. If you've put down a solid form onto the page, you cannot simply change your mind down the line and ignore it. An example of you doing this is with the head study of the ground beetle, where you started out with an exploratory ellipse, then then went on to disregard it to a large extent. What sells the solidity of a construction is how you perceive it while working with it. You need to respect the fact that it exists in space, and in order to work with it, you must carve and cut into that form. This means being as aware of the pieces being cut away as they exist in 3D space, as you are of the part that remains. What you've done here is work within the two dimensional confines of the initial ellipse. If you allow yourself to think about these things in two dimensions instead of three, your results will be flatter.

On the matter of texture, you're not actually applying texture - what I'm seeing is that you're attempting to add light and shadow to your drawing. This is inherently different, and it's why you can't seem to move past using hatching lines which contain no actual textural information relevant to your subject matter.

You're not answering any questions in regards to what makes this surface appear rough, smooth, wet, bumpy, etc. and are merely filling things in where you feel the light does not hit the surface directly. This is not an uncommon thing students try. Many students, especially those with prior experience with drawing, will try to use lighting and shading to build up the illusion of 3D form. Some will take that further and use texture as a tool to create areas of dark and light to accomplish the previous goal.

What I encourage is quite the opposite. Firstly, if construction is done well, there is no need for rendering (the application of light and shadow) to reinforce the illusion of form. Construction can stand on its own to communicate this aspect of the object being drawn without additional support.

What construction cannot communicate is the texture and tactile quality of the various surfaces of an object, so that is where texture comes in. Instead of using texture as a tool when applying lighting/shading, we can use lighting as a tool to help us communicate texture. This can be done because texture is effectively just a bunch of very small forms that exist along a surface - what we actually see of a texture is a matter of how light plays off it. The marks we see are effectively just shadows.

I go into this in greater depth in the 25 texture challenge so be sure to read through those notes. That said, there's one thing I want to make clear:

It's very obvious to me that you're too focused on the challenge of applying texture/rendering. While your underlying constructions are generally well done, it's quite clear that while working on construction, you are too focused on jumping ahead to the detail phase. This causes you to draw somewhat more timidly (not drawing through some ellipses for example). Additionally, the way you currently apply detail has a habit of seriously undermining your constructions. Every mark you put down for a drawing communicates something to the viewer - that's effectively what we're doing. We're communicating ideas, and describing things about those ideas. If the construction says one thing about an object, but the details you go on to apply contradicts that, a drawing will come out looking off. Always keep in mind that every mark on an object serves as a contour line, in that it runs along the surface of that form and in doing so, describes how that surface warps through 3D space. You need to always be completely aware of the forms you're working with, and ensure that any later details you add respect the construction that is already there. It is for this reason that I often opt for being subtle with my use of detail, so as to keep from overshadowing and overwhelming the underlying construction.

One last thing - I can't quite tell what scale you're drawing these at, but using your handwriting for scale, you may not be using as much room as you have on a given page. Drawing smaller will cause you to stiffen up and will pose greater challenges in terms of thinking in 3D space. Make sure you take advantage of as much of the space a page offers you.

I'd like you to do four more pages of insect drawings, but with no detail or texture whatsoever. Focus on drawing confidently, and on respecting the underlying construction. I believe removing the pressure of detail will really allow you to cement your grasp of the underlying forms.

Uncomfortable in the post "Lesson 5: Drawing Animals"

2017-04-15 23:25

I'm not sure what you mean by the first part of your question - that is, constructing something with knowledge vs without. As for the other question, it is mostly just raw practice. One thing I can suggest though is try looking at the negative space around your animal as demonstrated on the left side of this demo. You can use negative space to judge the angles and relative spaces in your reference and get a sense for whether or not you're doing a good job of matching it.

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."

2017-04-15 04:02

I can't see anything wrong with a standing desk, but I can't really speak to it with any certainty since I've never used one before.

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."

2017-04-14 16:27

Sit as straight-backed as you can, and adjust your chair height to keep your desk at a relative height where that is possible. If your desk is too low, you will hunch. If your desk is too high, you won't be able to have proper control over your drawing area (for lack of a better way to describe that). If necessary, you may want to try and create a more angled surface, although I've never bothered to do this myself. So long as it's stable, you could set up a drawing board (which is basically just a glorified large, flat board) to be raised higher on the far end. It might be tricky to keep these sturdy enough to draw on though. Alternatively a drawing desk is a more reliable, but perhaps needlessly expensive solution. Somewhere in between you can probably find preconstructed table-top solutions that don't involve replacing your entire desk.

I've always managed fine keeping my desk around the base of my ribcage and just forcing myself to keep my back fairly straight.

Uncomfortable in the post "250 Box Challenge"

2017-04-14 01:55

Nice work, I can definitely see your confidence and your use of line weight improving. I did notice however that as your mistakes became somewhat less extreme, your ability to identify where some of your angles were a little off dropped off as well. Here's something you can do to identify areas where the alignment of your lines aren't quite right:

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.

I'll go ahead and mark this challenge as complete, but be sure to try this method out on a few of your pages.

Uncomfortable in the post "250 Box Challenge"

2017-04-14 01:52

Looking good! The thing about the whole drawing through your boxes thing is that it is practicing this specifically that gradually allows you to build a three dimensional mental model of these boxes in your mind. By continuing to practice this - and just as importantly, going back with your red pen to pinpoint and correct your mistakes - you will refine and reinforce this mental model, which will ultimately help you to consider more of what you draw in three dimensions rather than just the two dimensions afforded by the page.

So while there's no tips or tricks to nailing it in a given drawing, there is something you can do to help identify mistakes (and therefore correct those mistakes more effectively). 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.

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

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."

2017-04-13 19:25

There's no correct direction to draw your lines, beyond what you feel to be comfortable. In lesson 1, in the description of the ghosting method, you'll find that I instruct students to rotate their pages in order to find a more comfortable angle of approach. This can certainly vary from person to person, but there's no set way of doing it based on which hand you use to draw.

When drawing from the shoulder, your arm should not be straight. What matters is that your joints are locked - which position they're locked will depend on your posture, your desk setup, how far the page is from you, etc. I generally find myself drawing with my arm bent at the elbow.

Uncomfortable in the post "Lesson 5: Drawing Animals"

2017-04-12 19:12

Your use of construction definitely improves over this set. This wolf's torso is especially well done, though you should never cut the feet off of a study. Even if the feet aren't visible in your reference image, it's best to find other reference to try and fill in the blanks.

There are a few issues I am noticing though:

• With the owl at the beginning, you appear to have partially skipped the step of fleshing out the entire wing as a single simple form before diving into the feathers. I say partially because I see signs of you doing it somewhat in certain areas, but not near the top/ends of the wing. This tells me that you may be somewhat distracted and overly eager to jump into the more complex aspects of the drawing, instead of focusing on what you're doing in a given step. Don't allow detail to distract you from building your underlying construction, as it will always be the most important part of your drawing.

• Your application of texture tends to be a little sloppy. I can see that you're trying to draw fur as individual tufts, which is good, but you're still approaching each tuft with a degree of mindless randomness (in how you create those little spikes) rather than designing them purposefully, especially in the cat. The two wolves are a little better, but you do have a tendency to think more about the quantity of fur along the silhouette more than how you're approaching the design of each individual tuft.

• Don't use cross-hatching. More often than not, it is an oversimplification or filler people use when they don't want to think about what kind of texture is present in what they're looking at, but at the same time don't want to leave the space empty. Cross-hatching certainly has its place in certain kinds of drawing, but that is not what we're after here. If you're going to dive into texture, take the time to carefully observe what makes a particular surface rough, smooth, bumpy, etc. Alternatively, focusing on construction is also perfectly acceptable.

• Correct me if I'm wrong, but I feel that your hybrid animal was not done using any reference at all, but rather from memory. As it stands, your visual library is not nearly developed enough (and there's no expectation for it to be) to pull out detailed information on how given parts of an animal are to be constructed. So, when doing something like this, make sure you still rely on reference for every individual part of your drawing, and using your understanding of their forms to fit them together.

I do think you've got plenty of room to grow here, but I'm going to mark this lesson as complete. Make sure you continue to practice your observational skills, while pushing yourself to approach the constructional method step by step, focusing on exactly what you're doing at a given moment and not looking beyond. It can also help to do drawings where you are purposely JUST doing construction, as the knowledge that we are going to move onto adding detail can often be distracting in and of itself.

One last point - what kind of pen are you using for this? It looks like ballpoint to me, rather than a fineliner/felt tip pen.