Uncomfortable in the post "Lesson 3: Drawing Plants"

2017-03-02 21:02

You're generally doing very well. I do have a few recommendations however:

• Try not to leave any of your stems open - that is, when you cut them off, don't have two parallel lines suddenly stopping. Cap them off with an ellipse in order to reinforce the illusion of volume and form.

• Draw through all of your ellipses, and draw them from your shoulder, rather than your wrist - regardless of their size. Those drawn from your wrist tend to come out more stiffly, and therefore end up a little uneven.

• You definitely have a heavy reliance on hatching/crosshatching when it comes to texture - while this isn't an uncommon thing when it comes to drawing, I strongly discourage it. I find that it's a very common fallback that keeps students from really looking closely at their reference and identifying the specific textures, the specific rhythm and flow of detail that can be captured with more purposeful and intentional marks. When we allow ourselves to simply use hatching to everything, we rob ourselves of the opportunity to look a little closer and expand our range of textures. Hatching itself really only accounts for a very small fraction of textures that exist.

• I know Peter Han's Dynamic Sketching lessons include the use of white ink and more on rendering than mine do, but my decision to leave anything but black ink out was an intentional one, as it guides students' attention and focus more towards elements I believe to be more important. I've found the use of white ink to be somewhat distracting in a way that is similar to my issue with hatching. Ultimately, while the courses are similar (and mine sprouts from what I learned from Peter), my particular path has steadily diverged in key areas. It's best for you not to mix different lesson plans, as it tends to muddy things up and makes it more likely that something's going to be missed. It would be better for you to go as far into my material as you ultimately intend, following the instructions and approach to the letter, then go back and follow Peter's separately.

• For the spherical fruits on the top of this page, note how your hatching does not follow the actual surface of the forms. The lines run straighter, rather than curving and hooking around. The result is that the forms get flattened out, because those hatching details inform the viewer how that surface distorts through 3D space.

• The further we go into the work you've done for this lesson (mostly in the last couple pages), I see a shift moving from an emphasis on construction to an emphasis on the final resulting drawing (meaning, you're less willing to draw the additional linework that helps flesh out our forms). Always remind yourself that the end result does not matter. You are not, or at least should not, be here with the hopes that you'll come out with a sketchbook full of pretty pictures to put on your fridge. Each and every drawing is a drill, and their value is in what you learn by drawing them. Focusing on the end result will keep you from making key decisions that would otherwise have helped both improve the solidity of that construction, while also improving and further developing your grasp of space. Ironically enough, when you draw confidently with less regard for the end result - and focus purely on solidity, construction, line economy and so on - the end result generally ends up better than if you go in hoping for something to show off at the end.

I do want to mention that your tree drawings are really quite well done. They show a great deal of care and patience. Just keep in mind that there is a difference between exhibiting what you are capable of right now, and working towards improving that skill level.

You may consider this lesson complete. Feel free to move onto the next one when you feel ready.

Uncomfortable in the post "Lesson 3: Drawing Plants"

2017-03-02 18:13

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

Uncomfortable in the post "250 Cylinder Challenge"

2017-03-01 23:41

Your last two pages are definitely better, though I do feel that across the whole set there's a real sense of sloppiness to how you've approached these. One of the biggest signs of this is how you handle your minor axis line - it's usually drawn somewhat thoughtlessly, not quite centered, and it doesn't penetrate the ellipses on either side which makes it largely.. not that useful.

Remember that the minor axis is supposed to go down first, should be drawn with the ghosting method (as should all lines) to ensure that it is as straight and smooth as possible. Then you straddle both ellipses on the line so that the line cuts through both entirely - you want to be able to judge the alignment of the ellipses relative to the line, ideally having cutting both ellipses into two equal, symmetrical halves down their narrower dimension. The way you've approached it, it's not really all that possible to achieve a good alignment.

I will mark this challenge as complete since you did draw all 250 cylinders, but I strongly agree with your desire to redo it, and will happily critique it should you resubmit.

Uncomfortable in the post "250 Box Challenge"

2017-03-01 23:22

Nooooooo! You ignored my specific instructions! From my last critique:

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.

Because you didn't draw through any of these boxes, you missed out on a hell of a lot from this challenge. Your corrections do seem to be pretty decent and you're catching a lot of your errors (of which there were many), but when it comes to embarking on the task of drawing so many boxes, you cannot allow yourself to waste time by not reading the instructions.

I am going to mark this challenge as complete, but I strongly recommend that you do it again and resubmit, if only to make amends for not paying attention.

I will however leave you with an additional approach that can help towards identifying mistakes. Like I said before, you're doing a good job of it, but this can really give you a clearer sense of why certain things are wrong and others aren't. This is actually pulled from a critique I gave someone else recently:

Here's a tip for helping you identify your mistakes more easily - with your different coloured pen, take each line that makes up a box and extend it back towards its implied vanishing point. You only need to really extend it back to about twice its original length, but you'll quickly start to get an idea of how those lines are behaving. If you remember, each box is made up of three sets of four parallel lines, each set having its own VP. By extending lines back, you can often find areas where two or three lines within a set seem to be converging together, but one or two lines aren't quite matching up. This is a strong indicator that your angles are off. From there you can take yet another colour pen and draw in lines that would converge together a little better.

Uncomfortable in the post "Lesson 5: Drawing Animals (new 50min intro video, 3 new demos)"

2017-03-01 23:16

You've definitely got a good start as far as construction goes, but there's two things I'd like to point out.

It's very clear to me that you do have a pretty decent grasp of form and space, but overall you're being a little too loose and approximate with your how much you respect the solidity of the forms you're drawing. The first point I want to make is that the marks you put down are not just arbitrary 2D shapes - you're constructing individual, solid, tangible three dimensional forms. By the end of each successive pass of the constructional method, you should end up with a construction made up of forms that actually feel as though they occupy three dimensional space, rather than just being marks on a flat page.

While drawing these marks, focus on establishing that illusion of form (make this reflect in how you draw the various ellipses, being sure to draw through them and keep them reasonably tight rather than being overly loose), and if at the end of a pass you do not feel convinced of their solidity, apply some of the tricks you learned in previous lessons, like contour lines.

Now, there are times where you'll want to make adjustments to a form that you've already included from a previous pass. In this case, don't simply act like it's not there and draw something new on top. As these forms are solid and tangible, you must work with them. Instead of outright replacing a shape, you must carve and cut the existing forms. The difference is that when cutting away at something that already exists, you must be particularly aware of the piece that is being cut away and how it sits in 3D space.

The other point I wanted to raise is that you have a strong tendency not to give much regard to how limbs connect to the torso - you've been stamping them on arbitrarily more often than not. The way you should be doing it is how you approached it in your bear drawing. Actually flesh out the connection between the torso and the shoulder mass.

Lastly, as you noted yourself, your approach to texture certainly needs work. This isn't as much of a concern for me since my focus lies on construction, but there is a suggestion I can offer. When drawing fur for example, we obviously try not to cover the entire surface and focus on the silhouette of the form. The thing is however, as we are using far fewer strokes, the importance of each individual mark goes up considerably, as it is being used to communicate far more information.

As such, you need to design those tufts of fur along the silhouette much more deliberately. What I'm seeing here is almost always a sort of repetitious pattern rather than the result of forethought and planning. You're basically saying, "okay I want some fur along this edge", and then you go into autopilot. Don't allow that to happen - repetition will make your textures feel stiff and boring, and generally won't go very far in terms of actually capturing the look you're after.

I'd like to see four more pages of animal drawings - three of the pages should be construction only, and the fourth can have texture included if you like.

Uncomfortable in the post "250 Box Challenge"

2017-03-01 00:13

I definitely see some clear improvement over the set. Overall, while many of your angles are still a bit off, the solidity of your forms is definitely there, as is the confidence of your linework. I do however have a big recommendation in terms of how to go over your work during the corrections phase.

It's a two-part suggestion:

1. Firstly, actually draw in the correct lines, rather than simply circling lines you feel are incorrect. It's one thing to point out a mistake, but something else entirely to actually pinpoint how things should be. The latter is considerably more useful.

2. Here's a tip for helping you identify your mistakes more easily - with your different coloured pen, take each line that makes up a box and extend it back towards its implied vanishing point. You only need to really extend it back to about twice its original length, but you'll quickly start to get an idea of how those lines are behaving. If you remember, each box is made up of three sets of four parallel lines, each set having its own VP. By extending lines back, you can often find areas where two or three lines within a set seem to be converging together, but one or two lines aren't quite matching up. This is a strong indicator that your angles are off. From there you can take yet another colour pen and draw in lines that would converge together a little better.

Anyway, keep up the good work. I'll go ahead and mark this challenge as complete. I do however feel that you should take another stab at doing your corrections, applying that second approach to at least one page of the boxes you've already drawn to help identify issues you may have missed.

Uncomfortable in the post "250 Cylinder Challenge"

2017-02-28 23:55

Very nice work! I can definitely see some serious improvement, both on those ellipses, and in general your approach to construction. Your forms feel solid and cohesive, and I'm very pleased to see you practicing both approaches to constructing cylinders - that is, starting with a minor axis, as well as starting from a box.

Keep up the great work and consider this challenge complete.

Uncomfortable in the post "Lesson 5: Drawing Animals (new 50min intro video, 3 new demos)"

2017-02-28 23:40

As far as construction goes, I think you're doing a pretty solid job. You're fleshing out your volumes, working from simple to complex, and are careful enough in your observation to identify the different forms that are present and generally do a decent job of getting your proportions down.

I do have a slight concern that you may be limiting yourself by drawing a little small, but this is debatable. Your forms don't actually suffer quite in the same way they would if your scale was really a big problem but I think where it does start to come in as a factor is where we get into details. Since you're trying to cram a lot of information into a very small space, it tends to come out very clunky. Additionally, the limited space really has an impact on your ability to really wrap your head around the marks you want to put down.

For example, if you look at how you approach fur (and even grass in some areas), it's really not more than little scribbles. This is in part due the scale, but in general you also need to make more of an effort to try and design your strokes more intentionally. Generally we keep our contrast and visual density down by only adding key details here and there, accentuating the silhouette and whatnot, but since we're relying on very few marks to carry the weight of the responsibility of communicating all of this information, those marks need to be planned, designed and very specific. For example, look at this demo. Notice the marks around the ball, and how they're not a simple repetition of the same zigzag? Each tuft is designed at least to some degree (though it gets sloppy towards the bottom).

Now generally I would mark the lesson as complete, but I'm going to go a little off script here and ask you to do two more pages. Take up as much of the page as you can with each drawing, and focus on some furry animals. Lets see how you can do with the additional advice I've given above.

Uncomfortable in the post "Lesson 4: Drawing Insects and Arachnids (new 40min intro video, 3 new demos)"

2017-02-27 23:41

These notes are rather haphazard, but there you go. I'm genuinely concerned that upon completing lessons 1 and 2, you stopped doing those exercises entirely, instead of incorporating them into a regular warmup routine as recommended at the very beginning of lesson 1. In particular, you really need to work on the skills developed in the organic forms with contour lines exercise - focusing on establishing simple shapes and turning them into solid 3D forms. You have a tendency to develop your simple shapes and break them into more complex shapes, but without ever properly establishing the illusion of three dimensional form.

Give my notes there a read, brush up on your warmup exercises and then give it a third try. Four pages, construction only, no details.

Uncomfortable in the post "Lesson 5: Drawing Animals (new 50min intro video, 3 new demos)"

2017-02-26 17:07

Huh, that's surprising. Felt smaller to me. In that case, stick to one drawing per page, turn it horizontally and use the space you've got.

Uncomfortable in the post "Lesson 5: Drawing Animals (new 50min intro video, 3 new demos)"

2017-02-26 15:52

• Yes, leave your mistakes alone regardless of how bad it is. There are always more drawings you can do, the one you're on now is just a drill - it doesn't have to be perfect, or even good. The mistake has been made, it cannot at this point be unmade. That said, the use of the shoulder doesn't cause the wobbling - it's rather how you use it. Make sure you reread the notes on the ghosting method, and try to work on reducing any hesitation while drawing - even if that results in your line being off target. Your first priority is that the line be smooth and even - accuracy is below that.

• Turning your page sideways would work, but in general your sketchbook is very restrictive in its size. Try getting some loose printer paper (8.5x11) and work on that.

• No, as I mentioned previously, focus entirely on construction. The problem is that it's very easy, when aiming for a 'detailed' drawing to get caught up in those details and distracted by them. Students tend to spend less time and focus on their construction phase and end up trying to fix the underlying mistakes by adding more details. Focus entirely on form.

• I don't really see why it would be a problem, but that depends on how exactly you're using them. The appropriate way to use a tool to measure proportion is to hold up your drawing utensil and capture some 'measurement' (usually holding your thumb against the pen, so the measurement is between the pen tip and your thumbnail), then seeing how many times that measurement fits into other components. For example, by doing this one might discover that the head fits into the torso X times.

• The important thing is to constantly ask yourself questions about how things fit into the rest of the construction. We tend to quickly get symbolic when we stop regarding the forms that are present, and just start pasting details on like stickers (with out any sort of grounding). One common metaphor is that when beginners draw an eye, they just stick it on. They instead need to consider that the eye lids are built on top of an eyeball, which in turn is set into an eyesocket, which is in turn defined by the brow ridge and the cheekbone. Everything is connected, so you need to lay in the foundation of a detail in form rather than simply see the detail and draw it. Other than that, there are no tricks to this - it's a matter of continued practice, forcing yourself to continually look at your reference, and learning not to trust your memory.

Uncomfortable in the post "Lesson 7: Drawing Vehicles (new 40min intro video, 3 new demos)"

2017-02-26 01:52

Nice work! I think you've got a lot of strong examples of construction here. I do think you definitely need to continue working on your ellipses (and frankly, we all do, they're ridiculously difficult to master) but your vehicle constructions are coming along great. There's just a couple things I noted that are worth mentioning:

• There's a few cases - like the pickup truck - where doing a proportion study of the front and applying the constructing to scale method would definitely have helped avoid some of the strangeness you've encountered.

• The curvature of your rivet-contour lines for the submarine didn't really convey the intended volume, and there wasn't really much else to help describe how that surface curves through space, so the result was a form that felt like it came down to an edge. I generally am not too fond of using 'dashed' lines because they're tricksy. Continuous lines are confident and reliable, while broken lines lie to us. Every time that path is broken, the trajectory shifts a little, resulting in a line that does not quite follow the path we intended for it. In this case using regular continuous contour lines would have been best, because the primary priority is to convey the appropriate volumes and forms, rather than worrying about details. Still, experimentation is always good, even if they lead us down the wrong path, so we'll file this away under learning what not to do.

I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete. Congratulations on completing lesson 7, and with it the entirety of the dynamic sketching lesson plan.

Uncomfortable in the post "Lesson 5: Drawing Animals (new 50min intro video, 3 new demos)"

2017-02-26 01:37

Before we get into the animal drawings, here's a couple points you should keep in mind for those warmups:

• Draw through your boxes, as mentioned in the 250 box challenge. This will help push your grasp of how each box sits in 3D space.

• Don't reinforce lines by reflex immediately after drawing them. Plan, prepare, execute, then stop. Every mark you put down should be preceded by forethought and use of the ghosting method. If you make a mistake, that's fine, leave it be. Getting into the habit of correcting them by reflex is not a good idea.

• It's great that you're doing warmups, but don't limit them just to boxes and cylinders - you should be doing exercises from both lessons 1 and 2, having them on rotation instead of focusing on just one or two things. Otherwise you end up missing out on important things like the use of contour lines, and so on.

For your animals, overall it's clear that you're developing a sense of construction and form. There are a lot of important issues that I can see however that do undermine your attempts and have a negative impact on your results.

• Your linework is very hesitant, resulting in stiffness/wobbling rather than the smoothness and confidence that is required to convey the illusion of solidity. It's clear to me that you're afraid of making mistakes, and as a result you choke upon execution in order to put more focus on accuracy. Always remember that the smooth flow of your linework is the first priority, and accuracy comes in second. You need to be drawing the majority of your lines from your shoulder, not your wrist, and need to be doing so with a confident pace after a period of preparation with the ghosting method. Don't concern yourself with drawing some lines faintly - draw everything with the same confidence, then come back later to add line weights to help sort things out.

• You're not giving yourself much room to work. Your drawings tend to be very small and cramped. As construction is largely a spatial problem, not giving your brain enough room to think through how all of the forms relate to one another is a great way to end up with really stiff linework, and forms that don't feel convincing. It's common for students to respond to the overwhelming nature of drawing an actual object or animal by drawing smaller, but this inherently leads them to perform worse. Instead, the better choice is to respond with - as I've mentioned many times already - confidence.

• You're working a lot from memory. That is to say, you spend too much time looking away from your reference, focusing on drawing. The moment we look away from our reference, our brains quickly process and oversimplify what we had previously seen, reducing it to cartoons and symbols. This is something that improves with practice, but only if you absolutely force yourself to return your gaze to your reference continually, spending no more than a second or two drawing at a time. This has an impact through every phase of a drawing, from laying in your early masses (to establish accurate proportions) to communicating more complex details.

I'd like you to try another six pages of animal drawings, but this time do not go into any detail. Focus entirely on constructing solid, confident forms. Make sure that at the end of each and every construction 'phase' that the forms you've laid down feel solid to you. You need to be convinced of that illusion that you're trying to sell to others. Students often feel that they'll be able to capture that solidity later on, in the next phase, but this is never true - solidity is something a drawing has from its earliest conception. Through every step, it can only lose that solidity, rather than gain it. If when you consider moving onto the next successive pass, you don't feel like your forms are solid, try using the tricks you've learned in previous lessons - like contour lines - to reinforce them.

I did want to mention that the raccoon/platypus hybrid was interesting. It definitely shows the hallmarks of not much observation (the feet for instance are flat and symbolic), there are many parts of the construction that show a developing sense of how the different forms fit together. This exercise is a great way to test that, since you're forced to put together components from different animals, and therefore must give thought to how they all connect.

Uncomfortable in the post "250 Box Challenge"

2017-02-24 20:47

Very nice work! I can see your confidence improving through the set, and your constructions and use of line weight develop quite a bit as well. That attempt at compound boxes was definitely a good call - looks like an interesting exercise to approach, I might steal that from you at some point. Your corrections also seem to generally be on point, so you're definitely heading down the right track.

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

Uncomfortable in the post "Lesson 5: Drawing Animals (new 50min intro video, 3 new demos)"

2017-02-24 20:40

You're certainly moving in the right direction, and are gradually developing a greater sense of form and volume, but I do see some areas where you can improve.

• Overall, think of this process as though you have a bunch of forms that you're actively sticking together. This means requiring an awareness of how those forms fit together, and being sure not to skip the steps of determining these areas of connection. For instance, how do the goats' legs connect to their torsos?. The one on the right side does a good job of capturing how the neck connects to the torso, but this is also missing form the one on the left.

• For the initial masses, your 'ribcage' mass does not generally come particularly close to actually lining up with the animal's actual ribcage. You'll find that it generally makes up about half of the torso in most animals, but you're only cramming it all the way to the front, which throws off your overall construction.

• Don't ever let yourself work from memory - we do this naturally, even when working from reference, where we'll spend longer periods of time drawing without returning to our reference. For yourself to look back and refresh your memory every second or two. If you don't, your brain will quickly oversimplify what you previously saw, rendering it somewhat useless. This is important both in the areas of establishing believable proportions (observing how the different major forms relate to one another in terms of scale), and also when it comes to capturing more detail.

I'd like you to do four more pages of animal drawings. In these drawings, don't get into any texture or detail. Focus entirely on construction, on building up those forms and the relationships between them. I believe you're making good headway, but I think that if pushed in the right direction, you'll be able to do much better.

Uncomfortable in the post "We never stop learning. Here's me struggling to do an elephant drawing demo for a student. It didn't go as planned."

2017-02-24 17:38

Thanks for the advice. Didn't realize that joint was quite so far back. Also, seeing that their bones reflect more 'normal' foot structure just makes me... angrier at the fact that they have those giant moronic pads for feet.

Uncomfortable in the post "We never stop learning. Here's me struggling to do an elephant drawing demo for a student. It didn't go as planned."

2017-02-24 15:19

Go for it!

Uncomfortable in the post "We never stop learning. Here's me struggling to do an elephant drawing demo for a student. It didn't go as planned."

2017-02-24 03:49

Seriously. Their very existence, at least to an extent, undermines the very principles of solidity and construction, even though they're solid underneath the baggy folds of scrotum-like skin. And look at those legs! They're like goddamn tree trunks, with very little in the way of clear muscle forms. Giant, awkward bastards.

Uncomfortable in the post "Lesson 5: Drawing Animals (new 50min intro video, 3 new demos)"

2017-02-23 23:47

You're definitely nailing it in this page. Your elephant's still got some definite weak points. You're definitely minding your forms, though the legs are very wobbly and as a result don't feel particularly solid.

Honestly though... elephants are challenging to say the least. I tried to do a demo for you, and struggled immensely. Here you go.

Anyway, I think you're doing well enough to merit lesson completion. Be sure to keep practicing this stuff, but feel free to move onto the next lesson.

Uncomfortable in the post "Lesson 4: Drawing Insects and Arachnids (new 40min intro video, 3 new demos)"

2017-02-23 23:06

Your house flies are definitely the stronger of the set - you're paying more attention to the solidity of the forms in those cases, compared to your beetles (where the individual components don't really feel that three dimensional). Remember that the constructional method is split up into a series of 'phases', and in each one you break down your forms more to build on top of the construction from the previous step. At the end of each step, you need to be fully confident and convinced in the solidity of your forms you've drawn. The initial forms of your beetles don't read as balls or organic forms, they read as flat, 2D ellipses. It's because of this that when you build on top of them, you don't really seem to be aware of how the forms exist in 3D space, because there's really no groundwork for that.

Try dealing with them like you would the organic forms from lesson 2 - add a contour line or two to help build up that illusion of form, so that you yourself are convinced.

You do this WAY more successfully in your flies, where those forms feel much more solid and believable. The only issue with the flies that I noticed is that the different sections of the legs don't really flow into one another - they're isolated bubbles. Try to approach them more like I do in this demo.

I'd like you to do three more pages of insect drawings - try on focusing on approaching those beetles more like you do the flies. Also, when it comes to the beetles, you're REALLY not observing your reference much and are definitely working more from memory. I know you're capable of much better than that (as you demonstrate with the flies), so show me that you can do it regardless of the subject matter.

Uncomfortable in the post "Lesson 4: Drawing Insects and Arachnids (new 40min intro video, 3 new demos)"

2017-02-23 23:00

Definitely getting better, but here's a few things that stand out to me:

• Your contour lines aren't generally wrapping around your forms correctly anymore. As I mentioned before, you should be incorporating the exercises from lessons 1 and 2 into a 10-15 minute warmup at the beginning of each session to ensure that you don't get rusty on the techniques you learned previously. What I'm seeing looks like a lot of signs that you're not doing that, or that you're practicing them incorrectly.

• Don't overdo it with the contour lines. One or two well placed contour lines will serve you MUCH better than a dozen sloppily drawn ones.

• Your legs are coming out very stiff - don't treat them like straight lines going from joint to joint. Draw them as flowing, organic shapes, flowing smoothly from one joint to the next.

I did want to mention that I particularly like the way you handled parts of the grasshopper - especially how the mass on the top of its abdomen fits into the rest of the forms.

Since you did a drawing of a fly, here's a demo for how I would approach it. Pay special attention to how I handle the legs.

Lastly, make sure you're drawing from your shoulder - we tend to stiffen up when we draw from our wrists, which could account for some of your the stiffness in your linework.

Try another four pages of insect drawings - remember not to include any detail, focus entirely on construction. I noticed that you tried to sneak in some (rather poorly observed) detail into the fly at the end. This will only distract you.

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

2017-02-23 16:55

Lessons 8-13 are all to do with figure drawing. I'd recommend checking out Stan Prokopenko's youtube channel for that.

Uncomfortable in the post "Lesson 7: Drawing Vehicles (new 40min intro video, 3 new demos)"

2017-02-22 21:30

Your constructions are definitely looking pretty solid. The only area where you need a hell of a lot of work is your ellipses. It's completely understandable and honestly fairly normal, but you're visibly afraid of them. Whenever you attempt to draw an ellipse, especially one that needs to fall into a specific plane or to a specific alignment, you hesitate and choke. The only way around this is to practice them a lot, more or less as you've been doing. Do them in isolation, but also do them as part of larger drawings - you're definitely doing a good job of pushing through each drawing even when the ellipses end up a little uneven or awkward, and that's great. Keep at it.

By the way, I'm especially fond of this car. The front's a little lopsided, but it's adorable, and the solidity of your forms and the patience with which you've planned out every detail really pushes it that extra mile.

Keep up the great work and consider this lesson complete. Congratulations on finishing the dynamic sketching material.

Uncomfortable in the post "Lesson 3: Drawing Plants (new 40min intro video, 3 new demos)"

2017-02-22 21:26

Sorry about the quick sketches, but I'm not letting myself get dinner until I've finished with today's critiques and.. damn I'm hungry. Here you go.

For the sunflower, I'd concentrate on the form at the center of the flower - it's three dimensional and has volume to it, a little bit like a donut, so you want to be sure to capture that.

Aside from that, you're doing fine as is. Go ahead and move onto the next lesson.

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."

2017-02-22 17:45

Different parts of figure drawing. Those lessons existed once upon a time, but I took them down as they didn't really meet my standards. I'll gradually be rewriting them, but it's tough to find the time at the moment.

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

2017-02-21 01:02

Generally very solid work. I especially like how some of your organic forms droop lazily off one another - it shows a solid grasp of how they relate to one another in 3D space. Your form intersections are also well done, and your dissections show a lot of great experimentation with different textures, most of which have been executed quite nicely.

Your organic forms with contour curves also generally show a good grasp of the technique, using it to convey a good sense of volume. It all would have been perfect... were it not for your contour ellipses. Maybe I'm just getting a little emotional since this is the last of a whole bunch of submissions I've had to critique today (many of which made this same mistake), but.. DRAW THROUGH YOUR ELLIPSES! You need to be doing this for each and every ellipse you draw for my lessons. Additionally, you completely left out the central minor axis lines from this exercise, which are very important. Lastly, you demonstrate a good grasp of what the degree of each ellipse/curve means in other parts of this lesson, but here it's a little shaky, so I'm going to point you to these notes.

I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete. Feel free to move onto the next lesson. You've done a great job despite that little ellipse issue, so the only thing I want to stress is the importance of following instructions.

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

2017-02-21 00:57

Pretty good work. I think your general sense of form and 3D space is coming along quite nicely, as you're demonstrating in the form intersections and organic intersections. Both of these exercises show me that you understand how these forms relate to one another, and how they play together within the same space.

This isn't all that important right now, but I figured I should also mention it - your use of line weight in the form intersections is really nice. It's subtle and understated, and really helps solidify your forms and maintaining a sort of cohesiveness for each one without being overbearing.

Admittedly your organic forms with contour curves are a little on the sloppy side, so keep an eye on that. Don't forget to include and build around a central minor axis, as this will help you keep those curves aligned properly.

Your dissections are well done - I definitely see a lot of experimentation, and it's coming together quite nicely.

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 (new 40min intro video, 3 new demos)"

2017-02-21 00:54

Generally not bad. The only thing that really jumps out at me is this page of leaves. To put it simply, you're skipping steps as far as the constructional method goes. You don't have enough information laid down to jump from the basic singular-direction leaf shape to all of the different sections, so the result ends up feeling very weak. Instead, when you have a leaf that gets broken up into all of these different sections, try handling each section as you would a separate leaf - with its own directional line, then building up a sort of leaf form around it, and so on. Then you can fuse them together.

In general, your main plant constructions are pretty well done. The only worry I have here is that you have a bit of a tendency to jump into detail/texture way too early. The veins on a leaf are really unimportant and should not constitute something you drop in early on, unless they serve as contour curves. Your sunflower for example, is a good example of jumping into detail too early - you get distracted from the core construction, and end up building on top of a very shaky foundation.

I think you have plenty of room for growth, but you're moving in the right direction, and things seem to be going pretty well as is. I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete, so feel free to move onto the next one.

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

2017-02-21 00:49

Better. You're falling short as far as the alignment to the minor axis goes, however, so you'll need to work on that as you continue to move forwards. I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete, so go ahead and move onto the next one.

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

2017-02-21 00:47

So there are a few issues I'd like to point out. Some of them are skipped steps/missed instructions, though others are more about your approach and understanding of space.

Before we get to that though - it seems you've turned off your flair on this subreddit. I'd really appreciate it if you turned it back on, as it's how I track whether or not you're eligible for homework critiques and which lessons you've completed thus far.

On to the critique:

• Your use of contour curves is pretty good, as they are wrapping confidently around the forms and do a decent job of conveying volume.

• Your contour ellipses however are really lacking. You're not drawing through most of them (something I expect you to do for all the ellipses you draw for my lessons), and you're neglecting to include the central minor axis line. This minor axis is important, as all of your ellipses need to be aligned to it such that each ellipse is cut into two equal, symmetrical halves down their narrower axis. Additionally, give these notes a read in regards to what the degree of an ellipse tells us about the circle in 3D space it represents.

• Your first page of dissections is a start, though I do want to point out that your textures are at the moment very heavily relying on your memory, rather than direct observation. Now that doesn't mean you're just working from your imagination - it means that you're looking at your reference for a bit, then going to town drawing for a long while before returning to your reference. You can read more about what I mean in the lesson section of the 25 texture challenge.

• Your second page of dissections is incomplete. Also, the contour curves you're using here aren't wrapping confidently around the forms. Though you did this correctly in the previous section, I'm still going to ask you to read these notes and watch the video linked there.

• The form intersections definitely are challenging by nature, but you also made them more difficult than they needed to be. In the instructions, I mention that you should be avoiding any and all forms that are 'stretched' in one particular dimension. Long tubes, long boxes, etc. These bring perspective too much into the mix and make things much, much harder than they need to be. I do see that you're drawing through some of your forms, which is good, but you should be doing this more consistently as you learned in the 250 box challenge. I also recommend that you take a look at the 250 cylinder challenge to get a better sense of how to construct those particular kinds of forms.

• Your organic intersections are a little hit and miss. A lot of it has to do with you getting sloppy and not wrapping your contour curves around the forms correctly, so they end up reading flatter than they should be. Other forms there do give a certain sense of how they all relate to one another, however. Overall, plenty of room for improvement, but a somewhat decent attempt.

In general, I'm a little on the fence about this. Your work leaves a lot to be desired, but it's really more a matter of reading the instructions more carefully. As such, I'm going to ask for you to do the following:

• 1 page of organic forms with contour ellipses

• 1 page of organic forms with contour curves

• 1 page of form intersections

I want you to do these exactly as they are written in the lesson - no deviation, no skipped steps. Also, while your organic forms with contour curves are technically fine, they aren't exactly as described in the lesson - so this time around, I want you to do them to match my specifications as well (so they should look like contour ellipses, just without the full ellipse).

Uncomfortable in the post "Lesson 4: Drawing Insects and Arachnids (new 40min intro video, 3 new demos)"

2017-02-21 00:29

So there is definitely some improvement. There's also a ways to go, and I'll outline some of the areas you'll need to work on before I can mark this lesson as complete, but in comparison to your last submission you're doing considerably better.

Before we get into my critique, since your last submission was three months ago, I want to mention just in case that you should still be keeping up with the material from lessons 1 and 2 as warmups, picking two or three exercises at the beginning of each session to do for 10-15 minutes. These need to be done regularly, or you will forget them, and you will get rusty. That's just a fact of life.

So the biggest improvement I can see is that you're paying more mind to the forms you're drawing. Before they felt like flat, flimsy 2D shapes. Now most of them feel more solid, at least in isolation. I do see some issues with some of your contour curves (those on the praying mantis' thorax and other parts are not curving correctly, you may want to take a look at these notes), but generally you're doing much better than before.

Another issue I did notice is that you're not drawing through your ellipses. I stressed this back in lesson 2 - it's not optional, you need to do it for each and every ellipse you draw for my lessons. Two rounds of each ellipse is generally considered ideal. This will keep your linework confident and smooth. Right now you're stressing too much on your accuracy, leading to linework that is quite stiff.

This relates to another issue - I'm seeing a lot of cases where you're drawing your initial construction trying to be as faint as possible, then you go back around it with darker lines. This is a bad habit. You should be drawing each mark you put down with full confidence, not trying to hide them or cover them up. Both steps that you're undertaking really damage the integrity of your linework - by drawing timidly, you're not able to put the right energy and smoothness behind each stroke. Then by trying to cover up those lines with darker "final" marks, you're stressing being super-accurate to match up with your previous marks, and as a result, they end up being stiff.

You cannot allow yourself to be afraid of making mistakes. Mistakes happen - they WILL happen, it's an inevitability. We aren't here to draw a bunch of pretty drawings. Each one of these is just an exercise, a drill, we're just grinding away. So make sure you draw each form using the ghosting method - that means planning and preparing to build up your muscle memory beforehand, then executing the mark with a confident pace so as to keep your brain from micromanaging.

Now, afterwards - once the drawing is complete - we do add line weight. This is not the same as what you're doing. We're not replacing or "cleaning up" our existing lines, we're merely emphasizing the ones that already exist to help clarify overlaps or draw attention where it needs to go. I describe this in these notes. Keep that in mind - we're not replacing, merely emphasizing what's already there.

I've probably mentioned this point a few times - continue to work on your observational skills. Some of your proportions here are decent, but I noticed that with several others, the ant for example, still need work. Now this is perfectly normal, but I do feel the need to stress it repeatedly. Spend most of your time studying your reference image, considering how the different parts of the object relate to one another in scale. Only draw for a second or two before returning your gaze to your reference to refresh your memory. Your memory is very, very fallible and cannot be trusted. Your brain wants to oversimplify everything into a cartoon - this will get better over time as we rewire those basic brain processes through these studies, but it takes a lot of time and practice.

The last point I want to raise is something I've mentioned to quite a few students over the years, in regards to construction. I'm pulling it directly from another critique, so keep in mind that it applies to you in varying degrees, but everything applies to an extent, so take it to heart.

We all know that the constructional method is about starting simple and building up complexity. Following this line of thinking, I want you to keep one rule in mind - at the end of each pass, you should be fully convinced in the solidity, the volume, and the three dimensionality of every form you've drawn thus far. If you yourself are not convinced, then you must fix this before continuing onto the next pass of adding complexity - be it by adding contour lines, or using whatever other trick you've learned in previous lessons. It's very easy to feel that, "well this isn't solid now, but once I've added more detail, more information, more forms it will become more solid." This is entirely untrue, however. Solidity is something that starts at the very base level, and it cannot be introduced in later steps - it can only be lost. That illusion of solidity and form is something that you need to be convinced of as you draw - because when you buy into the lie, you will make little subconscious decisions that help further convince your viewers. For example, if you believe you're drawing a sphere (not a circle), and then you draw a line along the surface of that sphere, your stroke will curve naturally, wrapping around it, because your grasp of the reality within your drawing will demand it. If you are not convinced, however, your line will cut straight across (or at least, won't wrap around convincingly).

When you have added a form to your construction, its solidity implies a few things. If it's solid, it cannot be changed or adjusted as easily as drawing a new line with no further consideration. If a form is solid, your brain forces you to treat it as though it is real. So how do we adjust a solid organic form? We must cut and carve it - an action inherently different from just willing the form to change. To cut something means to actually be aware of the form that is being removed. If you have a sphere, and want to shear off a portion, you are forced to deal with both the part that remains, and the piece that has been cut off. Even moreso, you could imagine an entire cube intersecting and being subtracted from that sphere. The point is, to carve something solid, you're actually thinking about what actions need to be undertaken, what new 'virtual' forms need to be considered in order to make the cuts you want.

I'd like to see you do another four pages of insect drawings - as I said, you are definitely making progress, but I am not going to let you move forwards until I am confident that I've done my job correctly. I'm sure you'll get there, so keep pushing through.

Uncomfortable in the post "250 Box Challenge"

2017-02-21 00:08

This critique is for /u/brownsummer's homework submission (which was posted just before the old thread got locked).

Congrats on completing the challenge. I do have a couple recommendations to make as you move forwards.

Firstly, I noticed that it's been 9 months since your last submission, so just as a friendly reminder, make sure you continue practicing the material from that lesson. Ultimately the exercises from lessons 1 and 2 should be incorporated into a regular warmup, picking two or three exercises from that set to do for 10-15 minutes at the beginning of each sitting so as to keep sharpening those basic skills, and to keep them sharp in the long run.

Early on you started drawing through your boxes with dotted lines. You did stop this pretty quickly (which is great to see) but I want to explain why broken lines like this aren't a good idea. Every time a line is broken and resumed, its flow shifts slightly. As this occurs numerous times through the course of a dotted or dashed line, we very quickly lose the original trajectory of that line, making it rather untrustworthy.

I fully understand why you decided to use that approach - it can be difficult to distinguish which side of the box faces us when we draw through them. I'm pleased that you transitioned to filling one of the front-facing faces with hatching lines to serve as a visual cue. This is definitely the recommended approach.

That said, your hatching is a little sloppy - make sure those lines are straight, parallel and stretch all the way across the plane from edge to edge, rather than floating arbitrarily in the middle. This kind of hatching is a great way to really reduce the overall quality of your drawing, and while aesthetic quality isn't our priority here, it quickly becomes a habit that should be avoided.

I noticed you pushed yourself to mark in a lot of corrections, and I'm pleased to see this. That said, I think you did struggle with identifying where those corrections had to be made, so here's a handy trick that should help to identify them:

Take your different coloured pen and try extending the lines of a box towards their implied vanishing points. Keep in mind that each box consists of three sets of four parallel lines, each set having its own vanishing point to which all four lines should be converging at roughly the same speed.

By extending those lines - maybe somewhere around twice their original length - certain cases where two lines in a set start converging more quickly than the other two become much easier to spot. This is a common issue, and having two lines converge more quickly shows us that all four of those lines are not converging towards the same vanishing point as they should be.

I recommend attempting this on at least one page (probably your last page), as it will really help highlight mistakes you may have missed. It's this awareness of mistakes we tend to make that quickly allows us to improve by leaps and bounds. Awareness really is the biggest obstacle.

Anyway, I'll go ahead and mark this challenge as complete, as you've pushed through the whole thing. There's plenty of room for improvement, so make sure you continue practicing this material (you'll likely need some additional practice before attempting the form intersections exercise in lesson 2). That aside, feel free to move onto the next lesson when you feel confident enough to do so.

Uncomfortable in the post "250 Box Challenge"

2017-02-20 23:59

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

Uncomfortable in the post "Lesson 5: Drawing Animals (new 50min intro video, 3 new demos)"

2017-02-20 23:51

Your first couple pages of birds are pretty well done, and this page of cats is quite impressive, especially the big one. The way you've constructed that body is bang on - you're very aware of how the different forms fit together, how the legs connect to the torso, and how the additional volume you've piled onto its back lays across the forms beneath it. You've approached the head with more guesswork than you should have, but the rest is well done.

Assuming your work is in chronological order, things tend to get somewhat worse as you push along. I'm not sure if you're losing focus, or if it's a matter of needing to reflect upon the lesson material more frequently. I can definitely imagine that when things get spread out over several days, it becomes very necessary to reread the lesson at the beginning of each session.

As you noted, proportions become a pretty significant problem through the set (it's more than just a few - you need to spend a lot more time observing your reference image, assessing how the different forms relate to one another in scale, always looking much much more than you draw), but in general your form construction gets weaker as well.

I want you to do another four pages - start by rereading the material and rewatching the intro video. Then, when you do the four pages, I want you to stick to construction only. No detail, no fur, no texture, just focus on establishing your forms and figuring out how they connect to one another.

You've made it clear that you're fully capable of doing this stuff, but somewhere along the lines you allowed yourself to lose focus and get sloppy. I'm sure you'll do better on this next attempt.

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

2017-02-20 21:16

Pretty well done. Just a couple things to keep in mind:

• Don't forget to draw your central minor axis lines when doing your organic forms with contour lines, both ellipses and curves. It's important to use your minor axis to help keep these ellipse-based contour lines aligned correctly.

• Your foreshortening in your form intersections is a little too dramatic, which relates to this issue raised in lesson 1. Basically you should keep your foreshortening more shallow when dealing with lots of forms stuck together in the same scene, as it helps maintain a more consistent sense of scale.

• Here and there in isolated areas I see a little bit of sloppy, sketchy behaviour. Keep pushing yourself to think in terms of the ghosting method - that is, every mark should be planned and prepared for, then executed confidently. You're doing better in this regard, but it's something you need to keep in mind as you push forwards.

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

Uncomfortable in the post "Lesson 5: Drawing Animals (new 50min intro video, 3 new demos)"

2017-02-20 01:48

Your lines are plenty confident - what they need is more thought and planning prior to execution. You've got a lot of lines that feel wasteful, reflexive, and unplanned.

Uncomfortable in the post "Lesson 4: Drawing Insects and Arachnids (new 40min intro video, 3 new demos)"

2017-02-19 21:35

Yeah, it's primarily getting used to the application of the ghosting method. Ghosting is all about getting the instructions written to your muscle memory so that once you actually execute it, you don't have to micromanage it with your brain.

As you practice this, two things will happen - firstly, you'll get into the groove of ghosting in a way that your muscles respond to, and secondly, the speed at which you need to draw to keep your brain quiet will decrease (as you're also practicing controlling your brain during execution).

Uncomfortable in the post "250 Cylinder Challenge"

2017-02-19 20:33

I really appreciate the kind words! It means a lot to know that my lessons are having an impact.

Your cylinders are looking pretty good. I do have one recommendation though - try to practice starting your cylinders off as boxes as well. I demonstrate how to approach this in the 'how to draw cylinders' video, though the video about 'perfect circles and cubes in 3D space' is also relevant, as it demonstrates how you can draw an ellipse inside of a plane knowing that it represents a perfect circle and not an arbitrary elliptical shape.

Being able to draw your cylinders inside of boxes helps considerably when you find yourself having to align those cylinders to a specific construction. You'll end up encountering a lot of this in lessons 6 and 7.

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

Uncomfortable in the post "Lesson 5: Drawing Animals (new 50min intro video, 3 new demos)"

2017-02-19 20:23

In general, these are really, really well done. They're a touch loose, and a touch sketchy, but you demonstrate a very strong grasp of form and how everything exists in 3D space. Often times people with a looser, sketchier style focus entirely on replicating the 2D images they're working from, resulting in something that feels flat and poorly put together. Yours do not fall into that category, and so I regard this as more of a stylistic choice.

As far as that goes, I do still want to recommend that you slow down a little and put a little more thought before your strokes (try to avoid haphazard scribbly hatching like in the cast shadow of this drawing - it just looks bad). There's always a difference between energetic sketching and plain sloppiness. Same goes for this horse, where its coat is really messy. Fur and hair follows a particular rhythm, and generally when people approach it in this manner they tend to be avoiding trying to consider the flow of detail. Rushing is never the answer!

As far as construction goes, I have only one critique and it relates to the issue you raised. Heads/faces. What I noticed distinctly is that your constructional forms - like the cranial ball mass, the boxier muzzle, etc. tend to float together a little loosely, rather than fitting together like pieces of a puzzle.

Take a look at this squirrel. If you look at the cranial ball, and the top half of the muzzle, they're clearly made to fit together, but there's a distinct sense of space there between them. Try to keep these constructions more snug and deliberate, it will help push the solidity of your drawings much further.

I'm going to mark this lesson as complete. You know what you're doing, and you're doing it quite well, but I feel like you need to find your balance between energy and sloppiness, as there is a clear distinction between the two though it may often feel like they are one and the same.

You will definitely find that the next two lessons will be more challenging, considering your current approach. In this sense, they will either force you to change your mindset towards thinking more, and being more deliberate with your mark making, or you will find them extremely frustrating. Ultimately organic subject matter (animals, insects, plants) tend to be pretty forgiving. Geometric, hard-surface objects are really, really not.

So as you get into the next lesson, be more patient, and allow yourself the room and time to think through each and every stroke.

Uncomfortable in the post "Lesson 4: Drawing Insects and Arachnids (new 40min intro video, 3 new demos)"

2017-02-19 20:15

I do definitely see some good here, but there's a few things we definitely need to sort out. Before we get into anything specific to your actual drawings, there's a particular manner of thinking I want you to try and immerse yourself in from now on. I've actually cut/pasted this from a critique I wrote for someone else, but it's an extremely important thing to keep in mind at all times:

We all know that the constructional method is about starting simple and building up complexity. Following this line of thinking, I want you to keep one rule in mind - at the end of each pass, you should be fully convinced in the solidity, the volume, and the three dimensionality of every form you've drawn thus far. If you yourself are not convinced, then you must fix this before continuing onto the next pass of adding complexity - be it by adding contour lines, or using whatever other trick you've learned in previous lessons. It's very easy to feel that, "well this isn't solid now, but once I've added more detail, more information, more forms it will become more solid." This is entirely untrue, however. Solidity is something that starts at the very base level, and it cannot be introduced in later steps - it can only be lost. That illusion of solidity and form is something that you need to be convinced of as you draw - because when you buy into the lie, you will make little subconscious decisions that help further convince your viewers. For example, if you believe you're drawing a sphere (not a circle), and then you draw a line along the surface of that sphere, your stroke will curve naturally, wrapping around it, because your grasp of the reality within your drawing will demand it. If you are not convinced, however, your line will cut straight across (or at least, won't wrap around convincingly).

When you have added a form to your construction, its solidity implies a few things. If it's solid, it cannot be changed or adjusted as easily as drawing a new line with no further consideration. If a form is solid, your brain forces you to treat it as though it is real. So how do we adjust a solid organic form? We must cut and carve it - an action inherently different from just willing the form to change. To cut something means to actually be aware of the form that is being removed. If you have a sphere, and want to shear off a portion, you are forced to deal with both the part that remains, and the piece that has been cut off. Even moreso, you could imagine an entire cube intersecting and being subtracted from that sphere. The point is, to carve something solid, you're actually thinking about what actions need to be undertaken, what new 'virtual' forms need to be considered in order to make the cuts you want.

Getting into your drawings specifically, I feel that the first point applies quite heavily - you tend to jump into the next phase of construction a little bit too early, and end up with a lot of information floating around but without fully understand what it is you're constructing and how it all fits together. This also ties into the importance of observation - we need to spend the vast majority of our time studying our reference image rather than drawing it, so that as we construct it, we can fully understand how everything is interconnected.

A good example is in this drawing. There's a few concerns here:

• The first thing that jumps out at me is that I can't quite pin down where the center of this creature is - like, a center line that would allow us to cut it into two symmetrical halves. There's a lot of business going on on its back, but they feel like they might be misaligned somewhat. Actually drawing in a concrete center line on your overall masses when starting out your construction, and then being mindful of it, would help considerably.

• How exactly do its legs connect to its body? Or more importantly, where? The points of connection feel a little arbitrary to me. Insects usually have much more going on at the points where their legs connect to their torsos, so it seems to me like not much investigation was done in terms of how that area should be constructed, and instead it was left unexplored.

• I do very much like how well you fleshed out the volume of its main torso. The use of contour curves was quite strong, and as far as that goes as being a solid form, it's very believable

• The head is less so - you started off with an ellipse, but immediately changed your mind and modified it without properly carving it, resulting in a less believable form. The initial ball mass serves no real purpose, and may well not have been there at all. When it comes to constructing heads like this, try to relate that ball mass to a specific core part of the head, rather than encompassing the entire thing. You can easily build off that core mass, but if it's an all-encompassing thing, it can be quite tricky to carve it down properly.

I'd like you to do another six pages of insect drawings, keeping everything I've said here in mind. I don't want you to go into any detail/texture - focus entirely on construction.

One last thing - I notice that you have a habit of not drawing through your ellipses. Draw through each and every one you do for any of my lessons, without exception.

Uncomfortable in the post "Lesson 4: Drawing Insects and Arachnids (new 40min intro video, 3 new demos)"

2017-02-19 19:52

So I can see some good things here, but they're diamonds in the rough and are getting obscured and buried by other things. One of the major good points in this set is that I can see you very purposefully trying to hold true to the idea of form, especially when it comes to the individual components you're using for construction. For instance, in isolation the thorax, the abdomen, etc. feel convincingly three dimensional.

There are two major components that get in the way however. The first and foremost is detail - I think you need to focus much more on the construction side of things, and simply leave detail, texture, etc. alone for the time being. It's very easy to shift our focus more towards detail, and perhaps not invest as much of that thought and planning towards the earlier, considerably more important phases.

The second point is stressing observation - I see a few key signs that you may not be spending as much of your time observing and studying your reference as you need to be. As a result, some of your drawings end up being done a little bit more from memory, from what you're convinced something looks like, rather than being directly from your reference. Now this can and will happen even after just a few seconds of looking away from the photograph. Our brains go to town on the information we've just gleaned, trying to organize and simplify it all, and throwing away a great deal of important stuff.

We do inherently get better at controlling this over time, and recording the important stuff and throwing away the superfluous, but when we start out we're just not built for it. In order to work towards that goal, we need to force ourselves to study and observe as much as possible, and to draw only for a second or two before looking back at our reference. By constantly forcing ourselves to refresh our memory and not rely on information that's been 'processed' too much, we keep looking back. The biggest rule I try to encourage people to keep in mind is this: always look more, draw less.

Now this whole observation thing plays a biiiig role in detail and texture, but it also places an important role in construction, because it governs the proportions we use (keeping an eye on how the different components relate to one another in size), and the different forms that we believe are relevant and present.

Keeping what I've said here in mind, I'd like you to do another six pages of insect drawings. Take them only so far as the end of the construction phase - no texture, no detail, etc. I don't want to see any patterning on wings, shells, etc. Focus entirely on form.

Secondly, pay special attention to how those forms should be connecting to one another, and how they relate to one another in space. Spend lots of time studying and observing these relationships, instead of jumping in immediately and drawing them as they come to you.

Thirdly, when you draw a form, make sure that you yourself buy into the illusion of its solidity. You need to be convinced that what you've drawn is not a 2D shape on a flat page, but rather a glimpse at something solid and firm.

Lastly, as always, push yourself to draw larger.

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

2017-02-19 19:30

Your arrows are looking good. Your organic forms with contour ellipses are solid. Your dissections show a lot of careful observation and attention to detail. Your form intersections are coming along well, and while the intersections themselves are a little hit-and-miss, that's not the primary focus of the exercise. What I am mainly looking for here is the ability to construct these forms together in a way that feels consistent and cohesive across the whole set, and you're doing a pretty decent job of that.

Your organic intersections are okay, and they definitely improve considerably by the second page. They do however suffer a bit from an issue that rears its head back in the organic forms with contour curves exercise near the beginning.

The issue is that your contour lines don't always convincingly wrap around the forms. They do sometimes, but I see a lot of cases where they fall a little short, which tells me that we need to work a little more in this area. It's not by any means that you don't grasp the concept, but rather that you need to be nudged into focusing more when doing them.

There's two ways I want you to change how you approach the organic forms with contour curves exercise:

1. Include your central minor axis lines - you seem to have consistently skipped over this step once moving on from the contour ellipses, but they're still very much relevant here. The contour curves are really just visible portions of larger ellipses, so they still align in much the same way to the minor axis. Keeping them aligned correctly will put you in a better position to achieve the illusion of your contour lines wrapping around.

2. Apply the 'overshooting' method described in these notes.

I'd like you to do two more pages of organic forms with contour curves. I have no doubts that you'll be able to do better, and that it's more of an issue of focus, as you have several examples of where you've been able to do it correctly.

Uncomfortable in the post "Lesson 6: Drawing Everyday Objects (new 30min intro video, 3 new demos)"

2017-02-19 19:20

These are veeery well done. You've applied the concepts covered in the lesson with great focus and patience. I don't see any points where you jump too far ahead - you're meticulous and gradually work through every step of plotting and construction and achieve results that convey a strong sense of solidity without any distraction from superfluous detail or decoration.

I really have nothing negative to say - you've hit this one out of the park. Consider this lesson as complete, and feel free to move onto the next one.

Uncomfortable in the post "250 Box Challenge"

2017-02-19 19:18

Nice work! I definitely see some improvement in your construction and overall confidence over the course of this set. I do however notice quite a few mistakes that you did not seem to catch in your corrections.

Early on, I noticed you trying to extend your lines all the way back to their vanishing points (where those VPs were really close), which is actually similar to an approach to correcting/identifying mistakes that I've recently been recommending to students. The difference however is that the methodology I'm about to describe is more about understanding how those lines relate to one another as they move further back, rather than having to explicitly take them all the way back to the VP.

Here's the approach:

Take your different coloured pen and try extending the lines of a box towards their implied vanishing points. Keep in mind that each box consists of three sets of four parallel lines, each set having its own vanishing point to which all four lines should be converging at roughly the same speed.

By extending those lines - maybe somewhere around twice their original length - certain cases where two lines in a set start converging more quickly than the other two become much easier to spot. This is a common issue, and having two lines converge more quickly shows us that all four of those lines are not converging towards the same vanishing point as they should be.

I recommend doing this for the last two pages of your work, just for the sake of wrapping your head around how it works, and identifying mistakes you previously missed. One that stands out to me is 249, but there's quite a few. These kinds of mistakes are totally normal of course - it's just important that you get used to picking them out, and extending the lines back in this way will help train your eyes.

Anyway, I'll go ahead and mark this challenge as complete. As for your other question, the 250 cylinder challenge can be completed at any point between now and just before the beginning of lesson 6.

Uncomfortable in the post "250 Box Challenge"

2017-02-19 19:10

Nice work completing the challenge! I noticed that in a few cases you applied hatching to one of the viewer-facing faces of some of your boxes. This is a great way to help give a visual cue as to which part of the form is oriented towards us (since drawing through our boxes can make this a little confusing), so good on your for that. That said, you applied your hatching particularly sloppily - those lines should be stretching all the way across the plane from edge to edge, rather than floating arbitrarily in the middle. Any action you choose to undertake should be executed with your full focus and attention. Nothing should be half-assed.

Additionally, I'm not seeing a whole lot of corrections, just a few here and there. I'm not sure if this is because you didn't go through them yet as directed, or if you couldn't identify those mistakes. If it's the latter, here's a method that can help you better identify where things are going wrong:

Take your different coloured pen and try extending the lines of a box towards their implied vanishing points. Keep in mind that each box consists of three sets of four parallel lines, each set having its own vanishing point to which all four lines should be converging at roughly the same speed.

By extending those lines - maybe somewhere around twice their original length - certain cases where two lines in a set start converging more quickly than the other two become much easier to spot. This is a common issue, and having two lines converge more quickly shows us that all four of those lines are not converging towards the same vanishing point as they should be.

Yes, everything mentioned in this critique demands more time and effort, but ultimately that's the way things are. That said, it's about using your time as efficiently as possible - properly reflecting over your work and identifying where things went wrong is a great way to make the very act of drawing a bunch of boxes several times more effective.

Anyway, I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete. In the future, you may also want to look into playing with line weight as discussed in the challenge page notes, as it will help kick your boxes up to the next level.

Uncomfortable in the post "250 Cylinder Challenge"

2017-02-19 19:05

Your cylinders are looking good. The advanced boxes are also pretty solid. The boxes with ellipses inside of them are looking a little loose though (that is, the ellipses themselves are), you're definitely going through those ellipses too much. Your pen gradually dying a slow and painful death is probably also a factor.

In general you're doing well, though I do recommend practicing constructing cylinders inside of boxes as demonstrated in the 'how to draw cylinders' video. The video about drawing perfect circles in 3D space, and fitting ellipses into planes correctly is also something that will come in handy in that capacity. The reason that practicing starting your cylinders from boxes is important is because this tends to make aligning our cylinders to specific angles considerably easier.

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

Uncomfortable in the post "Lesson 4: Drawing Insects and Arachnids (new 40min intro video, 3 new demos)"

2017-02-18 03:43

Page size isn't really important to me (beyond having you draw large enough for your brain to work through the spatial problems). Additionally, prescribing a particular number of pages to a student is largely irrelevant. What does matter though is the student's response to it. If a student chooses their own page size but considers that, "oh my paper's bigger so I'll just do fewer pages," it kind of shows a certain mindset in regards to the amount of work they are willing to do. It speaks more to how they perceive the assigned task, and where they're willing to draw their lines. This informs my response, and where I feel it necessary to encourage a student to break down the barriers of what they consider to be "enough" work.

Long story short, the actual amount of work being done is irrelevant, but being willing to fit my stated requirements (regardless of how you interpret what is not stipulated) is what I'm after.

To be honest, I think you'd benefit most from starting over on this lesson's work, so you can get the most practice possible with the points that I raised. As the homework section states, two pages focused purely on construction (don't worry about detail or texture), then eight pages of full drawings. You don't HAVE to venture into detail and texture into these last eight, you can choose to leave some or all of them at the same level of focusing on construction, but I leave that up to you. The first two pages must be construction only, however.

Uncomfortable in the post "Lesson 4: Drawing Insects and Arachnids (new 40min intro video, 3 new demos)"

2017-02-17 20:54

So my first concern is that the lesson asks for 2 pages of pure constructions, 8 pages of full drawings. So to start with, what you've submitted here falls quite a bit short of the requirements of this lesson. I will be asking you to submit it again with the missing pages.

There are some pieces of advice I have to offer however as you complete the remaining pages.

• You're drawing much too small. As we learn about construction and thinking about how different forms relate to one another, our brains require plenty of space to think through these spatial problems. By working small, our drawings end up cramped and clumsy, and our spatial awareness tends to be stunted.

• A lot of what I'm seeing is the drawing of 2D shapes. In many ways you're applying some degree of construction well, but not in a three dimensional sense. Your drawings tend to come out flat. As construction is a matter of building up complexity in successive passes, I want you to keep one rule in mind - at the end of each pass, you should be fully convinced in the solidity, the volume, and the three dimensionality of every form you've drawn thus far. If you yourself are not convinced, then you must fix this before continuing onto the next pass of adding complexity - be it by adding contour lines, or using whatever other trick you've learned in previous lessons. It's very easy to feel that, "well this isn't solid now, but once I've added more detail, more information, more forms it will become more solid." This is entirely untrue, however. Solidity is something that starts at the very base level, and it cannot be introduced in later steps - it can only be lost. That illusion of solidity and form is something that you need to be convinced of as you draw - because when you buy into the lie, you will make little subconscious decisions that help further convince your viewers. For example, if you believe you're drawing a sphere (not a circle), and then you draw a line along the surface of that sphere, your stroke will curve naturally, wrapping around it, because your grasp of the reality within your drawing will demand it. If you are not convinced, however, your line will cut straight across (or at least, won't wrap around convincingly).

• Another point I want to raise is completely related to the previous one - when you have added a form to your construction, its solidity implies a few things. If it's solid, it cannot be changed or adjusted as easily as drawing a new line with no further consideration. If you look at the spider in the top right of this page, you'll see how you simply drew new lines for the abdomen, disregarding what was previously there. This change paid no respect to the solidity, the resiliency, the unyielding nature of that form (admittedly it was flat and unsolid, so of course we both regard it as something flimsy and easily adjusted, but let's pretend that it was solid). If a form is solid, your brain forces you to treat it as though it is real. So how do we adjust a solid organic form? We must cut and carve it - an action inherently different from just willing the form to change. To cut something means to actually be aware of the form that is being removed. If you have a sphere, and want to shear off a portion, you are forced to deal with both the part that remains, and the piece that has been cut off. Even moreso, you could imagine an entire cube intersecting and being subtracted from that sphere. The point is, to carve something solid, you're actually thinking about what actions need to be undertaken, what new 'virtual' forms need to be considered in order to make the cuts you want.

• Lastly, you're not observing your reference enough. You have a tendency to draw from memory. While some may consider this to mean not using reference at all, we very easily slip back to relying more on our memory even when the reference is right in front of us. The fact of the matter is that as soon as you look away, your brain will try to oversimplify and toss out the majority of the information you gleaned from looking at the object. If you allow it, you will end up drawing more from your simplified, largely useless memory of the thing, rather than from the object itself. While we learn to rewire how our brain processes information by simply doing a LOT of observational drawing, we can reduce this effect by forcing ourselves not to draw for more than a second or two before looking back at our reference. Always remember - draw LESS, and look MORE.

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."

2017-02-17 19:20

You're most welcome.

Uncomfortable in the post "250 Box Challenge"

2017-02-16 22:24

Pretty nice work. I'm also pleased to see that you were playing with extending your lines back towards their implied vanishing points - this is a great way to identify areas where your lines aren't behaviour correctly (especially where any given 4 lines that should be going off towards the same vanishing point are converging in different directions). A good example of this is 8, though there are plenty of others.

I did want to mention though that once you use this approach to identify where things are going wrong (and do this more, I noticed that you did this less frequently after your first page), actually take the time to then correct your mistakes with yet another colour if you have one.

Anyway, keep up the good work. There's still plenty of room for improvement, but you're moving in the right direction. I'll go ahead and mark this challenge as complete. Feel free to move onto lesson 2 - I know you already did some of the work for that lesson, but consider whether or not there are parts you feel you can now do better, as my critiques are only useful if they're on the best you have to offer.