Uncomfortable in the post "Lesson 5: Drawing Animals"

2017-04-12 18:23

So for observation and awareness of proportions, take a look at this: http://i.imgur.com/ffsfevD.png. A lot of your drawings suffered from a tendency to make certain features too big, making them look a little bit more cartoony (think pink panther-esque). My proportions there aren't perfect either, but notice how it looks considerably more plausible? One important thing here is never to guess and make things up. We have a tendency to do this without realizing, as I explained previously, so we need to really push ourselves to only draw the forms that are actually, verifiably, present. Additionally, keep an eye on your negative spaces. One of the great strengths of purely observational drawing (as opposed to purely constructional drawing) is that it does nurture a stronger sense of proportion and accuracy (even if the resulting drawings are more likely to look flimsy). One technique they use to this end is to look at the negative 2D shapes present in the composition of whatever it is you're looking at. So in the otter's case, the space under its belly and between its legs, or between its tail and back leg. By keeping an eye on these, we can be more aware of the relative sizes of those spaces whilst constructing our object. Ultimately the ideal approach to drawing is a combination of construction and observation.

You are definitely aware of how your limbs connect to your torsos - especially in the deer, elephants, rhinoceros, etc. Just make sure that you draw your constructions without trying to hide them (as done in the otters). Your deer are better in this regard - you're not worry about hiding things, you're primarily focusing on bulking up your construction, and worrying about building a hierarchy with line weight after the fact.

Jumping back to the observation thing again, take a look at the bison and rhino legs - while the torsos are strong, those leg forms/silhouettes appear to be largely made up. It is okay to focus more on the silhouette-shape to capture the gesture of those legs, but you still need to make sure you're building up with simple shapes, and that you're mindful of your joints. It's at the joints and end points of each shape that you'll then go in and reinforce the three dimensionality once your gesture has been captured (using contour curves of what have you - like you did in the running baby elephant to an extent).

Uncomfortable in the post "Lesson 5: Drawing Animals"

2017-04-11 19:18

Looks like the patreon pledge went through just fine - although considering how much you help around the subreddit, I wouldn't have minded either way.

Looking at your work, I think you're getting a pretty good grasp of understanding form and how things all fit together. Most, if not all of your drawings do have a strong sense of volume.

One area where you definitely need a lot of work is in your observation. There's room for improvement largely in your ability to match the proportions from your reference images, but also you have a bit of a tendency to go a little cartoony at times. So you've got a good grasp of your forms, but perhaps aren't dedicating as much of that effort towards seeing how those forms need to be arranged, and how they need to relate to one another.

In this case, I encourage you to push yourself to draw less, and observe more. Basically a lot of what's happening here is that you end up working from memory. You're likely observing your reference a bit, then taking a good chunk of time staring at your paper and drawing. Within a few moments of looking away from the reference however, your brain goes through the motions of sorting through all that information and throwing out what it deems unimportant in order to simplify things. Then when your brain grasps for that information, it finds a gap and tries to infer what it would have been based on your understanding of the subject matter. Unfortunately when these are things we haven't studied much, our ability to fill those gaps are quite unreliable, leading to things that look off. The solution here is not to allow yourself to rely on memory at all - take only a second or two to put down a couple of marks before looking back at your reference and forcing yourself to refresh your mental model of what it is you're looking at.

Across your drawings, I think you've got a lot of interesting examples of highly dynamic motion that you've captured quite well. For example, the baby elephant on the left. I also quite like the sense of form from the crocodile, I think you've done a great job of capturing the top/side planes of its body, and accentuated them nicely with those ridges.

One other recommendation I have is to leave out all the extra environmental stuff. Here you seem to be trying to create scenes for some of these rather than core animal studies - the problem with this is that there's a lot of distraction. Remember that these are exercises first and foremost - the goal isn't to create a pretty drawing, but to improve your understanding of what it is you're drawing. To better grasp how that particular animal is configured from the standard parts that make up all things. If you get caught up in other things - even getting into texture too early - you won't learn as much from the exercise. The thing about texture and detail is that students often have a habit of, when deciding they're going to take a drawing all the way - it changes their mindset. They end up spending less effort on the construction, they end up purposely drawing more timidly, all so they can jump into the detail and push the drawing to something 'complete'. Always remember, these exercises are all about the process, not the result.

And something for the road - draw bigger. Maybe even reserve each page for a single animal, so you have enough room to think through all of the construction and proportion and whatnot.

So, before I mark this lesson as complete, I'd like to see three more pages. Don't get into any detail at all - if there's some element you want to add that you don't feel it necessary to think of as a 3D form, leave it out. Focus entirely on getting your proportions and the general configuration of each animal spot on. Take your time, make sure you're looking 99% of the time and drawing 1% of the time.

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

2017-04-10 23:05

The more lines there are, the harder it is to focus oh the points you're drawing between. It's something you'll have to cope with. Practice will help, so long as you're mindful of that weakness.

Uncomfortable in the post "Lesson 7: Drawing Vehicles"

2017-04-10 21:21

I haven't had the chance to go through it yet, but Scott Robertson's 'How to Render' (a followup to his How to Draw) is probably a good place to look. It definitely looks like it'd be right up your alley, considering how natural and comfortable the plane drawings seemed to be for you.

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

2017-04-10 21:19

On the spreadsheet where I keep track of all the homework submissions, I add a little red box next to submissions I think are more or less perfectly done. As it stands, you're two for two. This is exceptional work.

With your arrows and organic forms with contour curves, you're demonstrating a solid grasp of 3D space and how your lines flow not across a flat paper, but through three dimensions to which the page is merely a window.

The little epiphany you had there in regards to texture is right on the money. I actually explained this a few days ago to another student, that many people try to use texture as a means to depict light and shadow on their forms - which often causes them to sink to using a lot of crosshatching all over, as merely a sort of visual noise to differentiate the value scales on their objects. While understandable (especially considering that most drawing instructors will use graphite and speak at length about shading, something I don't even make a peep about), I argue the exact opposite. Lighting should be used to depict and communicate texture which, as you rightly observed, is composed of just more tiny forms.

This begs the question - if lighting ends up being a tool to some other end, how am I supposed to capture the illusion of form? And therein lies the core of the approach I encourage people to use. We establish the illusion of form without light at all. We do so through silhouette (capturing the subtle turns of form), with contour lines running along the surfaces as they distort through 3D space, and with line weight. It kind of goes right in the face of the whole "BUT LINES DON'T EXIST, YOU'RE A MADMAN UNCOMFORTABLE" notion. It's true they don't exist, but as light is a tool to capture texture, line is yet another tool to capture and establish form. To learn to use it properly, we must be aware of what it represents, beyond simple marks on a page.

I've gone off on a tangent there - really, my point here is that lighting is a tool to capture texture, which is in turn plays the role of little contour lines (of sorts, depending on the texture) which describes and reinforces the forms we draw. The actual course where I learned most of what I know about drawing was called viscom - literally, visual communication. Writing this out however has me thinking that perhaps there could be a better term for it. What we're doing is describing, through visual means, an idea. Describing how it moves through space, describing its weight, its surface quality, and so on.

Anyway, moving on - your form intersections are delightful. You've gone above and beyond my expectations for this exercise (to the point that showing people this as something to strive towards may be a mistake - you've nailed those intersections, which demands an extremely well developed understanding of 3D space). At the same time, you've nailed the core goal of populating a space with forms that relate to one another in a manner that feels natural, consistent and believable.

Lastly, your organic intersections do a great job of exploring how these less rigid masses interact with one another. You've captured how they cling to the forms that support their masses, and how they sag where there is nothing there to hold them up.

If I haven't said it enough, you're doing great. Keep up the good work and consider this lesson complete. Honestly, if it hadn't been for what you mentioned about the textures, I wouldn't have thought my lessons had any impact at all, as you're clearly coming with an already well developed grasp of form and space.

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

2017-04-10 20:51

I think I've grown a little numb to the creepy crawlies... at least when they're on paper. That said, a few people have still managed to utterly disgust me - that's usually a good sign.

So you're doing pretty well. I especially love the beetle on the upper right of the first page - you're demonstrating there a really solid grasp of the basic forms there. The ant there is pretty well done too, while the beetle on the bottom is a little flatter.

Construction consists of many successive passes where you break down your forms and increase complexity. At the end of each pass, you need to be fully confident and convinced of the three dimensionality of what is sitting there. I think that's where that second beetle falls through a bit - you probably would have benefitted from adding one or two contour curves to the first construction pass before building on top of it.

Moving through the set, there's some good and some less good, but I think one trend that I'm seeing is that when you set your sights on a more texture, detailed, and more finely rendered final drawing, you end up flattening things out. This relates back to what I was saying about the state of a drawing at the end of every successive pass. Basically, solidity is something that starts at the beginning - it cannot be added later on, it can only be maintained or lost. One common way to lose it is actually to contradict or undermine what the underlying construction tells us about how those forms sit in 3D space. Every mark of a texture sits on that surface and tells us something about it - when we get a little too engrossed in the idea of capturing every little detail in a texture, we can very easily lose sight of the big picture and lose the solidity that was once there.

There's also the fact that when people have their sights set on texture, they behave differently during the constructional phase. They'll draw more timidly, be more faint in their mark-making, and generally dedicate less focus to construction, hoping to jump forwards into texture.

That isn't to say you haven't had your successes amongst the textured drawings - the beetle on this page still retains a great deal of its underlying form and solidity, largely because you approached its texture with a much less overbearing hand.

So, when drawing, always approach construction as though all your drawing will consist of is that. Once you feel your construction is solid and conveys what you're trying to communicate to the viewer about those forms and volumes, then you can start to add detail and textural information. Keep in mind that the goal is always communication - you don't have to (and really shouldn't ,especially in this particularly harsh medium) capture every little detail you see in the photograph. Instead, you should use all of that visual data to help you to figure out how to best communicate the various qualities present on each surface. Think about what on that reference image makes the shell feel smooth or bumpy or rough, and limit yourself to only what you need to convey that message.

Anyway, you are demonstrating good understanding of form when you set your mind to it, so I am confident that you're moving in the right direction. I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete, so feel free to move onto the next one.

Uncomfortable in the post "Lesson 7: Drawing Vehicles"

2017-04-10 20:35

Generally you're doing really quite well, especially in terms of construction and understanding how these complex objects are made up of a lot of simple forms stuck together in specific, interesting ways. Your planes are especially impressive, but even some of the simpler stuff - like the constructional lay-in on the first page for that pickup truck is really phenomenally laid out.

One thing I did notice - which is honestly me just being picky due to a lack of other things to talk about - is in your tank, the particular perspective you used is starting to tend more towards the orthographic. The angle at which we're viewing the tank (from up above, tilted down) really begs for a third vanishing point to be used for the verticals. As a result, using two point perspective ends up making things start to feel a little weirdly distorted, especially looking at the angle of the treads and wheels.

Additionally, for those wheels, inset ellipses are a great way to add a little interest to areas like that.

Anyway, I'll go ahead and mark the lesson as complete. Congratulations on completing the dynamic sketching lessons! I do have one question though - are you using an ellipse guide for these? I did mention that students were encouraged to do so, but I think you're one of the first I've seen who actually had one (assuming that is what you used).

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

2017-04-10 19:19

Your organic forms with contour lines look better (although don't forget about including the central minor axis line when doing these exercises!). As do your form intersections, so you're definitely moving in the right direction.

Your dissections definitely need work, but that will come with time. What you need to focus on most is self-control. That is, not putting marks down without considering whether or not they serve a purpose. I do recommend that you start on the texture challenge, but unlike the other two challenges, it's not something you can (or should) do before moving onto anything else - it's more something you spread out over a long period of time. Read through those notes, try one or two rows of the exercises. Then a few days, or even a week later, reread the notes and try another couple rows. All the while, keep moving through the other lessons so you're doing them in parallel. When doing the other lessons, try to focus more on construction and leave texture as a last little addition at the very most.

Anyway, I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete. Feel free to move onto lesson 3.

Uncomfortable in the post "250 Box Challenge"

2017-04-10 19:06

Congratulations on completing the challenge. Here are a few things you can improve upon that stood out to me in particular:

• Your application of the ghosting method is often times a little sloppier than it could be, resulting in lines that waver and wobble. Make sure you're drawing from your shoulder, and investing your time in the preparation phase instead of the execution phase. Each mark, after all your planning is done, should be drawn with a persistent, confident pace relying on the muscle memory developed by ghosting through the motion repeatedly.

• You have a tendency to focus on the wrong things when doing your corrections. 239 is a good example of what you should be doing. Don't worry about the stuff you circled - focus on finding lines that are not going in the right direction, and then draw in the correct line with your red pen. It's true that you do need to work on having your lines meet more cleanly (you have a lot of gaps, which you circled), but that's more a matter of adjusting how you apply the ghosting method. The correction phase is more about your understanding of 3D space.

• Give the section on line weight another read through. You have a tendency to apply your line weight to your internal lines, which you really should not be doing. This breaks apart the illusion that all of these lines fit together to make a form. Instead, your internal lines should be on the lighter end of the spectrum, with more weight going to the external lines that make up the box's silhouette. If you're doing this to help differentiate which lines are in front and which lines are behind (as drawing through forms can cause a bit of a double-sided optical illusion), a good way to differentiate them is to fill one of the front-facing faces with some tight, consistent hatching to serve as a visual cue.

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

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

2017-04-10 18:50

Sorry for the delay, I've had a long two weeks at work and haven't been able to respond to homework submissions as quickly as I usually do.

So your constructions are definitely going in the right direction, and you're clearly mindful of how the objects you are drawing are composed of an assortment of rudimentary forms. You're also not getting distracted by the details, as some students do leading to them drawing them on like flat stickers rather than considering the fact that they occupy three dimensional space.

I do think that the scale at which you're drawing is perhaps holding you back a little bit, but despite this you're doing reasonably well. The speaker at the beginning is quite tiny (as you noted yourself), but you're not letting this distract you from establishing all of your major solid forms.

I did notice however that in some areas you're perhaps getting a little sloppy in the execution of your lines. Perhaps at times you're getting tired, and aren't quite pushing yourself to apply the ghosting method as stringently as you do at other times. Understandable, but definitely something you should push yourself to improve upon.

I think in some cases proportion is definitely an area that could use some work. The monitor for instance, while being a good example of the sloppiness I mentioned earlier, also ends up feeling really small due to the proportional relationship between the base and the screen, as well as the thickness of the base and the bevel in relation to the whole object.

All that said, you've got more than enough significant successes here for me to consider this lesson complete. The lamp was especially well executed, considering all of the ellipses involved. I also quite like this knife - smaller objects can often be quite challenging because we have a tendency to downplay the significance of their rudimentary forms. You definitely pushed past that and captured it with a strong illusion of solidity.

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

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

2017-04-10 18:36

There's certainly room for improvement, but I think you're grasping the overall concepts and are having some noticeable successes. In particular, I think where you stick more to treating the objects as a collection of rudimentary forms (rather than trying too hard to replace exactly what you see with all of its little curves and whatnot), you tend to do better. For example, this one is looking pretty decent because you're considering each individual component as something simple. You can maintain the solidity of each simple component, and once you stick them together, that solidity remains. This is also a good example which while simple, is definitely moving in the direction we're interested in heading.

On the flipside, for this drawing you effectively went from box directly to the exact form of the alarm clock. You didn't break that box into simpler forms (even smaller boxes to block out the space), you just kind of went for it. The thing about curves like this is that the bigger the curve, the more dangerous it is. They need scaffolding to ensure that they maintain solidity, otherwise the resulting drawing will be quite flimsy.

For the same drawing, I also noticed that you tacked certain details on in a way that treated them quite a bit like stickers. Understandable in some cases, like the LED 7:33, but in general when tackling this kind of subject matter, I'd highly encourage you to simply leave that stuff out. Decorative details aren't really important here - if you find some component you want to add but really cannot think of it in terms of construction and form, and like it's effectively just a sticker sitting flat on the surface of the object, then ignore it. If, however, this detail is integral to the object, you're more than likely not dealing with something that's just a sticker, and should push yourself to build it in as a part of a three dimensional construction. For example, the markings across the top - it feels to me like those are depressions of some sort, but you didn't communicate that well because there's no apparent thickness or lip to them.

Aside from that, be sure to continue practicing your boxes, cylinders, and generally those lesson 1 and 2 exercises as they're the bedrock for this kind of thing. I definitely see areas where your boxes do need work like here - and if a box is off, anything that relies upon that box will be too.

I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete. You're demonstrating a budding understanding of the material, and while you absolutely should continue practicing this stuff, I think you should be good to move onto the next one. Make sure you take advantage of the fact that I let students use rulers in the next lesson (and ellipse guides if you can get your hands on one), as vehicles can be quite challenging.

Uncomfortable in the post "Lesson 7: Drawing Vehicles"

2017-04-09 16:55

Old thread got locked, those eligible for critiques from me can post their homework here.

Uncomfortable in the post "Lesson 5: Drawing Animals"

2017-04-07 22:55

While there's certainly room to grow, I think you're moving in the right direction. Also, while it's not really for the same reason your elephant came out a little awkward, those things are a pain in the ass to draw. This demo for a while back really shows you my relationship with those bastards. ... It's also another decent demonstration of construction so you can keep that in mind.

I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete, so feel free to move onto the next one. I will warn you though - where insects and animals are a little bit more forgiving when it comes to construction, the next lesson is certainly not. It's a good idea to tackle the 250 box and cylinder challenges before attempting it.

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

2017-04-07 22:52

Pretty good! One thing that I am noticing is that you're likely a little more focused on detail and texture than you are on the underlying construction. Your construction isn't in and of itself bad, but if I had to apply weights to each one's priority, I'd say that 80% of your effort should be spent on construction, and 20% on texture. It's not uncommon for students to have their mind set on the detail phase, because it's natural to feel that the details make the drawing. They really don't. The solidity, the tangibility and the believability of a drawing really comes from how mindful the artist was in regards to the basic forms that fit together to create the overall construction. Details really only add the last little oomph to set the drawing apart. Alternatively, details can also undermine and contradict the construction, in which case letting your details do all the talking can result in a drawing that simply doesn't look right.

In terms of texture, I can see a lot of great experimentation here. I really love the head on this one where you've captured a nice balance of different textures coming together, with no reliance on randomness. Most of your marks feel purposeful and intentional. The rest of the body is a little more haphazard, which is why you probably felt you didn't do too well on the hairy part. On that note, I have one major hint - you don't have to fill everything in. In fact, you probably shouldn't. When it comes to hair especially, the strongest impact will come from details you've carefully designed and crafted along the silhouette of the form. Anything that breaks that silhouette will immediately be caught by your eye long before it starts processing the internal marks. Having a lot of internal detail on the other hand will result in a lot of noise and distraction, and if you do it everywhere, you'll have everything vying for the viewer's attention. This can in turn be quite stressful and make a drawing unpleasant to look at.

As you push further into the set, I noticed that you think less about the actual textures and details present on your reference image and end up using hatching lines a lot more. This is a mistake. Hatching lines are very often used as a sort of filler, where a student doesn't want to think about what's actually present there and focus more on lighting and shading. So, they end up filling things in with all kinds of scratches just to say there's something there.

The relationship between lighting and texture, and both of their role in your drawing, should be the opposite. Lighting should be used as a tool to capture texture in key areas, instead of texture being used to show light and shadow. In turn, one should not be relying on lighting in order to convey form - that should already be established by one's construction.

There's also another reason that hatching isn't a great idea especially in this medium. Fineliners will force you to work very much in binary - either a mark is down or it's not. There's very little - pardon the pun - grey area. Instead, we achieve the illusion of value ranges by varying the density of black and white within a certain space. This also has the downside of creating really noisy, high-contrast spaces which as I explained before becomes distracting and unpleasant. Hatching does this by its nature, because it's just a bunch of alternating marks. Other kinds of textural approaches will vary, but regardless, it's best to do texture with a light touch, only getting more intense when you actively want the viewer to look somewhere.

So. When you're approaching texture, I want you to think about what is actually going on in your reference. Ask yourself, what makes this surface appear bumpy, rough, wet, smooth, etc. What specific marks are there that communicate that to me, and how can I use them to communicate that same idea to the viewer.

After having talked at length about texture, I'd like you to do two more pages of insect drawings with absolutely no texture or detail. Focus entirely on construction.

Uncomfortable in the post "250 Box Challenge"

2017-04-07 22:40

Your improvement across this set is phenomenal. As you get through the first 100, I can really see things beginning to click. As you start experimenting with line weight, your confidence also begins to improve, and the general cohesion and sense of solidity comes along with it.

Long story short, you've done great. One thing that I want to recommend though is more about how you approach your corrections. As you reach the stage you're at, you end up dealing less with obvious mistakes and more with subtler ones that can't always be caught with a glance. In this case, it can help considerably to try extending your boxes' lines back to be two or three times their original length, towards their implied vanishing point (when approaching it with your correction-pen). If you remember, each box consists of three sets of four parallel lines, each set having its own vanishing point. When extending the lines back, you'll start to notice that of these sets - to varying degrees - will have some of their lines converging more quickly than others, rather than all four converging at roughly the same rate towards roughly the same point. This tells you that there's a mistake.

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"

2017-04-07 22:35

So there's a few areas where we can definitely see some improvement here. Firstly, for your organic forms with contour curves, you're doing okay but I get the distinct feeling that you don't quite understand what those curves and ellipses really represent, and what their degrees really say about how they're oriented in 3D space. I definitely recommend that you give these notes a read. They should help you move beyond just drawing arbitrary curves/ellipses and start developing your ability to perceive what you draw as being three dimensional.

Looking at your dissections, that definitely falls in line with what we saw previously - many of your textures here don't really wrap around the 3D forms. It's more like you filled in a flat shape on the page, rather than trying to consider how it would look if you wrapped the form in that texture. Specifically, consider how the surface curves away from the viewer, and how that would make the texture on it become more compressed as you reach the edges of the form. Many of the textures on this page demonstrate that sort of disregard for 3D form. Look specifically at the top left corner, as it's the clearest example, where you've got those tiles arranged in straight lines.

Another point about the dissections - don't go overboard with detail, but make every mark you do put down count. Spend the majority of your time observing and studying your reference, and take only a moment or two to actually make those marks before looking back at your reference. I see several examples where you've gotten rather scribbly - definitely avoid this. Don't allow yourself to descend into randomness, as the results from uncontrolled mark-making are usually not particularly good. Instead, think about what really makes each surface convey a certain texture quality. What details make it look rough, smooth, bumpy, wet, etc.

What you're not doing is simply replicating exactly what you see, value for value, mark for mark. Focus instead on communicating something to your viewer. You can (and should) use the details present there in your reference, but you need to decide what is and what isn't important. There's more information on the challenges of tackling texture here, though for now we mainly want to focus on having you wrap those textures around 3D forms. Other aspects of texture will be more of a long-term goal.

Your form intersections aren't bad, but there is definitely a lot of messiness here and a few points that you ignored from the instructions that hamstrung you.

• In the instructions, you're told to avoid any forms that are particularly stretched in any one dimension. Really long boxes, long tubes, etc. You definitely missed this. The reason I recommend this is because the form intersections are already very challenging in understanding how to draw all of these forms together such that they feel consistent. Adding additional questions of perspective and foreshortening really add complexity and end up distracting you from the core of the exercise.

• Your use of hatching isn't great. Keep in mind that any mark made on the surface of a form plays the role of a contour line. It describes to the viewer how that surface distorts through space, because we know that the line runs along it. Take a look at this page. The sphere in the bottom corner, and the shaded-in cone on the left side both read as being completely flat, because that's what the lines tell us. They're running straight across. In general, I don't really encourage the use of hatching lines here, because it's generally not necessary. I can understand their use on boxes that you've drawn through (draw through all of them by the way, so you better understand how they sit in space) since drawing through forms can result in a sort of unclear, double-sided illusion, but definitely don't use it on spheres as it's only going to make things messy. If you want a circle to read as a sphere, make sure it's even, smooth and confidently drawn. Nothing else is necessary.

All things considered, your organic form intersections are decent. If anything, they only really suffer from the issues raised for the organic forms section.

• Your foreshortening is a little more dramatic here than it should be, which makes the overall sense of scale and the relationships between your forms somewhat inconsistent at times. Try to stick to drawing forms with relatively shallow foreshortening. I go a little further into this in these notes from lesson 1.

So, taking all of this into consideration, I'd like you to do the following:

• Half a page of organic forms with contour ellipses, half with contour curves

• Half a page of dissections

• One page of form intersections

As for your questions:

1. Since most of the lines when drawing texture are shorter and more than likely drawn from the wrist, the benefits of ghosting definitely diminish. You should however spend more time thinking and less time drawing when it comes to texture.

2. You don't control your line weight when drawing your initial strokes - you put everything down evenly, then come back to add line weight similarly to the superimposed lines exercise from lesson 1.

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

2017-04-07 12:29

It's just you. Try accessing the site at http://drawabox.com:3000 and see if that works.

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

2017-04-07 02:59

Old thread got locked, those eligible to have their work reviewed by me can submit it here.

Uncomfortable in the post "250 Cylinder Challenge"

2017-04-06 03:28

These are looking pretty decent, so I'm not sure what you're getting so frustrated over. There's room for growth and improvement of course, but you're doing fairly well. One thing that I do want you to keep in mind however is that you should be stopping yourself from automatically reinforcing your lines with additional marks. Remember that the ghosting method requires you to think and plan before each and every stroke. This should completely preclude you from any kind of reflexive drawing.

Additionally, it's a good idea to also practice drawing cylinders inside of boxes, as covered in the two videos linked in the challenge. This will help you considerably when you get into lesson 6, as it allows you to align a box as you like, and then construct a cylinder inside of it.

As for your question, redoing lessons 1 and 2 is always a good idea. After a while, even if you're practicing those exercises regularly as instructed, you can start to fall off the rails and forget important things. It's a good idea to reread the material and even get someone else's eye on those exercises to make sure you're not practicing anything incorrectly.

Uncomfortable in the post "Lesson 3: Drawing Plants"

2017-04-06 02:36

I flipped back to check your last attempt at this lesson, over a year and a half ago. Strangely enough, I can remember exactly what I was doing that day... ANYWAY I think it's safe to say that you've improved considerably since then.

One thing that I do want to stress though is that it's a bad idea for you to be getting into hatching as heavily as you have been. Or really, at all at this point. Hatching relates to a very small subset of textures, very few of which you'll actually encounter in these drawings. People tend to treat them as a sort of catch-all "I want to fill this area up but don't really want to think about what I'm drawing" sort of thing, and they keep students from really observing their reference carefully and thinking about what gives those objects the particular surface quality they'r seeing. What makes something rough, wet, smooth, bumpy, etc. It also tends to create a lot of high-density areas of contrast which can become very noisy and distracting. So definitely avoid it.

Additionally, keep in mind that construction is always going to be your major focus in these lessons. Texture is not. The thing about detail and texture is that it's remarkably easy to overwhelm the underlying construction and undermine its solidity by simply adding too much detail that does not jive with what you've attempted to communicate to the viewer about its basic construction. Every textural detail you put down communicates something about the curvature and nature of that surface, so if you put marks down thoughtlessly, you can contradict yourself. For this reason, it's best to be reserved with your detail marks. Always consider line economy, and try to err on the side of less rather than more.

Anyway, overall you're doing well, I just wanted to keep you from veering off into those particular pitfalls. I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete, so feel free to move onto the next one.

Uncomfortable in the post "250 Box Challenge"

2017-04-06 02:20

Looking good! I think your confidence definitely improves over the set, though you were already pretty decent when you started so from there the improvements end up becoming more subtle. Don't forget to go over them with corrections though! At this stage, it can be a little more difficult to identify where things are going wrong, so here's a helpful technique:

With your differently coloured pen in hand, try extending the lines of your boxes back two or three times their original length, towards their implied vanishing point. If you remember, boxes are composed of three sets of four parallel lines, each set having its own vanishing point. By extending the lines back, you'll find that within a given set two or three lines may be converging more quickly than the other(s), implying that they do not all converge neatly at around the same point. This shows that there's been a mistake, and by identifying it, you'll slowly catch onto the kind of mistakes you tend to make, and gradually reduce its frequency. This kind of reflection is definitely a very helpful and efficient way to nurture your own growth.

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

Uncomfortable in the post "Lesson 3: Drawing Plants"

2017-04-06 02:06

Nice work! While I think you may be focusing a bit too much on texture and detail, the underlying construction is definitely all there. It's more often that I see students skip through construction too quickly and try to make up for it by going crazy on texture, and you definitely don't fall into that category. Just be aware that it's very possible to let the texture and detail of a drawing overwhelm the underlying construction and undermine its solidity. This is why I always try to err on the side of fewer marks, rather than more, when adding detail.

I have just a couple tips for you:

• Contour lines and ellipses are great for showing solidity, but you'll find that the most important ones are the actual caps of a given form - so in the case of a tube, either end. This means you can actually get away without too many contour curves through the length (maybe just a couple irregularly spaced to reinforce things), but if you neglect to cap the form off (and just have it stop as two parallel lines floating on the page), it's going to result in a form that feels very flat. I noticed this in some of your plants' stems. Alternatively, your branches exercises were all capped off nicely, and they feel solid and confident. So, even if a stem continues off the page, be sure to cap it off.

• Don't limit yourself to just a corner of each page for each drawing. While you're not suffering too much drawing smaller, it is pretty normal for people to stiffen up when drawing smaller and I do see it in some of your particularly minuscule forms. Think about how solid those branch exercises look, and then compare them to some of your really small stems. If you'd approached them at a scale where they were closer to the branches, you'd have really established those volumes nicely. Continuing to practice at a larger scale will allow you to build up the awareness of space and form that will eventually improve your smaller drawings as well.

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

Uncomfortable in the post "Lesson 5: Drawing Animals"

2017-04-06 01:58

Definitely not bad! I think you're demonstrating a well developing sense of form. One thing that I am noticing however is that I think you may be letting the details get ahead of you, and are not entirely spending as much time as you should on the construction phase. I can see you blocking in the initial masses pretty well, and you're respecting the three-dimensional nature of most of the components you're building up, but where you seem to be skipping steps is determining just how the various forms fit together. For example, how the legs attach to the torso. This isn't always the case - the red wolf is done pretty well. I'm just not seeing that same attention to construction in many of your other drawings.

Additionally, try to ease up on that hatching. While it can definitely be used well, people at this stage will almost always use it as a sort of filler texture when they should instead be putting more time and effort into carefully observing what's present in their reference image and attempting to replicate specific surface textures. Hatching isn't really a texture (except in very specific cases), and it robs you of the opportunity to really dig into a piece. Additionally, it has the tendency to create very high-density concentrations of contrasting black and white spots which becomes very noisy and distracting.

Now while I would necessarily be against marking this lesson as complete, I'm not going to. I'd like you to do four more pages of animal drawings, but with no texture or detail whatsoever. Focus entirely on the construction. There's a few more demos in the 'other demos' section of the lesson that you should definitely take a look at if you haven't already. The oryx especially is a pretty in-depth example of how to be extra mindful of your forms and how they fit together.

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

2017-04-06 01:50

Your arrows are looking okay. One thing to consider when working on these in the future though is a matter of depth. In your mind, try to position one end of the arrow physically farther away from you, and the other closer. This will help you regard the page as not just a flat plane across which you make your marks, but rather a window into a three dimensional space.

In your organic forms with contour ellipses, the ellipses are looking really quite stiff. This is something I mentioned in my critique of your lesson 1 work - you need to be drawing those ellipses with a confident pace, after applying the preparation phase of the ghosting method. If you allow your brain to drive the motion of your hand, you will end up with wobbly lines that don't do a particularly good job of conveying solidity and volume.

Additionally, I think you may be having trouble understanding the role each ellipse plays in relation to the organic form you're fleshing out. Basically, you're still thinking of the shape you've drawn as being purely two-dimensional, just lines on a page. Firstly, the contour ellipses are really circular cross-sections of the form. The degree of the ellipses determines each circle's orientation relative to the viewer, as explained in these notes and in this video.

Moving on, your organic forms with contour curves also need work. Your curves do not convey the illusion that they're wrapping around the rounded form - instead of accelerating as they reach the edge and hooking back around to continue on along the other side, they feel more like they come to a sudden stop, as though the opposite side of the form is flat. I address this common issue in these notes. Try applying the overshooting method described there, which helps to link in your mind the act of drawing a full ellipse to the act of drawing a partial ellipse (the curve).

Additionally, you don't seem to be drawing your minor axes in this exercise, as instructed. This is extremely important, as it helps you to align each curve.

Your dissections are a good start, although as you move forwards, you need to push yourself to pay more attention to your reference. What I see here is that you likely study your reference for a while, then move on to draw for a long period, glance at your reference again, then draw for a while, etc. The problem here is that it results in you drawing primarily from memory. Our memories are pretty awful, and the moment we look away from our reference, our brain starts going to work simplifying what we'd seen and throwing away a lot of valuable information.

Because of this, it's important that you look at your reference almost constantly, taking only a second or two to put down a mark before looking back. I talk about this a little more in these notes.

So the main focus of the form intersection exercise is understanding how to draw many forms that occupy the same space without feeling inconsistent. I don't believe you're quite there yet. There are several issues here, like your boxes not feeling particularly solid (I'm glad you're drawing through your boxes here, but since most of your practice in the 250 box challenge was not approached in this way, your grasp of 3D space is still very weak so your boxes feel rather flimsy and your angles are off), your spheres being uneven since you're not drawing through your ellipses, and so on. The biggest problem however is that your foreshortening is not consistent - that is, the rate at which things get smaller as they move farther away from the viewer.

I address this issue in these notes from lesson 1. Basically, it's best to use fairly shallow foreshortening in scenes where you have lots of forms crammed together in order to keep them consistent.

You also seem to have missed the instruction about avoiding forms that are overly stretched in any one dimension (like long tubes, and so on). This adds a lot of complexity to the exercise and makes it that much easier to get it right on the more basic level.

Lastly, the organic intersections could use some work too. They suffer from the same issues with contour curves that I mentioned earlier. Additionally, some of your forms are a little more complex (they get wavy in places), and this complexity undermines the solidity of the underlying form. Simple things are always much easier to depict as being solid, so we always try to capture things as simply as possible before building up complexity in successive passes. For now, all you need to worry about is that simplest stage. Stick to basic sausages only.

I think you definitely have a lot of room to grow, and one thing that stands out a lot is your sense of 3D space. The thing about being able to draw things that feel three dimensional is that the first step is for you yourself to believe in the illusion you're about to put down. You cannot regard your drawings as being lines across a page. If you start to believe in your own lie, then it will start affecting how you draw. For instance, with the organic forms with contour curves, those contour lines run along the surface of a 3D form. If you are convinced that the surface curves and wraps back around, then your brain would fight against you if you tried to draw a straight line across all the way to the edge.

Now this doesn't happen overnight - even believing in our own lies takes time and practice. The biggest thing I can recommend right now is that you're really doing yourself a disservice in not reading the instructions fully. I understand that the lessons are very dense and that it's difficult to absorb all of the information there in one read through. All that means, however, is that you need to read through it a few times, and make sure you go through each exercise description again right before approaching it. Give each exercise the time you require to give your best effort, and if you have to split even one exercise across a few different sittings, make sure you've reread that exercise's material again before starting over.

Lastly, don't forget about the material from lesson 1. As I mention at the beginning of that lesson, completing it doesn't mean you're done with that stuff forever. You need to continue practicing those exercises (in smaller quantity) as a warm-up at the beginning of every sitting so that you can gradually hone those basic skills.

Now I won't be marking this lesson as complete. I'd like you to resubmit the following, though I definitely recommend redoing the 250 box challenge first:

• 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 "/r/ArtFundamentals and Drawabox.com: A New Beginning. Read this if you're new to this subreddit."

2017-04-05 18:27

Durr hurrrr

Uncomfortable in the post "250 Box Challenge"

2017-04-05 14:29

Sometimes it's hard to tell. As you move forwards, try to stick to just one size - the 0.5 specifically. This will force you to build up your pressure control.

Uncomfortable in the post "250 Box Challenge"

2017-04-05 01:04

I do think you improved a fair bit over the course of this challenge. There is definitely room to grow though, as I'm seeing a lot of boxes where your near/far plane size relationships aren't quite right. Keep in mind that the challenge did suggest that you go over your completed work with a different colour to make corrections - that is, marking in the correct line wherever you feel your original line was off. This can help immensely to reflect upon where you tend to make mistakes, as we generally have patterns rooted in what we understand, and what we haven't yet fully grasped yet.

Additionally, make sure you're applying the ghosting method to each and every mark you put down. While it's somewhat understandable considering the boring nature of the exercise, and the vast number of boxes I asked for, you've really got to push yourself to plan out every mark you put down. While in many areas, your lines are decently executed, they do get sloppy in others so keep an eye on that.

One last point - I noticed that you experimented a fair bit with line weight. There were situations where you tried putting your darker lines on the inside of the box. I'm not sure if you gathered this on your own, but this tends to break apart the cohesion of the box. It's best to keep internal lines a lighter, instead adding that extra weight to the lines that define the silhouette. Of course, all of these variations in weight should be fairly subtle. You'll also find that changing to a felt tip pen instead of a ballpoint will help you ease into the use of line weight a little more easily.

I'll go ahead and mark this challenge as complete, but be sure to go over them for that correction phase for your own benefit.

Uncomfortable in the post "Lesson 3: Drawing Plants"

2017-04-05 00:56

As I mentioned before, these are definitely looking to be an improvement, especially in many of the areas I raised previously. There certainly is room for growth, but I think you're now focusing your energy in the right areas, and are showing a better regard for form and construction with significantly less distraction.

A couple things:

• On this page, those leaves feel a little stiff. I believe this is due to two things - first off, always remember to consider how those leaves are moving through space, specifically through the dimension of depth, moving from being further away from you to closer. These leaves feel somewhat more like you're aware of the fact that you're drawing on a flat page. This will improve with time. The other contributing factor is that you're a bit too even and robotic with those contour lines along the leaves' surface. Try to break up the monotony of those regularly-repeating lines.

• The lines in this one definitely ended up being quite stiff because you didn't follow the methodology of the branches exercise, where you overshoot an ellipse, then try and draw another segment that flows from the previous one onwards.

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

Uncomfortable in the post "Lesson 3: Drawing Plants"

2017-04-05 00:50

Really nice work! Overall, I think you definitely have your priorities in order. Like you said yourself, you're clearly focusing more on construction here, and it definitely pays off. Your linework also has a certain bold, confident quality that really sells each drawing. Just a one recommendation:

While contour lines through the length of a form certainly help to reinforce the illusion of form, the strongest impact comes from capping off the ends of the form itself. Conversely, if the ends of a form are left un-capped (like just stopping as two parallel lines, or being left to continue off the edge of a page), this really flattens things out and breaks that illusion. For example, the bottom of your dandelion's stem, and even how some of your potted plants' leaves just kind of stop before reaching the soil. It's important to be more direct and concrete about how things end up - even if the form actually continues off the page, it's best to artifiically chop it there.

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

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

2017-04-05 00:41

Over the course of this lesson, I think you've done a pretty good job of demonstrating and improving upon your understanding of 3D space, and how the forms you're using all fit together to create more complex objects.

I have only two things to point out:

• I'm noticing that the legs of your insect tend to be a little stiff at times. This isn't always the case, but I think you do better when you regard the flow of each leg, and worry less about each individual segment. While form is still important, I find that taking advantage of the more gestural flow provided by 2D shapes can help establish something a little more lifelike before building form on top of it. Take a look at step 4 in this demo. Even when tackling them with more form, you can think of the different segments as organic sausage shapes/forms as shown in this demo.

• I find that when you try to go heavier on your use of texture, like the grasshopper at the end there, you fall into the common trap of overpowering the underlying construction. One principle that is important to remember is that the illusion of solidity is something that you imbue your drawing with at the very beginning, based on the decisions you make and how you regard the forms you're sticking together. As you continue to build up your drawing, you cannot increase how solid and three-dimensional it looks. You can only ever maintain it, or lose it. Every mark you put down for texture actually describes that surface - not only in its textural quality, but also how the surface itself deforms through space. As such, if you put down a lot of cluttered marks without considering how that impacts the illusion of form, you could be sending mixed signals to the viewer that ultimately break their suspension of disbelief. For this reason, a good rule of thumb is that less is more - try not to go overboard with texture. Try to think more about what you're trying to communicate, and then consider what's necessary to do just that much. So you may be trying to communicate the particular roughness of a beetle's shell, for example. Don't focus on replicating the photograph you're using as reference. Look at it constantly to determine what your surfaces look like and how you might go about emphasizing certain qualities within it, but filter that information through your own intentions.

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

Uncomfortable in the post "250 Box Challenge"

2017-04-04 23:38

On one hand, you definitely demonstrated a lot of enthusiasm about this exercise. On the other, you did not follow the instructions on the challenge page, or the instructions I gave you in my last critique. Specifically:

Be sure to read through all of the notes on that page, especially the tip about drawing through your forms. This in particular should help you better grasp how each box sits in 3D space.

This is what I was referring to. You should be drawing all of the lines that make up each box, including those that cannot be seen. Approach it as though you have xray vision. This will give you a better sense of how each form sits in 3D space, and will also allow you to more easily understand the relationship between the near planes and the far planes.

It isn't to say that you didn't improve over this set of boxes, but your growth was slowed considerably by this mistake, and the time spent practicing was rendered considerably less efficient. You'll find that taking the time to absorb the instructions is no less important when learning to draw as it is with anything else.

I am going to mark this challenge as complete only because you did fulfill the requirements of drawing 250 boxes. That said, it would be in your best interest to try it again.

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."

2017-04-04 14:53

Glad I could help.

Uncomfortable in the post "Lesson 5: Drawing Animals"

2017-04-03 02:16

There's certainly a lot of good stuff here, but there's one major thing that I see holding you back. I can see a developing sense of form and volume, but you're caught up in the results of each drawing, rather than focusing primarily on the process of constructing each animal. This causes you to skip steps and to put more weight on the detailing phase than establishing the underlying structure. Lastly, I can see you tending already towards stylization in key areas. Admittedly, your sense of style is coming through strongly and shows me that you've got a knack for art in that particular vein, but now is not the time to be mixing that in.

Long story short, you're distracting yourself from the core of the lesson. Don't allow yourself to draw what you think you see in your mind's eye - draw what's there. Find the simplest forms that exist in the object you're drawing and build up from there. Don't leave things out. While in the future you'll be able to merely visualize much of the construction, right now you must draw all of your masses and forms, draw how they connect ton one another, and so on.

The second bear (page 4) is pretty good (albeit a little stylized), as you've allowed yourself to put more linework in than in later drawings. There is still room for improvement of course - for example, the additional masses along the top feel a little flimsy due to the complexity of their underside edges (the more wobbling, the more general complexity of a form's silhouette, the less solid it will feel). Also, you should be more mindful of the joints in the back legs.

Back to the point of simplicity - when drawing the ribcage, pelvis and cranial masses, draw them as ellipses. Meaning, draw through them instructed from lesson 1. I'm going to sound like a broken record at this point, but keeping them simple allows you to immediately treat them like 3D masses, rather than just flat shapes. If they're irregular, bumpy, or complex, this illusion of form becomes much more difficult to create. Notice how I block in the masses in this demo.

I'd like you to try another four pages of animal drawings, keeping this in mind. Give the lesson another read and be sure to go through the material in the 'other demos' section. I can see that you do have a grasp of this stuff, but you're simply not pushing yourself to apply it as strictly as you should be at this point. Be more patient and conscientious with how you approach this stuff, and it should go well.

Uncomfortable in the post "Lesson 3: Drawing Plants"

2017-04-03 01:55

These are certainly an improvement, and moving in the right direction. That said, don't make half submissions. I'll give you a full critique when you submit the rest.

Uncomfortable in the post "250 Cylinder Challenge"

2017-04-03 01:53

One thing that stands out to me here is that your lines are somewhat sloppier than they were when you did your 250 box challenge. You seem to be focusing more on the repetition of the actions, going through the same formula (leading to drawing a lot of cylinders in the same orientations) like a machine rather than properly focusing on the execution of every individual mark. I understand that 250 is a lot, but if you're not putting your mind to each and every one, you're not going to gain a whole lot from them.

Overall, I think this set demonstrates to me that you need to review the material from lesson 1. As mentioned at the beginning of that lesson, you're meant to be incorporating those exercises into a warmup routine so you can continually maintain and hone those particular skills. Doing so will not only help you maintain smooth, straight lines and confident, even ellipses, but it will also train you to be more patient and conscious of every mark you put down.

I am going to be marking this lesson as complete, because you did complete it - but I guarantee you that given the appropriate amount of attention and focus, you can do much better than this.

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."

2017-04-02 20:05

It's neither good nor bad. It's just another tool one can use to achieve an end, and like any tool it can be misused (and tends to be when used by beginners). Basically, once you build up an understanding of form, lighting, colour, cohesion, composition and all that good stuff, you're probably going to understand how to apply photo successfully to your pieces. If you jump in and try to use photobashing before you really know what you're doing however, you're going to shoot yourself in the foot in the long run. Your work won't look that great (which is normal while you're learning) but you won't actually learn much through that process either.

When I started out, I tried to use a lot of photo textures all over, then at one point I realized what a horrible crutch it was and stopped entirely. I ended up developing a massive aversion to it in general, until much later when we were actually forced to try photobashing in an environment design class I was taking. As a result of my outlook on it at the time, I ended up painting over every piece of photo as much as I could. This ended up being a good route to take in two ways - firstly, I was still able to benefit from a lot of the structural and textural information the photos bring to the table, but secondly I avoided the all-too-common mistake people make where their illustrations end up looking like stylistic chimeras, with the photo coming through way more in some areas than others. It results in a total lack of cohesion, but by painting over everything like a madman, things came together much better.

This was one of the pieces I did for that class.

Uncomfortable in the post "250 Box Challenge"

2017-04-01 00:00

Wow, the improvement from the first few pages to the last is significant. You can definitely see how much your confidence has increased, and how much your grasp of 3D space has improved. The nuance of your line weights also kicks those boxes up to the next level.

As you probably noticed, as your boxes hit a certain level, it can become quite a bit more difficult to identify your own mistakes. One approach that can help to do this is to extend the lines of a completed box back towards their implied vanishing points. If you remember, a box consists of three sets of four parallel lines, each set having its own vanishing point. If you extend those lines back two to three times their original length, you'll likely see some of the lines of a given set converging together more quickly than other members of the same set. By definition, if the box is correct, all of those lines will converge towards the same point at the same rate.

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

Uncomfortable in the post "Lesson 5: Drawing Animals"

2017-03-30 23:57

What I'm most interested is, of course, your construction - and that has definitely gotten better. Your fur is better than before too, but here's an explanation of how it's still kind of off.

But - like I said, your construction feels considerably more solid than before, and shows a better understanding of form and how everything fits together. The smaller areas (feet, for instance) could certainly use some more work, but overall you're doing better.

I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete. Feel free to move onto the next lesson, though I'll warn you now - it's going to challenge you in a very different manner.

Uncomfortable in the post "250 Cylinder Challenge"

2017-03-30 23:46

Definitely getting better over the set. Be sure to take more care with your straight lines though. In many cases they're just fine, while in others they arc and wobble a bit, or don't remain entirely straight when they ought to. I think it's more a matter of focus and patience than anything else, but lines really are the basis for all of this so it's important that they remain consistently straight.

I'm glad to see that you practiced both freestanding cylinders and those within boxes. The latter will definitely be useful in the next lesson.

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

Uncomfortable in the post "Lesson 3: Drawing Plants"

2017-03-30 23:37

Before we get into the work itself, you really need to ease up on all that negativity. It's not an uncommon thing to see artists bashing themselves, but all you're doing is trying to label your own work as garbage before anyone else has a chance. Yeah, your work may not be the greatest, but no one expects anything of you right now. Your work's SUPPOSED to be shitty. Be proud of the effort you put into it. Until you really start to feel confident, fake it. Drawing leans heavily on one's feigned confidence, and if you go in thinking only about how you're bound to make loads of mistakes, you will hesitate before every stroke, and it will show in the results.

Whenever you sit down to draw, remind yourself: "BREAKING NEWS: ARTIST MAKES MISTAKES" is not a headline you'll ever see, because it's supposed to happen.

So, starting with your leaves exercise - the basic construction isn't bad. Your lines are a little stiff at times, a little hesitant (for the reasons previously discussed), but generally you're following the methodology well. One thing that should help add some dynamism is to think about the initial directional line around which the leaves are built as flowing from a point far away from you to a point closer to you. Your mind still seems to be a little bit trapped in the idea of drawing on a flat page, rather than the page itself being a window into an infinite three dimensional space. For this exercise, don't worry too much about going into details like those various edges. Stick to simple shapes, focus on how they flow through space.

Two things about your branches/stems. Firstly, your ellipses are looking kind of stiff, and don't demonstrate a particularly strong grasp of what those ellipses actually represent. Each one is a circle in 3D space, and its degree conveys the orientation of that circle relative to the viewer. Give these notes a read.

The other point is that you appear to be drawing your branches as long, continuous curves. Certainly admirable, but not what I instructed. Only your initial central line should be drawn in this way. Since it doesn't need to match up with anything else, it can be drawn confidently enough to keep it smooth. You don't have to worry about making it complex - in fact, don't. Complexity is not going to help you here. I've seen a lot of people who struggle with the basics of something focus on upping the difficulty of the exercise rather than dealing with the root problem - basically giving themselves more things to deal with, so they can at least conquer those. Focus on building simple stems that feel solid.

Once your central line is drawn and you've lined up your ellipses along their lengths, the lines along the sides should be drawn segment by segment, from one ellipse down and just past the next. Apply the ghosting method beforehand, and execute those marks with confidence. You WILL make mistakes. These are just drills, and as long as you approach them confidently, you'll improve with practice. You just need to be ready and accepting of the fact that you're going to fuck up frequently. Read the instructions again, and follow them to the letter.

For the rest of the work, I've got a few more points to make. Overall you're doing okay in most of the major areas, but there are a few key things that are holding you back.

• You have a tendency to rely on detail and texture to fix things once a drawing has gone south. Unfortunately, solidity is something that is born at the beginning of a drawing, and as you continue to add more things to it, that solidity can only be lost - not regained. It's very easy to get caught up in detail and texture and to lose that illusion of form in doing so.

• Be aware of the purpose contour curves and contour ellipses serve. You're overusing them in general, and this hints to me that you're not necessarily thinking about what they're for. They're there to reinforce form and to communicate to the viewer how a surface warps and deforms through space. If your marks aren't doing this properly (by correctly wrapping around forms and such), then adding a dozen more isn't going to help any further. A couple well executed contour lines are going to serve their purpose far better than a handful of sloppy ones. Also, consider how they're spaced out. Spacing them out regularly tends to make things look more stiff and man-made. Clustering a couple and having one more further out can help make things feel more natural, especially considering that these are often times artificial details we're adding ourselves.

• Flower pots are cylinders, so they should be drawn around a minor axis, as explained in the 250 cylinder challenge page.

I'd like you to take another shot at this lesson, but this time, I don't want you to add any detail or texture to your drawings. Focus entirely on construction, and on convincing yourself of the illusion of form you are creating on the page. Think about how the forms connect to one another, and how they relate to each other. Take as much time as you need - I can see that note above your ink-cap mushroom. "Speed up construction". Do not aim for speed. Your mark-executions should be done at confident paces, but they should be preceded with careful planning and consideration. And of course, above all, observe and study your reference carefully.

Uncomfortable in the post "250 Cylinder Challenge"

2017-03-30 23:09

You're doing pretty well, and I can see your confidence improving as you move through this set. Even within the first hundred, your grasp of what you're doing and the integrity of your ellipses steadily gets better.

There's just two things that I want to point out and recommend that will help in the future:

• Firstly, as you move through the set, I can see areas where your linework - that is, the basic minor/major axis lines - gets sloppy. Sometimes it's just a subtle arcing, other times they're not really serving a purpose at all because you've deviated so much from the intended alignment. Make sure you're applying the ghosting method to these lines, and that you're approaching this work with a focused, rested and patient mind. It is quite challenging to put down a line and then draw an ellipse aligned to it, but it will improve over time as long as you have your mind set to the task.

• Be sure to practice constructing those cylinders inside of boxes as well, as this will help considerably in situations where you need to construct your cylinder to some specific alignment where you have a bunch of other forms already present. This is especially important much later into the lessons, when you start hitting lesson 6.

Anyway, you've generally done a pretty solid job, so just keep those points in mind. I'll go ahead and mark this challenge as complete.

Uncomfortable in the post "/r/ArtFundamentals and Drawabox.com: A New Beginning. Read this if you're new to this subreddit."

2017-03-28 19:16

Stan Prokopenko's YouTube Channel is definitely a good place to start.

Uncomfortable in the post "/r/ArtFundamentals and Drawabox.com: A New Beginning. Read this if you're new to this subreddit."

2017-03-28 18:17

Your guess is as good as mine. A long list of factors have kept me from pushing forward on that front, the most significant of which being the fact that I don't feel confident in my ability to teach that particular material. It's possible that I may simply decide to remove all figure drawing content at some point and just make drawabox purely about the material from lessons 1-7.

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

2017-03-27 19:41

A brush pen's definitely a big asset when it comes to filling in large areas to keep visual noise and distraction down. Overall I think you're doing a really good job of taking the concepts of construction from the lesson and applying them to your drawings. I can see that you're demonstrating a pretty solid grasp of the forms you're playing with, and the space in which you're fitting them all together. Your experimentation with texture is also resulting in nice headway, and I really like how boldly you're playing with those large areas of black and shadow.

There's just two minor points that I want to mention:

• The head on the top right here gives me a great opportunity to mention how one big risk when adding texture is overpowering the underlying construction and losing a lot of the solidity and volume in the initial drawing. Always remember that solidity is something that your drawing starts out with, and that is maintained through the drawing. You can't ever add more solidity, but you sure as hell can lose it. One such way to decrease solidity is through the use of texture. That's why I generally lean towards making fewer marks rather than more. This wasn't really an issue in the rest of your drawings, but I figured I'd jump on the opportunity to work this point in, as it may come in handy in the future.

• I noticed that you were filling in your cast shadows with loose hatching. This is more of a personal observation and you're free to disagree with me here, but I find that this makes the shadow draw the eye too much. The alternating black/white of those hatching lines increases the visual interest in something that really isn't meant to be that eye-catching. The cast shadow should really just be a simple shape there to give the rest of the construction grounding without calling too much attention to itself.

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

Uncomfortable in the post "250 Cylinder Challenge"

2017-03-27 01:04

Pretty solid work. The tables of ellipses are definitely looking quite nice, and the stiffness we see in some of the earlier cylinders definitely decreases towards the end, especially after the break you took. I think as far as those ellipses go, my recommendation would be to ease up on how much you're drawing through them. Go around two full times, then lift your pen.

For the cylinders, I have two recommendations. Firstly, try to make the shift in degrees (between the ellipses at either end) a little more subtle. A larger change implies that the cylinder itself is quite large in terms of its scale, while a subtler change will imply a much smaller scale more closely related to most of the objects we see and use on a daily basis.

The second recommendation is that you should also practice drawing your cylinders by starting off with a box, as demonstrated in the video. This will be particularly useful when you have to align your cylinder to a specific orientation. It will also help get you used to drawing ellipses within planes, matching the criteria necessary for an ellipse to represent an actual circle in 3D space.

Anyway, you're generally doing quite well, so just keep that stuff in mind as you move forwards. Keep it up and consider this challenge complete.

Uncomfortable in the post "Lesson 5: Drawing Animals"

2017-03-25 21:22

I think you're demonstrating some steady improvement on this front. There's still a lot of room for improvement, and really just drilling the concepts in - so don't stop practicing this stuff. Also, don't stop rereading and rewatching the lesson material. Being as dense as it is, you may stumble upon things you may not have appreciated fully the first ten times.

In general, I think as you move through this set, your sense of form and construction does improve. Your legs are still rather cartoony (look at this deer's front feet for example), but your torsos are much better, and your facial constructions in your latter half have definitely vastly improved.

I especially like the torso on this fella, you're starting to get a sense for the underlying musculature (even though we haven't drawn any of it), because the volumes are largely present and in the right places.

I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete. Feel free to move onto the next one, though I do warn you - as we get into hard surface, geometric objects, your sense of form and 3D space will definitely be tested. It's important that you revise your boxes and complete the 250 cylinder challenge before attempting that stuff.

Uncomfortable in the post "250 Box Challenge"

2017-03-25 21:08

Overall your lines are looking okay - the only issue I can see is the sort of arcing that doesn't come from drawing too quickly, but rather is a natural tendency in your arm. You can correct this however, and I explain how to approach it in these notes.

Aside from that, a few things to keep in mind:

• Work on your ability to draw lines between two points without overshooting.

• You certainly have been pretty light on your corrections. I see a few here and there, but I assure you that there are more mistakes. They may be harder to identify, but one way to help pick them out is to extend your lines back towards their implied vanishing point. You don't have to extend them all the way, but extending them to two or three times their original length can really help you see issues with their convergences. Each box consists of three sets of four parallel lines, and each set has its own vanishing point. It's likely that you'll see that within a given set, some lines converge more quickly than others - which implies that they'd have multiple points where two or three members of the set converge, but not one single point where they all meet. This implies a mistake.

I'll go ahead and mark this challenge as complete, but it's definitely a good idea to apply that line-extending error checking approach to a couple of the pages you've done here.

Uncomfortable in the post "250 Box Challenge"

2017-03-25 21:02

It's definitely a mistake to ever think in terms of whether or not you're progressing too slowly, because there is no "just right". The only mistake you can make in this regard is rushing - and worrying that you're going too slow will drive you to rush. Just move along at your own pace.

Your boxes are definitely looking good. Their solidity and your general confidence seems to improve over the set, and your corrections are generally on point. I noticed that you're playing with line weight in a few areas, but doing so more consistently will help push your boxes to the next level.

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

Uncomfortable in the post "Lesson 5: Drawing Animals"

2017-03-23 19:53

Here are some notes. Try another four pages of animals, and try to focus adding the nuance I pointed out in these notes to your torso-sausage-form.

Uncomfortable in the post "250 Box Challenge"

2017-03-23 19:39

You're progressing nicely, and I definitely see improvements over the set. One thing that does jump out at me though (more towards the beginning and towards the end) is a tendency to have lines that arc somewhat, rather than being solid and straight. This may be due to lack of focus, though it may also be a natural tendency in how you draw that would have to be dealt with. I explain how to handle this sort of thing in these notes.

I'm glad to see that you're playing with extending your lines further back to see how they behave in terms of perspective, in your correction phase. This is definitely very helpful in terms of identifying where things are going wrong, as not all mistakes really jump out. Keep up the good work and consider this challenge complete.