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."

2017-02-16 18:21

To which vertical/horizontal distinction are you referring?

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

2017-02-16 13:41

No, because I don't have any timeline for that unfortunately.

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

2017-02-15 21:25

These are certainly moving in the right direction. Now once you're able to combine your strong observational skills with these kinds of constructions, you should find the solidity and believability of your drawings increase.

One minor thing to point out - in your first page, I noticed that when you drew the muzzles of the animals, you weren't really defining how the box-like muzzle form connects to the cranial sphere. Make sure you're always aware of how things connect as you did with the bears (though the bears were done a little more from memory, and could have used more strict observation).

Keep up the good work and feel free to move onto the next lesson.

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

2017-02-15 02:26

These are definitely looking much better. There is still plenty of room for improvement as one might expect, but I think you're heading in the right direction and should be good to move onto the next lesson. There you'll find more opportunities to push your grasp of construction, and to wrap your head around how different 3D forms interact and intersect with one another.

Uncomfortable in the post "250 Box Challenge"

2017-02-15 02:01

Decent work. I do have a few suggestions though:

• Some of your lines have a bit of a tendency to arc. Make sure you're applying the ghosting method, and if you find this arcing continues, try the solution described here

• Keep your hatching lines straight and parallel. Curving or wavy lines tend to look kind of sloppy.

• For your corrections, don't just circle and identify issues - specifically the kinds of mistakes you seemed to focus on really aren't that important. What you want to look at is the behaviour of your lines, and where those behaviours are incorrect.

Here's an approach you can use when marking in corrections:

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.

It would be worth while to take a page of two of your boxes and try to apply this method.

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

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

2017-02-15 01:56

Looking good! I have a few recommendations as you continue to move forwards, but in general you're doing very well at both your box constructions and your cylinders.

For your boxes: When you've reached the corrections phase, 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.

For your cylinders: Just be sure to also practice constructing those cylinders inside of boxes (using the box to establish a minor axis, and getting used to constructing ellipses inside of planes, as demonstrated in this video. This becomes especially important when you need to get a cylinder to align to other objects in the scene, as aligning your box then building your cylinder within it is generally much easier than trying to construct a cylinder from scratch and have it fit your requirements.

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

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

2017-02-14 00:55

Very nice work! Your organic forms with contour lines feel solid and convey the illusion of volume quite nicely. Your dissections are also quite well executed, with a lot of thought put towards how you organized your areas of visual interest, and your rest areas. The tree bark one did get a little haphazard in places though, so keep an eye on that. The others were much more intentional, for lack of a better word.

Your form intersections are generally well done too, but there's one point that stood out to me. Your foreshortening is a liiittle bit extreme. You handle it decently with the scope of the intersections you drew, but the problem with perspective that dramatic is that it tends to throw the consistency of scale off when you start expanding into larger networks of forms in the same scene.

For this reason, had you filled an entire page with forms like this (which was actually what was instructed), things would have started to go a little wonky. One good rule of thumb is that as perspective gets more dramatic, the scale of the objects you're drawing inherently increases. Think about how when you hold a box-like object in your hand, you can't tell the difference between the sizes of each end. When you look at the top of a building from the ground however, it looks tiny in relation to the base.

So, when you've got a lot of forms put together, you'll generally want to keep your foreshortening shallow to help keep things consistent. If everything is super dramatic, our ability to discern scale falls apart.

Lastly, great work with the organic intersections. You've conveyed the interactions between those forms quite convincingly.

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"

2017-02-14 00:21

Experimentation is definitely always worth doing. That said, I think trying to cram 125 boxes into each day may have been pushing yourself a little too hard. It's not necessarily super rushed, but I definitely feel that you may have benefitted from taking more time on each box.

Here are a few tips:

• Don't scribble out or cross out your boxes. It's a waste of a perfect opportunity to see what went wrong.

• When doing your corrections, don't just circle a line that you think is incorrect - draw in the correct line. You did this sometimes, but I see a lot more cases where you've merely circled things.

• Try to avoid drawing your boxes too small - this kind of construction is very much a spatial problem, and as we just start to develop these skills, our brains need a lot of physical space with which to think through spatial problems.

• Filling in one of the planes that face the viewer (one of the near planes) with some tight hatching is a great way to provide a sort of visual cue as to which side is which, since drawing through our boxes can make that a little confusing.

• You mentioned that you were constructing most of your boxes differently from how I instructed in the video. When you say that you then went onto work strictly front to back, I hope that means that you were then applying the Y method that I mention there. This method is specifically much better for constructing arbitrarily rotated boxes because it gets you in the habit of thinking about all three dimensions together, instead of building your box in one dimension, then another, then another. This latter approach leads to more inconsistencies and mistakes.

Additionally, here's another approach that you use to help identify some of the less obvious mistakes. When you've reached the corrections phase, 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.

Your work overall has improved over the set (especially with your line quality), though there's plenty of room to grow and I think you'll benefit considerably from going back over your work and applying the approach I described above, in regards to extending your lines to find mistakes.

Either way, I'll go ahead and mark this challenge as complete. Keep at it - you're on the right track, but you've got to keep pushing.

Uncomfortable in the post "250 Cylinder Challenge"

2017-02-14 00:11

Your use of the minor axes, and your general construction is coming along great. What definitely needs work however are your ellipses. Often times you aren't drawing through them, and in general you're being quite stiff and stressing precision over the flow and evenness of the shape. You need to be applying the ghosting method so that you can invest all of your time in the preparation phase, leaving you to execute the marks with much more confidence.

Looking at your ellipses, you'll notice that they're actually being distorted away from being elliptical, and more towards being somewhat capsule-shaped. This in turn causes the cylinders to look like they've been squashed.

Anyway, I'll go ahead and mark this challenge as complete. Be sure to continue working on those ellipses.

Uncomfortable in the post "250 Box Challenge"

2017-02-14 00:08

Don't worry about the order - I usually don't pay attention to the changes from box to box, but rather compare the different pages to identify trends. Your work here is fairly well done. I'm especially pleased with the fact that your ghosted lines are looking considerably straighter and somewhat more confident - you don't seem to be hesitating much anymore, resulting in much smoother strokes.

Your box constructions are generally well done too, though I want to recommend an additional approach for catching more subtle, less noticeable mistakes. When you've reached the corrections phase, 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.

It's a good idea to try applying this approach to some of your pages - the last two would be a good choice, since they're your most recent attempts.

The only other thing I wanted to mention is that as you continue to move forwards, toying around with the application of line weight is a good way to bump your boxes up to the next level. This is another one of those things you do after having constructed a box - similarly to the super imposed lines exercise from lesson 1.

Anyway, I'll go ahead and mark this challenge as complete. Keep up the good work and feel free to move onto lesson 2 once you feel you're ready.

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

2017-02-13 23:56

There's some good and some less good here, but overall you are moving in the right direction. I see a lot of solid attempts at incorporating a lot of the stuff from the lesson into your work. Ultimately some of the areas that cause the most problems are really more at the base level (drawing solid, correct boxes and cylinders). It's for that reason that in the intro video, I mention that you should have gone through the 250 box and 250 cylinder challenges. I notice that you don't seem to have submitted anything for the latter. Definitely worth spending some time on.

There's a handful of drawings that I'm particularly fond of from this set. For example, the lighter, and the box thing on the left here. I'm also rather fond of the proportional studies you did on this page.

When it comes to ellipses, you're definitely struggling - but more specifically, you're struggling with two things. Fitting ellipses into planes, and establishing ellipses that represent circles in 3D space. Both of these points are explained in this video, and then elaborated upon in this video. The latter is more related to the next lesson, but the former is presented as part of the 250 cylinder challenge as well.

Anyway, my recommendation to you is that you take some time to practice more boxes (this 'advanced' box exercise may be up your alley), then doing the 250 cylinder challenge.

I'll be marking this lesson as complete, so once you're done what I recommended above, you may move onto lesson 7.

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

2017-02-13 23:44

Fantastic work. Really solid constructions, great use of line weight, and the little touches of detail here and there really make your house flies pop. I'm also pleased to see that you were playing around with different ways of tackling certain problems (like creating a sort of grid-texture over your housefly eyes) and ultimately reflecting upon where those experiments worked out and where they didn't.

My only recommendation for now is this - take a look at the drawings on this page. Notice how you've kind of drawn your initial construction more faintly, then gone over it with a more precise, careful, darker line? Try to avoid this in the future. Your drawings are more successful when your initial construction is more confident, and it's difficult to achieve that kind of confidence when you're worrying about drawing faintly, or when you're trying to match lines that already exist.

When it comes to adding line weight, it's really just about reinforcing lines that already exist. You've done this quite well with your scorpion and your house flies, so stay on that path.

Aaaaand I just realized I actually already mentioned that in your lesson 2 critique. Just keep following what you're doing with the house flies, those were definitely the more successful of the lot.

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

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

2017-02-12 21:59

One major concern I have is that the majority of your drawings are less of isolated objects and more of larger things that have been cropped down. The nature of cropping is that it makes us see what we're drawing more in terms of how it exists in the two dimensional photo we're referencing than as a representation of three dimensional forms. Additionally, by not focusing on a singular object, your drawings end up becoming scattered, and it seems to me that you're not able to put enough brainpower towards establishing any one thing.

Another concern I have is that when you have many layers of objects - leaves for instance - you only draw each object where it is visible. This again comes back to perceiving the two dimensional projection present in your photo reference, not the objects it has captured. Similarly to how I stress the importance of drawing through forms in the 250 box challenge, you should be doing the same thing here. By drawing each leaf in its entirety, you grasp how it sits and turns in space.

Don't make the mistake of trying to create a pretty drawing - these are not pretty things to post on your fridge, they're merely drills and exercises. The value in them is not what comes at the end, but what you learn in the doing of it. By avoiding drawing certain lines in favour of a good end result, you don't end up learning as much as you could have.

Now, this particular page from your homework is a much better example of what you should be aiming for. Drawing through your forms, considering how they all connect to one another, and so on. The little leaves you've drawn there are still rather sloppy in that they're tentative, hesitant, and don't really clarify how they connect to the stems - but in general it's much better, as you're properly exploring how those stems and the flower pot all fit togehter in 3D space.

I'd like you to do another 4 pages of plant drawings, keeping what I've said here in mind.

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

2017-02-12 00:35

You're demonstrating a decent grasp of the constructional method through many of these pages. There are some definite issues in some places - the most consistent of which that I can see is the fact that you're not drawing through your ellipses. Keep in mind that you should be doing this for each and every ellipse you draw.

Additionally, your linework still tends to be quite stiff - you're afraid of making mistakes, so you hesitate somewhat when making those marks. I don't actually see much wobbling, which is good, but there still is a certain degree of stiffness to most of your marks.

Overall, this page was quite solid (aside from the ellipses).

This page however shows some leaves that are not constructed too well, as you jump into a much too complex form too early. When faced with a complex leaf like that, try to break its various sections into individual components, each with their own directional center line (around which you can build the rest of that section, and then merge them all together.

Anyway, I'm going to mark this lesson as complete. You've got some room for improvement, but I feel you'd be better off moving onto the next lesson.

Uncomfortable in the post "250 Box Challenge"

2017-02-12 00:08

Pretty nice work! Your constructions are coming along well, and your use of line weight does a good job of establishing cohesion across the form. I do feel that there's a lot of potential corrections that you missed however - one tip for identifying areas where things may be a little off is to extend the lines of your boxes back towards their implied vanishing points. Extending them to be about twice the length of their original line is usually more than enough to give you a sense of how those lines are behaving.

Remember that each box consists of three sets of four parallel lines, with each set having one vanishing point (towards which all four within the set converge). This means that you should see that as you extend those lines back, they all head towards the same point at roughly the same rate. What you will find instead however is many cases where two lines converge more quickly together, while others are more gradual. This implies that the four lines of a given set converge at several different points, rather than a single vanishing point - which is a clear sign that something's wrong.

Anyway, keep up the good work. I'll go ahead and mark this challenge as complete. I do encourage you to go back and double check your work again, but when you feel ready, go ahead and move onto lesson 2.

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

2017-02-11 23:23

You're certainly doing better than last time. Your sense of construction has improved, and you're more careful with how you plan things out. There are a few very important areas where you need work however.

First and foremost, draw bigger. You're giving yourself VERY little room to work with, and this is causing you to choke and hesitate. When it comes to these spatial construction problems, our brains need lots of room to think through it all, especially as beginners.

Secondly, when drawing cylinders, follow the methodology described on the 250 cylinder challenge page. That means starting off with a minor axis in order to have something to align your ellipses against.

Thirdly, your texture on these flowers isn't good. It's not really texture, it's essentially your brain halting before it has the chance to really lean in and study those surfaces. You're stopping with your brain telling you that you've understood enough about those and can go on to draw them from memory. Remember not to draw from memory. In general, your texturing shows that you're not paying enough attention to your reference images. This example in particular though applies a lot of hatching techniques - in the future, when you find yourself thinking to apply hatching to a drawing, stop. Hatching is actually a short-hand people tend to use instead of really paying attention. It represents a mindset of "I'd like to fill this area in, but I don't want to take the time to look closer to see what's actually going on in there". It's common, but it's really a mistake. There are very few textures that actually correspond to hatching, so almost every time you try to use it, it's the wrong choice.

Lastly, here and there you fail to really apply construction as you should be. The last page I linked in regards to texture is an example of this, while this one is an even bigger one. If you're faced with a situation where you have many forms together, and some forms are blocked by others, you should STILL be drawing them fully. That means drawing each petal completely, in order to understand how it sits in space. It's the same idea as what was conveyed in the 250 box challenge, in regards to drawing through your forms.

Anyway, I am going to mark this lesson as complete, though you do have plenty of room for improvement. I feel like you'll be able to get your head around these points more easily by moving ahead to the next lesson, rather than being held back here.

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

2017-02-11 23:15

Think of it as sharing the arachnophobia I've developed after critiquing all of these goddamn insects.

You're doing a pretty solid job with your constructions. Lots of clear volumes, you're clearly aware of how everything connects together, and you're applying the methodology of building things up from simple to complex quite well.

I especially liked the scorpion on the top left of this page. You can absolutely see how it sits in space, with its backside being physically further from the viewer, and the tail coming back around. The other one's okay too, but I feel the heavy stippling on its torso and the way you've handled the deep shadows along its side serves to flatten it out a bit.

You've also got some interesting character to some of these. The mantis on the bottom right looks like he's got something to hide.

I'd say the only thing I'd like to see as you move forward is for you to lighten up on your line weights a little. Variance is great, but I think there should be an upper limit on how thick you're willing to let your lines get (not including areas where those lines bleed into larger shadow shapes). Really thick lines start to feel more graphic and cartoony, and can also flatten things out.

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

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

2017-02-11 01:09

Very nice work! I can see clear examples of you absorbing many of the principles of construction that I tried to convey in the lesson, and as a result your constructions generally feel fairly solid. I have only one recommendation - I can see that with your earlier phases of construction, you tend to draw more faintly, being a little more timid with those marks so as to keep them hidden.

This is something I'd like you to try and avoid. The most successful drawings are confident, and timidity really robs the sense of energy and solidity from constructions. Yours didn't suffer too much from that here, but as a rule, it's not a great habit to get into. Don't think of these drawings as works of art that you'd like to preserve and perfect - think of them as exercises and drills. They're meant to be practice and nothing more - you could burn them after completing them and you would not have lost a thing of value, since all the value is in the process.

Keep that in mind as you continue to move forwards. 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 (new 40min intro video, 3 new demos)"

2017-02-11 00:54

You're doing well as far as constructing individual volumes that feel three dimensional. That said, I think there's definitely room for improvement. One thing that stands out to me is that your drawings tend to be quite small. It's difficult to judge since the images are cropped, but the scale implied by your handwriting definitely lines up with a lot of the common issues that come up with people draw too small.

The biggest problem with drawing small is that it really limits the amount of space that we have to think through the spatial problems we're dealing with. Of course, construction is nothing if not problem that challenges you to think about how all the different forms you're drawing relate to one another in space. Giving yourself much more room to work and think will help in this regard.

Another issue I'm seeing is that there are some signs that you need to work on developing your observational skills a little more. I'm seeing a great deal of (unintentionally) drawing from memory. This is a common problem that occurs when we look away from our reference too long. The large amount of information that we see initially is thrown out very quickly by our brains in an attempt to simplify and understand it.

It's important to get into the habit of drawing for no longer than a second or two before looking back at your reference image and refreshing your understanding of what you're looking at. We naturally come into this with a tendency to fill in gaps with our imagination (without realizing it), so that's something we want to force ourselves to avoid by continuously looking back.

As a rule of thumb, always push yourself to draw less, and look more.

I'd like you to try another four pages of insect drawings, keeping in mind what I've mentioned above. Also, I have one question... why does your fly have eyelids?

Uncomfortable in the post "250 Box Challenge"

2017-02-09 21:40

Great work! Your linework is looking quite confident and your box constructions are definitely feeling solid. Though I do see that you're struggling here and there when applying line weight (keeping the lines together can definitely be tricky) but you're approaching it correctly. It'll just take time and practice for that to come together. Overall though, your line weights go a long way to emphasize the cohesion of all your lines, making your boxes feel like solid forms, rather than a collection of individual lines.

Lastly, great work with most of your corrections. I'm glad to see that you're extending your lines back towards the implied vanishing point, to help identify where things may be off.

Keep up the fantastic work, and consider this challenge complete.

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

2017-02-08 21:47

Nice work! I especially liked your dissections - you paid a lot of careful attention to each mark you were putting down, demonstrated solid observational skills and did a good job of organizing those details so as to avoid overly distracting and noisy results.

Your organic forms with contour lines are also generally well done. Don't forget the importance of the minor axis line though when you practice this exercise. I noticed that you only drew it for the first organic form with contour ellipses, but it's very important across the board. This minor axis line helps you to know how to align your contour ellipse/curve. The minor axis should be cutting through each ellipse, splitting it into two equal, symmetrical halves.

Your form intersections were pretty solid - the super thick lines were a bit much. I get that you were trying to emphasize the intersections themselves, but it wasn't really necessary. Chunky lines like that have a tendency to flatten things out. I can tell that before those things were looking pretty solid.

Your organic intersections aren't that great. Fundamentally you are demonstrating an understanding of how those forms relate to one another, but the relatively low viewing angle was just a poor choice, I guess. Well, you win some, you lose some. In the future, try not to build one 'main' form and then pile everything else on top of it. Try to consider each form as being of equal weight and value, and try to run your brain through the simulation of first dropping one form, considering how it would sit on a ground plane, then dropping another similar form on top of that. Then another, and another, all forming a pile of similarly-sized forms. It's really an exercise on figuring out how those forms would interact with one another, clinging to the forms underneath that support their weight, and sagging where they fail to be held up.

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

Uncomfortable in the post "250 Box Challenge"

2017-02-08 21:40

Not bad! Your boxes are coming along pretty well. As for your misreading, it's not a big deal - end of the page, end of the set, what's important is that you're not correcting them immediately after drawing each box. We really want to be separating the process of correcting from the process of drawing, so you don't develop the habit of correcting mistakes by reflex, since this usually results in a lot of extra ink drawing the viewer's eye to your mistakes.

One recommendation I have is that when you do your corrections, one great way to identify mistakes you may not have realized were present is to extend the lines of your boxes back towards their implied vanishing point. Even doubling the length of each line can give you a considerably better sense of how those lines behave relative to one another.

Keeping in mind that each box consists of three sets of four parallel lines (each set sharing a vanishing point), extending the lines will show us situations where within one set, two lines start converging more quickly than the other two. This tells us that they aren't converging at roughly the same vanishing point, so something's off.

That's definitely worth doing for a page or two that you've already done, just to get used to the approach and to help identify issues you may have missed.

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

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

2017-02-08 21:17

These are looking pretty nice. For the most part your linework is looking quite confident, and your constructions feel more solid. There's certainly room to improve, and some of the drawings feel a little more energy and less forethought and planning (like this one), but things are coming along decently.

As far as the potted plants go, I quite like this one, though those contour ellipses through most of the trunk don't actually contribute anything. They're not aligned to the minor axis, their degrees don't reflect the orientation of those circular cross-sections in 3D space, and in general they're just wasteful and rushed. The rest looks nice enough despite them. For the pot itself, just two things to keep in mind - the base should have a wider degree (as discussed in the 250 cylinder challenge, and the rim at the top of the pot should have some thickness to it. Right now it reads as being paper-thin, since you didn't draw an ellipse inset from the outer one.

Anyway, keep up the good work. Just slow down a little when it comes to thinking and planning. A couple well planned contour lines will far outperform a dozen sloppy ones, so instead of drawing quite so many, hold back and think about what purpose they serve, and how best they will achieve that.

I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete. You'll find that the next lesson will give you ample opportunity to rectify those issues.

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."

2017-02-08 17:49

It certainly does apply in that case. It's difficult, but it's possible. It all comes down to the nature of the shoulder being a ball joint. All that said, it doesn't matter right now because you should be rotating your page to find the most comfortable angle of approach as the second step of your ghosting process.

Uncomfortable in the post "250 Box Challenge"

2017-02-08 02:51

Well done! Your line quality and general execution is very confident, which helps convey the illusion of solidity and cohesion. I did however notice that there are certain spatial problems in many of your boxes. Some of which you catch, others you seem to miss. Your linework still, however, manages to establish these forms as being solid and believable, even if they don't always read as being boxes specifically.

When it comes to identifying these particular kinds of problems, it can help considerably to take your red pen during the correction phase and extend your lines back towards the implied vanishing point - even if just doubling the length of the original lines. By extending them in this manner, we can see a little more of how they behave as they move off into the distance. Specifically, we can see how they relate to one another - how quickly they converge, or whether they are diverging instead.

Keep in mind that every box consists of three sets of four parallel lines, with each set going off towards the same vanishing point. Often when extending the lines further back, we start to see that two lines in a particular set are converging together faster than the other two - this is a definite sign that something's wrong, since all four of them should be heading at roughly the same rate towards roughly the same point.

I'd say pick a page of your boxes and try applying this methodology to help pick out some more errors. This kind of reflection will help you start to realize what you might be doing wrong, so you can compensate for them later on.

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

Uncomfortable in the post "250 Box Challenge"

2017-02-07 00:39

Having seen your work thus far, I'm going to say redo the lesson. I think you'll benefit considerably from it.

Uncomfortable in the post "250 Box Challenge"

2017-02-06 21:54

I definitely agree that your boxes waver here and there, and that generally you demonstrate a strong upwards trend, with a fair bit of improvement by the end. I'm also pleased to see that you're playing with extending your lines afterwards to identify areas where some lines converge together more quickly than others, signifying something being wrong with your estimation of perspective (for example, #42). This is definitely something worth doing more frequently.

One thing I noticed is that you do have a tendency to draw a lot of boxes with particularly dramatic foreshortening, where the vanishing points are quite close to the box. I do see boxes of both sorts (shallow and dramatic foreshortening) but I feel that you should definitely lean more towards shallow foreshortening, as this is what you'll be dealing with more frequently.

Dramatic foreshortening tends to imply much larger scale (like seeing the top of a building from the ground floor), while shallower foreshortening implies a more relatable, human scale.

You did mention that you were experimenting with line weight - to be honest, I don't really see it. Keep in mind that line weight is something you should be adding after a box has been constructed (similarly to the super imposed lines exercise). I'm not sure if you were perhaps trying to press harder while drawing your initial lines, which is why the different line weights aren't too noticeable. Those initial lines should be drawn with a fairly consistent, confident weight (focusing on drawing straight, smooth lines rather than controlling their weights).

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

Uncomfortable in the post "250 Cylinder Challenge"

2017-02-06 21:09

It's definitely a good start. I do have a few recommendations however as you continue to practice these:

• Don't fill your cylinders with contour lines/hatching as you have done. Your aim should be to draw cylinders that feel fully 3D on their own, and require no reinforcement. Just draw your minor axis, two ellipses, and two lines connecting them.

• Your ellipses definitely have some stiffness to them - always remember that the process of drawing is split into two phases. The first one is about planning, thinking through the problem, and ghosting through the drawing motion in order to build up muscle memory. The second phase is where your brain turns off, and you execute the mark with a confident pace, trusting in your muscle memory. Once you've moved from the first phase to the second, you've basically committed to it - if a mistake's going to be made, nothing you can do now will avoid it. Therefore, there's no point in being hesitant about it, it's like the mistake has already been made.

• When drawing your ellipses in planes, I see a few cases where your ellipse doesn't fill up the entire thing. The ellipse should touch each edge of the given plane once. Also make sure you've watched this video on drawing ellipses that represent perfect circles in 3D space.

I'll go ahead and mark this challenge as complete. Feel free to submit your work for lesson 2.

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

2017-02-06 21:03

Construction-wise, you're doing quite well. You're definitely thinking in 3D space, you're subdividing your enclosing boxes properly, and your results feel three dimensional. The only shortcoming really is what you mentioned - your line quality's not great. There's a lot of hesitation there, and overthinking when the time for thinking's done.

Always keep in mind the fact that the ghosting method is about splitting the process into two distinct parts. The phase where you're thinking and planning things out, and building up your muscle memory, and the phase where you execute the mark with bold confidence, trusting in your muscles (and in your previous preparation) and largely shutting your brain off.

Your lines waver because you're having trouble shitting your brain off. One thing that can potentially help is to take two blank pieces of paper. Fill the first one with lines - these lines have no criteria, no planning, nothing to prepare. Just lines - preferrably straight, but ultimately what matters most is that they need to be smooth and confident.

You can pause and take as much time in between as you like, but when you draw them, don't think. Let your arm pick a trajectory and stick to it.

The second page is similar, but this time, ellipses. You're not fitting those ellipses into any particular configuration, you're just drawing them without thought or planning.

Make sure you draw from the shoulder, locking both your elbow and your wrist. Hopefully this will help you loosen up, and make you more comfortable with the idea of drawing with confidence.

I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete. Once you've practiced loosening up your linework, feel free to move onto the next one. Lesson 7 does allow you to use a ruler (and an ellipse guide if you can get your hands on one), but ultimately this line quality thing is something we'll have to fix up one way or another.

Uncomfortable in the post "250 Cylinder Challenge"

2017-02-06 20:57

You've done reasonably well, especially with the free floating cylinders. The ones in boxes were definitely more challenging, or at least, partially so. What you seemed to have trouble with was drawing ellipses that actually represent perfect circles in 3D space (so a lot of your cylinders ended up being squashed). This video on drawing perfect circles in 3D space should help clarify how to approach that problem.

As for your question, it's generally just something we develop an eye for through practice. Always remember that you're cutting that ellipse into two symmetrical halves - so it's like folding an elliptical piece of paper in half. There's no trick to doing it, aside from doing it wrong a bunch of times.

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

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

2017-02-06 20:54

I usually have late breakfasts, so I was planning on eating it at 1pm yesterday. Then I sat down and thought.. shit. I should make an FAQ. Well it won't take too long, I'll just do that real quick before breakfast so I'm motivated by the promise of food to finish up.

... Didn't eat til 7pm.

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

2017-02-06 20:53

Admittedly, these are better than I expected. You were handling the inorganic stuff pretty well by the end of the last lesson, but I was worried that hard surface objects might pose a very foreign challenge for you.

Now there's definitely plenty of room to grow overall, but one hitch that I noticed was in how you're tackling your cylinder and cylinder-like objects early on. It seems that at some point you went through some of the 250 cylinder material, as you start using your minor axes a little better in drawings like this one, but it's definitely missing in other places. Either way, you'll definitely want to go through the full 250 at some point, preferably before moving onto the next lesson.

Aside from that, I think it's really a matter of continuing to familiarize yourself with constructing boxes and aligning them to one another. You'll find that those base-level exercises will help develop your skills more effectively than just practicing studies until you get it. Not to say studies are in any way bad, but those box constructions are a key point that need some drilling.

Anyway, keep up the good work. Do some boxes, do the cylinders, then feel free to move onto the next lesson. You may find that one a little easier in some ways (in that you're allowed to use a ruler, an ellipse guide if you have one, etc.) but also more difficult in that the scale of the objects tends to make them somewhat more challenging.

Uncomfortable in the post "250 Box Challenge"

2017-02-06 20:19

Your line quality definitely improves here, compared to the end of the last lesson. Your box constructions improve as well, and while I'm pleased to see that you're diligently correcting your boxes, many of your boxes still have some spatial issues (specifically with near/far plane size relationships). They definitely do improve through the set though.

One great way to go about identifying these mistakes is to take the lines of your boxes and extend them back towards their implied vanishing point. By extending these lines to even twice their original size, we can start to see how those lines behave in relation to one another.

Remember that a box consists of three sets of four parallel lines - if, by extending those lines, we start to notice that two lines start converging much more quickly than the other two lines in their set, then it becomes quite clear that they are not going off towards the same VP.

I'll be marking this challenge as complete, but I strongly recommend that you take a page or two (perhaps the second last and the third last pages) and extend the lines of your boxes back in the manner I just described.

Uncomfortable in the post "250 Box Challenge"

2017-02-06 20:09

I'm glad to see your diligence as far as your corrections go. Reflecting upon your mistakes is a great way to continue improving. One approach that can help you in this regard is to try extending your lines back towards their implied vanishing point (which may be way off the page). By extending the lines somewhat, you can see where some of the lines start converging together more quickly than they converge with others. Keep in mind that each box consists of three sets of four parallel lines, one for each vanishing point. If two of the lines in a set start converging together more quickly than the other two, you know there's something wrong.

Additionally, keep working on nailing that use of the ghosting method, and make sure you use it for every mark you draw. Your lines are coming along, but I do see signs of wavering and hesitation. Applying the ghosting method means planning and preparing as necessary beforehand, but also executing the mark with a confident pace, trusting wholly in your muscle memory. This leaves no room for hesitation.

Overall you've definitely improved relative to your last attempt. I'll go ahead and mark the challenge as complete (again). Keep up the good work and feel free to move onto lesson 2.

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."

2017-02-06 00:19

It's actually taken up the coveted second sticky slot, so it'll forever be at the top of the subreddit.

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."

2017-02-05 22:51

If you guys see any common questions that aren't dealt with there, feel free to mention them here. Also, if you'd like to refer to any of these specific answers, clicking the link icon on the right side of a given answer will automatically copy a reddit formatted link to your clipboard (so you need only go to reddit and hit paste).

Uncomfortable in the post "250 Box Challenge"

2017-02-05 22:36

Excellent work! Your linework is looking extremely confident and smooth, which adds to the overall solidity of the boxes. Your corrections are definitely looking on point, though the mistakes are minor enough that most of them wouldn't be noticed at a cursory glance.

Keep up the great work and consider this challenge complete!

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

2017-02-05 22:35

Lovely work! Your use of construction is coming along quite nicely. Over the set, I see some definite improvement, but I'm also pleased with a lot of your experimentation. That celery was quite the challenge you bit off, but you did a pretty decent job of it. For the grapes, you did quite well, though I would probably have recommended actually drawing the different spheres for the grapes, then emphasizing the line weights that you drew there. That is, instead of going from the overall mass right down to the selective linework. While what you did is the way you'd certainly approach it later on, right now the still developing grasp of 3D space resulted in some of the grapes themselves feeling a little flat without the underlying construction to prop them up. All said and done though, this is after a fairly minute inspection. At first glance they look lovely.

Anyway, keep up the great work! Feel free to move onto the next lesson.

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

2017-02-04 20:29

It's a start, but I think you've already moved well beyond that stage with the lesson 2 work you redid. These lesson 3 drawings are building in the right direction, but they have a tendency to be very small and cramped (which generally leads to stiffness and greater challenges in dealing with spatial problems). You're also not being terribly thoughtful when it comes to texture (a fair bit of erratic scribbling), and you're not drawing through your ellipses either.

I'm quite confident that your next attempt will be considerably stronger.

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

2017-02-04 17:52

Go ahead and ghost for the superimposed lines. Ghost for everything, really. The superimposed lines exercise comes first because I have the alternate intent of having you try and wrap your head around a particular challenge before giving you more solid instructions on how to approach it.

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

2017-02-04 17:49

One thing to remember is that your pressure control will develop over time - that's one of the reasons I force my students to use 0.5mm pens, rather than the full array of pens one can buy together. Pressure control develops out of necessity, so even while you may not be able to achieve the nuance we're after just yet, keep pushing yourself to try.

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

2017-02-04 00:20

You're generally doing pretty well, and I think you show considerable improvement over the set. By the end, your leaves flow quite nicely, and your linework has gained quite a bit of confidence, especially in this one. There's only two things I'm not terribly fond of for that drawing. The bigger of the two is the texture on the pot, as it's done rather haphazardly, so those little ridges you've built up don't quite follow along the curvature of the rounded pot, causing it to feel somewhat flatter. This is also in part due to the base, where it doesn't seem that you drew through that ellipse.

The other point is the texture on the leaves themselves. This is more minor, and in some ways I'm actually kind of pleased with the way you tried to imply that veiny detail without getting too visually noisy, but I do have a strong recommendation on how to improve upon it. Those lines are very uniform - equal weight all around. The thing about lines is that they don't actually exist. They're the result of shadows cast by small changes in form along a surface. Having uniform, consistent lines like this ignores that fact - you'll find things coming out better if you try and consider how some sides might have a little more weight (like a heavier cast shadow), and other sides might have less. Additionally, the way you've got those lines coming in and out is good, but I also think your particularly haphazard approach to it gives a sense that you might not entirely understand why they come and go like that. It comes back to the play of light once again - just as shadows can deepen and expand on some areas, causing lines and shapes to fuse together into larger, consistent areas of black, white - or rather, light - can do the same, blowing out lines in some places. After all, if your detail lines are really just shadows, shining a line directly at a shadow will cause it to disappear.

Aside from that, I have just one more point to make - don't let forms stop open-ended. Make sure you cap them off. The bottom of the pot in this image is a good example. If you allow the form to just stop like that, it will flatten the image out. In this case, you would cap it off with an ellipse, even if the actual form doesn't end so early. Same goes for branches and so on.

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

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

2017-02-04 00:03

You've done pretty well. Your arrows flow nicely through space, your organic forms with contour lines establish a solid illusion of form and volume (though don't forget to build those contour curves around minor axes, as though they are merely visible portions of larger ellipses), and your dissections demonstrate a developing grasp of how to approach texture. I see differing approaches across the textures, which is great - experimentation is always good. I'd say that the more successful textures were more deliberate, and had a bolder use of marks. For example, the cabbage leaf was very strong, while the woven string felt a little weak and the bread was perhaps too vague and uncertain. Fineliners are very good at making solid full black marks, so take advantage of that. It's common for people to treat them more like they're drawing with a pencil (being more exploratory with their markmaking, and trying to be delicate and timid). Since the tool is not well suited to this, the results aren't generally that great.

Your form intersections are generally showing a solid grasp of form and space. Your organic intersections are okay, though I feel that your decision to do an underdrawing, and then replace the lines with clean, dark ones was a little misguided. This resulted in a clean, yet not particularly solid or convincing look. The problem with drawing in two phases like this is that you end up losing the confidence and solidity of your initial drawing.

Instead of replacing your linework in this way, you should instead be thinking of your application of line weight as emphasizing lines that already exist. Draw confidently through the entire process (initial organic shapes, contour lines and all), then add line weight to help organize those lines - rather than replacing them with new ones altogether. This will help you retain the underlying confidence and construction, while also allowing yourself to organize your linework, pulling some marks forwards with additional thickness and having others recede.

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

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

2017-02-03 23:54

Not bad, but I did find a few issues to point out:

• Your lines are coming along decently, but one thing I'm noticing is that there's a bit of stiffness to them - this is both your section 1 lines, as well as your ellipses. One good case study for this would be the super imposed lines exercise. Many of yours can be seen as starting cleanly, getting a little wobbly through its length, then meeting up with its template by the end. This shows me that you're guiding your hand a little too much with your brain, rather than trusting in your muscle memory. What we should be seeing is the lines starting cleanly at the same point, and separating slightly from the template as they move towards the other side, resulting in a slightly frayed look. This result would show that your line deviated slightly, but maintained the same smooth flow (since your brain was not involved during the execution of the mark, and instead you were trusting in your muscle memory). Accuracy is ultimately your second priority - producing smooth, confident linework comes above all else, and can be achieved by executing your marks with a pace just quick enough to keep your brain from interfering. This will throw off your accuracy, but as covered in later exercises, the ghosting method is a great way to reel that back for any mark making, be it straight, curved or elliptical.

• I noticed in your ellipses in planes, you didn't draw through the ellipses. Make sure you do this for every ellipse you draw for my lessons. You'll find that you'll benefit more from it as you shift towards drawing at a more confident pace. I'm glad to see that you did draw through them for the other exercises.

• In your rough perspective boxes exercise, I noticed that your use of hatching lines tended to be a bit sloppy. Make sure you draw parallel, consistent lines that stretch all the way across the plane from edge to edge. No scribbling, no half-assing this. Should you choose to put a mark down on the page, it ought to be planned and thought out.

• Also for the rough perspective boxes exercise, make sure you go over your completed work as described here to help identify areas where your estimation of perspective is off.

• Looking at your rotated boxes exercise, I noticed that you skipped step 3, which was drawing boxes at the top/left/right/bottom to help establish the scope of your range of rotation. Make sure you follow the instructions more closely in the future.

• Your linework in the organic perspective boxes exercise is a little shoddy. Always remember to apply the ghosting method to each and every line you draw, ensuring that your lines are straight and smooth, and avoiding gaps between them. Also refrain from correcting mistakes right on the spot, as it's a bad habit to get into. When you correct your mistakes, you end up making them the darkest, most noticeable part of your drawing. It's often better to just leave them alone.

Now the thing about the rotated boxes and organic perspective boxes exercises is that as far as the ability to construct the boxes themselves, my expectation is that most students will struggle at this point. These two exercises were included here to give you the chance to get familiar with the challenge of rotating boxes freely in 3D space, so that when I get into the explanations of how to deal with them later on, you'll have some context for those instructions.

I'm going to mark this lesson as complete, but I'd like you to move onto the 250 box challenge next. This is both to help further develop your grasp of 3D space and your construction of arbitrarily rotated boxes, but also to give you the opportunity to get more work in on your use of the ghosting method.

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

Uncomfortable in the post "250 Box Challenge"

2017-02-02 23:31

Look at 57 as an example. Extending your lines towards the implied vanishing point is a great way to identify mistakes. Ideally, you'd see the lines gradually converging together at the same rate, so that somewhere way off the page, they should come together around roughly the same place. What we're seeing here however is that the two middle lines are converging more quickly, while the other ones are actually diverging.

Once you identify a mistake, draw in lines you feel are more correct.

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

2017-02-02 21:07

Lovely work! Your constructions are solid, and your use of those large black areas in combination with texture really pushes your drawings to the next level. In general I would be a little wary with your tendency to use hatching lines in some way or another when it comes to the actual texturing - keep in mind that there are a lot of textures in the world, and most of them are not hatching based. Take a little more time to study the way in which light plays off those surfaces, and try and identify the textures that are present there. It's good to go in deciding not to use any hatching in order to force yourself to think more about what other ways you could potentially depict that visual information.

As for the brushpen, that's actually what I recommend when anyone asks, so no harm there! It's definitely a great tool to use, and often times a regular fineliner just won't cut it when it comes to covering large areas with black.

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

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

2017-02-02 21:04

Pretty nicely done! Just a couple things I caught worth mentioning:

• For your funnels, you marked out the 0-80+ degree range, but the ellipses themselves are actually pretty consistent for the most part. It is actually a little tricky to get around modifying the degree as you increase the size of the ellipses themselves (since the ellipse will naturally get wider as it gets bigger, so you need to exaggerate that expansion of its width in order to actually change the degree).

• For your rough perspective boxes exercise, just be sure to go over your completed work as described here to help identify areas where your estimation of perspective is off.

As for the rotated boxes exercise, it certainly is a difficult one, but there's no reason for that to stop you from completing it. Ultimately I have no expectation that students will be able to do this exercise (or the organic perspective boxes exercise) particularly well at this point. It's more about forcing you to face the challenge of rotating boxes freely in 3D space, so that when I get into the explanation of how to deal with that, you have the contextual knowledge of having faced it before to allow you to digest the information more easily.

So, I am going to ask you to try that exercise again. Read through the instructions carefully and try to replicate each step to the best of your ability. As it gets difficult, push on through - it's fine if you make mistakes, and it's fine if it doesn't look pretty, but just be sure to get all the way through it.

Submit those to me when you're done, and I'll mark this lesson as complete. Then I'd like you to move onto the 250 box challenge next. Be sure to read through all of the notes on the challenge page, especially the tip about drawing through your forms. This in particular should help you better grasp how each box sits in 3D space.

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

2017-02-02 20:57

Pretty solid work! Your arrows flow nicely, your organic forms with contour lines demonstrate a solid grasp of establishing the illusion of volume and form, your dissection textures are well structured and organized, and convey the complexity of the objects you're depicting without getting too distracting, and your organic intersections demonstrate a good grasp of how these different forms interact with one another.

The form intersections are fairly decent, though I do feel that your actual sketchbook may be giving you a little bit of trouble by limiting the amount of space you have to work with, and in turn hampering your ability to think in 3D space. I often find that perfect-bound sketchbooks like that tend to be harder to work with, with their tendency to want to fold back over, and not sit flat.

On top of that, giving yourself more room to work tends to really help when it comes to thinking through the spatial problems involved, so that is definitely something to give though to. Generally your work on this exercise is pretty decent, but I feel like that may have been holding you back a little.

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

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

2017-02-02 20:53

The first two sections are reasonably well done. Your super imposed lines are fine and your ghosted lines are decent (though not particularly numerous, you didn't really go too far into filling the page). Your planes exercises are a little shoddier, as you've stopped putting as much effort into ghosting through each and every line, resulting in wobblier marks. Keep in mind that this method should be applied to every single mark you draw in order to separate the planning/preparation (identifying the line you want to draw, ghosting through the motion several times to build up muscle memory, etc. which ultimately improves the accuracy of your mark) and the actual execution of the mark (with a smooth, confident pace). By separating these two phases, we reduce our tendency to fall into the trap of drawing too slowly and carefully, having our brains guide our hands as we actually draw the mark, which always results in a wobblier, stiffer stroke.

As far as the boxes go, as you pointed out yourself, they're not particularly well done. That said, this has nothing to do with your technical ability to draw. The boxes are a mixture of two challenges - being able to draw straight and smooth lines that start and end where you want them to (which is part of the technical skillset explored in previous exercises of this lesson), and leaning on an as yet undeveloped sense of 3D space. The latter is something you don't have yet, and you're not really meant to have it. Both the rotated boxes and organic perspective boxes exercises were included here largely to get you to have your first encounter with that particular challenge, so that when I do actually get into explaining how to deal with it, you'll be able to relate it back to your own experiences, and therefore digest the information more easily.

The problem with your boxes is ultimately one that you brought to the table yourself - you're impatient. This isn't entirely uncommon, and it's something I've seen from plenty of students. Here's a few signs of this:

• Instead of applying the ghosting method (as discussed above), you tend to be more loose and sketchy, drawing and then reinforcing marks to compensate for their inadequacy. From here on in, you absolutely must force yourself to stop and think before each and every stroke. That's what the ghosting method is about. That means putting the time in to plan each mark, but also no longer allowing yourself to immediately reinforce a line by reflex. Reflexive drawing is a bad habit, and correcting mistakes will generally simply draw more attention to them. Going back and finding where you went wrong and marking out the correct lines is fine, but it must be a separate process from the drawing itself, and better yet, with a different coloured pen to make the distinction clear.

• You're pretty loose about following my instructions, and the rotated boxes exercise is the best example of this. As I mentioned before, I don't expect you to nail this exercise at all, but I do expect you to demonstrate that you have gone through each and every step as I have outlined them. In your attempts, you do not draw the axes (step 1), you do not draw the boxes at the far extremities to the top/bottom/left/right (step 2), and you don't draw through your boxes. This exercise is very much about wrapping your head around how those boxes sit in 3D space, and how that changes as they rotate - by only drawing the lines that are visible, you are only understanding those boxes as 2D drawings on a page. You must draw each and every line that makes up each and every box, as though you have x-ray vision.

Now, I'd like you to do the boxes section again. Do not deviate an inch from my instructions, and take your time with the execution of each and every line, planning and preparing before drawing with a confident pace driven by your muscle memory.

Once you've completed that - and I'm sure it will be vastly improved, as it is clear to me that you are capable of much better (if you invest the time and focus) - I will mark this lesson as complete and ask you to move onto the 250 box challenge. At that point, be sure to read through all of the notes on that page, especially the tip about drawing through your boxes (which is more or less what I mentioned in regards to your rotated boxes exercise and x-ray vision). This helps us to better grasp how each box sits in 3D space, which will help you move closer to that goal of being able to turn a box freely in your head. I'm mentioning the 250 box challenge thing now, in case I forget later - so for now, just focus on redoing the boxes section of lesson 1.

Oh, and in regards to the rough perspective boxes exercise - be sure to go over your completed work for that exercise as described here.

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

2017-02-02 03:32

I never measured references much. My sense of proportion developed very slowly though. There's no reason to think that you'd somehow be able to achieve proper proportions without measuring and without the opportunity to make loads of mistakes and learn from them. You only feel that way because you watch other people do it - other people who've spent all that time practicing.

Ultimately measuring and checking is what will make your proportions improve faster. It's not that it will immediately make your drawings perfect, but it will speed things up, at least as far as proportion goes. There's other roles that observation plays (like in terms of texture and detail) which will develop separately.

At the end of the day, my lessons teach you how to construct, so while I'll point out when proportions are off, I don't focus on it that much (since in my experience, it's the sort of thing that takes time to develop an eye for). My goal is that you should be able to construct something that feels tangible and solid - even if its proportions are a bit wacky.

As for your last question - no. By doing studies of plants/insects/animals/etc. as you have done here, you're practicing a wide variety of skills together, in a way that each one plays off the next. Practicing these things in isolation should be limited to your warmups (which is exactly what lessons 1-2 do).

If all of your practice is focused on one area, then things will fall out of balance.

Your questions lead me to one of my own: are you in some kind of a rush?