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

2017-01-02 19:57

Technically speaking, sure, but it definitely wasn't the most effective approach.

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

2017-01-02 19:42

You have a box up there on the top which I would assume is sitting in the middle of your overall construction. You've even found the center of that plane, and drawn a line down from there. That's your middle.

From what I can see, you've even drawn a line from the top right corner of your right tire, through the center, but where it intersects with your other tire, you used it as the inner side rather than the outer. Meaning, that tire is too far out.

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

2017-01-02 19:38

Nice work with the lines. The ellipses are also looking quite good, though here and there you tend to get a little more stiff. Keep in mind that the first priority is maintaining a smooth, even shape. We achieve that by drawing our stroke with a confident enough pace to keep our brains from micro-managing and course-correcting us as we draw. Accuracy is certainly important, but it's a (close) second priority - so first focus on ensuring that your ellipses are smooth and even, then apply the ghosting method to improve your accuracy.

As I mentioned though, some of your ellipses are well done. You tend to demonstrate more stiffness in the ellipses in planes (which is totally normal since we tend to get distracted by the awkward shapes the planes give us), and only a touch of stiffness in the tables of planes.

For the boxes, you're doing a pretty good job. Your plotted perspective boxes are fine. Your rough perspective boxes are coming along well, though I want to recommend two things:

• Aligning the tops/bottoms of so many boxes to the horizon is a great way to waste the opportunity to practice your estimation of perspective more. There's really no point, and you're only causing yourself to lose out.

• Go over your completed work as described here to identify where your estimation of perspective is off.

Before I move on, I want to mention that the rotated boxes and organic perspective boxes exercises are both here with the expectation that students will struggle with them. I haven't fully explained the concepts involved in rotating boxes freely in 3D space at this point, so I am by no means expecting to see perfect work. I'm merely giving you the opportunity to get used to struggling and failing a little, while also getting you accustomed to the challenges involved in constructing arbitrarily rotated boxes in 3D space.

With your rotated boxes, there was one issue that I noticed that did contradict some of the notes in the instructions, however. If you look at this, you'll notice that the red lines denote the given vanishing point for the lines you drew, and the green lines denote where the vanishing point for those lines should actually be as per this diagram. You can read more about this concept in these notes.

Your organic perspective boxes are more or less where I'd expect them to be. There's plenty of room for improvement, but we'll deal with that next.

I'm going to mark this lesson as complete - I want you to move onto the 250 box challenge next. Be sure to read through all of the notes on that page, and watch the videos. Focus particularly on the tip about drawing through your forms, as this will help you better grasp how each box sits in 3D space.

Uncomfortable in the post "250 Box Challenge"

2017-01-02 19:05

Nice work! You're definitely improving in terms of construction as well as confidence, across this set. I would have liked to have seen more work in terms of line weight (rather than just on the front page). One suggestion I have on that front is not to make any of the internal lines overly thick, as this becomes rather visually confusing. The heavy line sitting in the center of the form breaks the cohesiveness of the whole set of lines and makes them read more as individual marks rather than as a single form. You generally want your internal lines to be slightly less heavy than your lightest external line. Overall this should be quite subtle (so as to avoid huge chunky external lines).

Also, I did want to mention that when it comes to corrections (which, as you noted that there were plenty of mistakes, so you should have continued doing them through the entire set), focus more on actually correcting the mistake by drawing the correct line in a different colour, rather than simply pointing them out with notes. Theoretical understanding is fine, but you'll benefit the most from actually drawing the lines themselves.

I'll go ahead and mark this challenge as complete. You're free to move onto the 250 cylinder challenge next (which will help with your form intersections exercise in lesson 2), or straight to lesson 2. Leave the texture challenge for after lesson 2 is complete.

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

2017-01-02 19:00

Very nice work. Your first two sections are coming along very well - your lines are straight and solid, and your ellipses are confident, smooth and evenly shaped. I did notice though with your funnels that you tend to have a lot of ellipses floating in between the funnel lines, rather than snugly between them - that is of course something you'll want to work on. That said, the evenness of the shape and the confidence of your stroke is the primary priority, with accuracy sitting a close second - so you're nailing that first goal, and need to now try to improve on the second whilst maintaining the first. Applying the ghosting method to your ellipses (as you should for all marks made) will help you improve on this front.

Your boxes are generally coming along quite well too, though I do have a few recommendations. For your rough perspective boxes, go over your completed work as described here to help reflect on where your estimation of perspective tends to be somewhat off. This is quite normal.

Jumping ahead to your organic perspective boxes, it's perfectly normal for your ability to construct arbitrarily rotated boxes to be quite weak at this point - I included this exercise (and the rotated boxes one) not with the expectation that you'd be nailing it, but rather to give you the chance to fail a little, while getting familiar with the particular challenges involved in freely rotating boxes. It's not an easy thing to do, but having experienced it here, you'll be able to digest the later instruction more easily and put it to better use, since you already understand the context of it all.

I did want to point out though that I am seeing a tendency to correct your mistakes immediately after making them. This is not recommended, as it tends to become a bit of a bad habit, where you immediately reinforce lines you've just drawn out of reflex rather than with planning and forethought. Additionally, correcting a mistake will only draw more attention to it, while leaving it alone tends to give it the best chance of disappearing amongst the other marks. As we move through the lessons, we'll gradually learn to incorporate those mistakes into our actual drawings, but for now it's best to leave them alone.

Correcting itself is not a problem, but it's when it becomes a knee-jerk reaction. So instead, if you wish to reflect upon your mistakes in this manner, you can do so once the drawing is complete.

I'm going to mark this lesson as complete. I'm glad that you want to do the 250 box challenge next, as that is exactly what I was going to ask you to do. This is to improve your sense of rotating boxes freely in 3D space. Be sure to read through all of the notes on the 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 4: Drawing Insects and Arachnids (new 40min intro video, 3 new demos)"

2017-01-02 18:52

Through the course of this set, you do seem to be improving on your understanding of construction and form. This fly in particular was very well constructed - one thing that some of the earlier drawings lack is capturing a sense of solidity at the end of each and every pass. That is, when we construct our objects, we start out simple, then go over it in successive passes to break down forms to greater levels of complexity. It's important that at the end of each pass that what we've drawn thus far feels three dimensional and conveys the volume and solidity of the final result. That is, as opposed to finishing off a pass feeling somewhat flatter or less solid, and expecting to fix this when adding greater complexity. So, when you're done with a pass, ask yourself whether the elements present on the page feel like they're three dimensional, whether the illusion of that is conveyed and whether or not you buy into it when looking at the image. If not, apply some of the tools we've learned in previous lessons (contour lines for example) to reinforce this before moving onto the next pass.

Now form is of course my greater focus, but as far as texture goes you seem to be a little less deliberate with the marks that you place on the page. You rely on a lot on scribbly hatching, and when you try to fill an area in with black your approach is quite blobby and uncontrolled. It's important that you plan every mark out carefully and that your decisions reflect what you've observed and studied from your reference image. Keep in mind that far more time should be spent observing than drawing - don't spend more than a second or two to put down marks before looking back at the reference, as you will very quickly forget specific details that you had observed previously. Our memories are quite weak, especially at this stage, so we need to rely heavily on transferring information more directly.

You do have plenty of room to improve, but you're going in the right direction so I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete.

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

2017-01-02 17:27

You solve this problem by mirroring across the center of your form - I talk about this technique in the intro video to lesson 6, specifically at around 10:34. If you know where the tires stop closest to you, you can find that line on the ground plane, then mirror it across the center to find the same line on the opposite side.

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

2017-01-01 00:33

Your ellipses are looking solid, so full marks there. For your rotated boxes, I don't actually expect you to show me anything perfect - I just want to see something that's complete. The thing about this exercise is that I included it there knowing that it was outside of the scope of most students' abilities. It's there for two reasons:

1. To make you fail a little. Failure is important, inevitable, and necessary. It makes us grow, but people tend to hate it and fear it. You'll encounter a lot of it, so it's good to force it down peoples' throats now and again.

2. To get you familiar with the challenges involved in rotating boxes freely in 3D space. If you're familiar with the particular things that tripped you up in your first attempts, once you get to the actual instruction on this material (which we'll get to later), you'll be able to think back to your own experiences with this material and digest the new information more effectively.

Your grasp of it is improving with practice, but I just want to see a completed attempt at this exercise.

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

2016-12-31 23:39

One of the things that really jumps out at me when looking at your organic forms with contour curves specifically is that while you've done a huge amount of work on that exercise, you're pretty loose and a bit sloppy when it comes to actually putting the lines down. Be more patient - plan your strokes out more carefully before executing them (with a confident pace, of course). Don't neglect to add the minor axis line, as you did for some of them.

Overall you are demonstrating a grasp of how your contour curves should wrap around the rounded form, and the last two pages of look quite good, but in general you need to actively think through the marks you want to make before executing them.

Your dissection textures are coming along well - with the fur, just keep in mind that you never want to rely on randomness or thoughtless mark-making to create texture. Every mark should be deliberate (pretty much the same idea as what I mentioned before). In later lessons, we'll explore how to tackle fur in ways that creates less contrast and relies less upon this kind of mindless repetition. Additionally, on the note of contrast, as you more forwards, try to consider areas where you can merge large swathes of very dense linework into solid black masses. The little slivers of white caught amongst the black lines creates a lot of distracting contrast that draws the viewer's eye to where it should not be focusing. The next step about developing your approach to texture (as described in the 25 texture challenge) focuses quite a bit on this idea of controlling the viewer's eye and implying detail without drawing it all out explicitly and creating unwanted focal areas.

Your form intersections are coming along well, though I did catch a few boxes that have some particularly dramatic foreshortening applied to them (relative to their neighbours). Keeping your foreshortening more shallow helps keep the overall assortment of forms more consistent and cohesive, which is more or less the focus of this exercise. For more information, refer to these notes.

Your organic intersections need a bit of work, though the second page marks some considerable improvement over the first. You're moving in the right direction, in terms of understanding how those forms interact with one another, but it just needs a little bit more practice.

Anyway, I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete, so go ahead and move onto the next one. Don't forget to keep up with these exercises as warmups though, picking two or three from lessons 1 and 2 to do for 10-15 minutes at the beginning of each sitting.

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

2016-12-31 23:25

Fairly well done. Your arrows are decent, your organic forms convey a sense of solidity and roundedness that maintains the illusion of volume, your dissections' textures really take off by the second page, and your intersections are well done. As far as the form intersections go, I mention this in the exercise but no one seems to acknowledge it - the exercise is actually not really about the intersections themselves, but about drawing forms that feel cohesive and consistent within the same space. The intersections themselves are challenging, and it will take a great deal of time wrapping your head around 3D space to start nailing them. It's not even close to a priority right now, you're just at the beginning of that.

I do want to mention though that another instruction in that exercise was not to draw overly long forms in any one given dimension - basically to avoid long boxes, tubes, etc. so that overly dramatic perspective is not added to the list of challenges of this exercise.

Aside from that, you're doing well, so keep up the good work and consider this lesson complete.

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

2016-12-31 23:15

Your use of construction is generally okay, but that stiffness is still there. Why are you still drawing in that sketchbook? I mentioned in my last critique that it's too small for you, and I even recommended that you draw on larger sheets of loose-leaf.

In general, your observational skills need work - as it stands, you're spending a lot of your time drawing, and doing so from memory a good deal of the time. This has a particularly heavy impact when it comes to detail and texture, but even here it has a significant effect. You should be spending the majority of your time looking at your reference image, not looking away for more than a second or two to make a few marks before looking again to refresh your memory. Our memory is inherently flawed - we very quickly turn the things we've seen into cartoons in our minds, making our drawings reflect that in turn. Through practice, we rewire our brains to collect more relevant data without throwing it away, but this takes a great deal of training. As a rule, don't draw for more than a couple seconds before looking back.

Lastly, the venus fly trap was definitely very complex, so it's no big surprise that one fell apart. There's nothing wrong with starting off simple, and it will in turn help you improve more easily. On the same example, your handling of the flower pot wasn't great - you let it get cut off the page rather than actually closing off the form (always do this, even if you're cutting the form short - leaving it open as you did flattens the whole thing out). Additionally, the flower pot was composed of multiple box forms stacked on top of each other, with thickness to its edge. This is relates back to focusing on studying and observing your reference image. You want your initial block in to be informed by what you see, not by what you think you see.

Here are some tips.

I want five more pages, on larger paper this time, taking into consideration what I've mentioned above.

Edit: One more thing crossed my mind. Are you practicing the exercises from lessons 1 and 2 as warmups? Those exercises should not be left behind - you should pick two or three of them to do for 10-15 minutes at the beginning of each sitting to keep sharpening your basic skills, as these are the ones that will have the greatest impact on your overall results.

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

2016-12-31 22:18

You've done a good job with your arrows. Your organic forms are also coming along fairly well, though a few points here. Try to loosen up with your ellipses a little bit - they're a little stiff, so you want to try and draw them with a more confident pace, relying less on your brain to drive the motion of your hand and trusting more in your muscle memory. Drawing through your ellipses (which you do in many of them, but don't for others) is actually only really effective if you're drawing more confidently, as it helps to counteract the temporary decrease in accuracy that comes of it.

Your dissections are looking good, though remember that you want to start this exercise off as just a bunch of organic forms from the previous exercise. Don't start thinking about texture until you've established a solid organic form with surfaces that feel as though they're rounded. Keep in mind that all we're doing in this exercise is transferring textures to existing forms - so the bell pepper strayed a bit from this principle, where you started carrying over the pepper's form as well.

As far as the texturing itself goes, you're doing well - you're being very deliberate and avoiding any sort of randomness. The very heavy application of texture all over is pretty normal at this point. As I discuss in the 25 texture challenge, we learn to texture in two separate stages. First we get comfortable with carefully observing and transferring all of the detail we see (which is what you're doing right now), then we move onto figuring out different ways to organize that information to create those rest areas/focal areas.

Your form intersections are alright, but along with the point about being a bit stiff with your ellipses, your foreshortening is a little inconsistent. This relates directly to what I mentioned here in lesson 1. Also, as far as the longer tubes/cones/etc that you used in some places, I did mention in the lesson that you should avoid these because they tend to complicate things by making foreshortening more of a factor.

As for the intersections themselves, they seem reasonably correct to me - though of course this is not really the focus of the exercise. It's more about keeping all of the forms consistent and cohesive, maintaining the illusion that they all exist in the same space.

Lastly, your organic intersections are looking pretty good. I definitely get the sense that you understand how each of these sit in 3D space, and how they interact with one another.

While there are a few points to improve upon here, I feel that you understand more than enough for me to confidently pass you onto the next lesson, so I'll go ahead and mark this one as complete.

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

2016-12-30 00:54

Definitely better! There's still room for improvement, but I'm getting a sense of the solidity of the forms here, and I can see that you convey some understanding of how these forms interact with one another. Keep it up, and consider this lesson complete.

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

2016-12-30 00:52

I'll be frank - generally when students come to me with a big long self-critique, I ignore it. Admittedly it's partially because it's time consuming, but more than that it's because I don't want my own view of your work to be tainted, and I don't want to end up in the situation where I second guess whether or not I want to point something out because you've already mentioned it. So I'll leave it to you to compare your self-critique with my own, and will jump right into it.

Overall I see a growing understanding of how to convey form throughout your work, but I very much see that being overshadowed by the urgency with which you jump into complexity, often dealing with the initial phases of construction (simple block-in of form) too timidly.

Long story short, you're too preoccupied with the final drawing. You are - whether consciously or not - highly concerned with the idea of creating a pretty drawing at the end, and as a result you purposely try to draw quite faintly when it comes to your initial block-in. This results in those initial forms being not quite as solid as they could be.

Your drawings still turn out pretty decently for the most part, because you're compensating for this with a fairly strong sense of form and volume, as well as fairly decent observational skills. That's not going to be enough to carry you forever, though, so we need to make sure that your ability to go from simple to complex is sorted out.

When it comes to texture, you're employing a variety of approaches. Experimentation is definitely a good thing when it comes to detail and texture. The main thing I want to call out is where you tend to use hatching, cross-hatching or somewhat random/scribbly lines to fill in space. These rarely correspond with actual textures that exist on the objects you're drawing, and tend to look sloppy no matter how you slice it. Try to avoid having little erratic bits of white in a sea of black (the contrast becomes quite distracting), and try to avoid any lines that don't look deliberate.

As far as deliberateness, the vinegaroon is quite nicely done (aside from the claw where you applied hatching lines), though I'd say you definitely went overboard with texture here. The centipede showed some more comfort with leaving areas either solid white or solid black, though perhaps could have used a little bit more texture in the transitional areas between them. Overall, you'll be working towards finding a solid balance between overburdening your drawings with detail and not quite being detailed enough to establish focal areas. That's the main point though - you want to guide how the viewer's eye passes over the drawing, so use focal areas as way-stations for the eye's journey. If you cover everything with an equal amount of information, the path will be unclear. If your use of detail lacks a solid hierarchy in terms of one area being more demanding of the viewer's attention than another, then they'll be free to roam on their own and will likely get a little lost.

One other thing to keep in mind when it comes to texture is that under no circumstances should the texture overwhelm the construction and the form. They should reinforce it instead. This often means holding yourself back from adding more detail in a given area.

I want to see three more pages of insect drawings, but with no detail or texture whatsoever. Focus entirely on building up the construction from the simplest possible forms that need no support for their solidity, then breaking those forms down and building up detail in successive passes. Do not draw overly timidly or lightly, and don't try to go out of your way to half-hide things - you can sort out your lines and organize them using line weight later, as I do in my demonstrations. And at the end of each pass, ensure that what you've drawn would feel solid and sturdy were you to leave it at that stage and move on.

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

2016-12-29 19:02

Very solid work, across the board. I don't have much to say, but I scraped up a couple minor things to mention. Before I get to that, your organic forms have a great sense of solidity and volume. Your textures are extremely impressive in how you've organized your detail to create clear rest areas and focal areas. Your form intersections are cohesive and demonstrate a solid grasp of 3D space. Your organic intersections show a clear consideration for how those forms interact with one another.

The two recommendations I have are as follows:

• I noticed that you used a lot of very tight hatching in your textures where you get into your deepest shadows. For areas like this, fill them in with solid black to avoid the little bits of white. These tend to become quite distracting due to the high contrast. Just as we have rest areas with the large blank portions, we want to balance them out with rest areas of solid black as well. Sometimes a fineliner isn't quite enough to achieve this - in those cases a brush pen can be quite handy.

• For your organic intersections, the first page was excellent. The use of line weight on the second went a bit overboard I'd say, and actually caused things to flatten out a little. Subtlety goes a long way, and you generally want to avoid that kind of uniformity. The added dynamism coming from the little cast shadows helps, but for the most you'd benefit from having more variation in weight (on one side, the line getting particularly fine, and on the other side it getting a little thicker - though try to avoid making things too thick to the point of a sort of graphic look).

Anyway, I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete so feel free to move onto the next one. Also from what I can see, you seem to be dumping work you'd done previously - three submissions over three days is a lot, so keep that in mind as you space out your future submissions.

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

2016-12-29 18:14

Ultimately, all of the demonstrations I have to offer are already available to you - the two in the intro video, the three on the lesson page, and the handful of informal demos under the "other demos" tab of the lesson page. The thing is that the lesson and demos are dense, and won't be fully absorbed after just one read-through. You'll have to read and watch the material a few times, so I recommend that you go back over them, as well as the article on constructional drawing once again.

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

2016-12-28 20:42

Much, much better. There's still room to grow (especially with those elephants' legs and feet), but that'll come with continued practice. 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"

2016-12-28 18:32

Your lines and ellipses sections are pretty solid - I'm quite pleased with your ellipses in particular, they're quite confident and smooth. Once you get into your boxes though, I think there's a lot of work to be done. Not so much in the construction of the boxes themselves, but rather in your process for drawing each line.

Firstly, in the plotted perspective exercise, this one was meant to be done with a ruler in its entirety, but it seems like you drew the boxes themselves freehand. Don't stray from my instructions - there are times where I choose to make certain things easier, and that is always because that component is not the focus of this exercise. By making it more challenging for yourself, you become distracted from the main purpose of the exercise.

Looking at your rough perspective boxes onwards, your use of the ghosting method isn't great. Your lines are rather wobbly and unstable, which makes me think that on top of not using the ghosting method, you've probably fallen back to drawing from your wrist at this point, instead of drawing from your shoulder.

Another point that you actually noted down is quite correct - fixing your mistakes draws attention to them. When you make a mistake, leave it alone. The habit of immediately correcting a blunder is a very bad one. Instead if you want to reflect upon your mistakes, do so after you've completed the whole thing. Additionally, I recommend double checking your alignment with the vanishing point as described here.

Your rotated boxes aren't bad - they're cluttered to be sure because you keep trying to correct your mistakes rather than putting the time into applying the ghosting method and drawing from your shoulder, but the construction of the boxes is mostly correct. One image from the exercise description that I want to draw your attention to is this one (as you seem to have gotten lost in terms of aligning your boxes in the top left there.

As for your organic perspective boxes, they're not great, but that's more or less expected. To a degree with this exercise and the rotated boxes one, I throw students into the deep end of the pool before teaching them to swim so they can grow accustomed to the challenges involved in rotating boxes freely in 3D space. That way they understand the later instruction, having already been exposed to the context of it.

I am going to mark this lesson as complete, but you'll have the chance to further practice your ghosting method and your free-rotation of boxes by moving onto the 250 box challenge next. Be sure to read through all of the notes on that page and watch the two videos. The tip about drawing through your forms is particularly important, and will 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"

2016-12-28 18:23

They're honestly still rather flat - your contour curves here are falling a bit short of wrapping around the forms (compare them to these). I want you to try again, and before you do, give the exercise description another read and look carefully at the steps I outline there. Also, don't make them so different in scale, make the more similar. You may find it somewhat easier if you draw larger as well - I can't actually tell what scale this is at, but based on the stiffness of your lines, it feels like you're drawing pretty small.

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

2016-12-28 18:20

There's a few things that jump out at me here. First and foremost, your mind jumps right to texture way too early. Before we worry about that, we want to be sure that our sense of form, 3D space and construction is allowing us to create solid representations of the objects we're constructing.

The amount of space you're giving yourself for each drawing is definitely a problem - working small gives us very little room to think through the spatial problems involved, and also results in the clunky effect of overly thick lines (relative to the overall size of the drawing). Both of these points cause us to seriously stiffen up, and it comes through in the resulting drawings. This is also causing you to draw through your ellipses less (likely to avoid making them even thicker).

I actually just noticed where you wrote the notes "need bigger sketchbook". My recommendation to you is that you draw on loose leaf printer paper instead of a sketchbook.

Furthermore, I'm seeing what appears to be underlying pencil marks beneath your ink in some of these drawings - I'm sure you already know that you should not be using pencil at all in any of this work.

Another point - when dealing with flower pots, construct them as cylinders, minor axis and all.

The last thing I want to jump to is your use of texture. Now, as I said, it's distracting you at the moment so we're going to be setting that aside. That said, a lot of your application of texture has relied on somewhat more random, less planned marks, where you've identified a pattern, and then gone to town on that surface a bit mindlessly. Now this isn't always the case - there are a lot of examples where you've been more deliberate, but the sort of sloppy lines on the bottom right of this page won't contribute much to your overall drawing.

I talk about the process of approaching learning how to tackle texture in the 25 texture challenge - keep in mind the fact that there's two separate stages, and I think much of the time you're jumping into the second stage (organizing your details) before properly completing the first stage (training your eye to observe all of the detail in your reference image).

Now, what I want you to do is another 5 pages of plant drawings, on larger pages, with absolutely no texture whatsoever. Focus entirely on construction, draw from your shoulder, and ensure that your forms feel solid and three dimensional. Plan and execute each mark you put down with the ghosting method.

Uncomfortable in the post "250 Cylinder Challenge"

2016-12-28 18:09

Pretty good work, I'm particularly pleased with the alignment of your ellipses to your minor axes. Just a few thoughts:

• Try to decrease the difference in degree between the two ends of the cylinder. The far end should certainly have a larger degree, but think about what the degree represents, in terms of how that ellipse (and the circle it represents) is oriented towards the viewer. When the different is so large, it implies a lot of perspective distortion coming from the cylinder being very large in scale. This is similar to what I mentioned in your 250 box challenge critique.

• Tighten up your ellipses - you're going around them too many times, I'd say start limiting yourself to two rounds.

• You should also practice constructing those cylinders inside of boxes.

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

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

2016-12-28 18:06

It's not bad, but there definitely a few things I can point out.

First and foremost, it looks like you're using the 'drawing' preset on your scanner. This generally ramps up the contrast resulting in this sort of extremely harsh approximation of your work, throwing out any of the nuance of your lines. The 'photo' presets are generally much better, as they'll more or less capture your work as it is.

Your ghosted lines are looking okay - there's a bit of wavering here and there, which pushes me to remind you to draw from your shoulder, and to push through with a confident pace quick enough to avoid your brain from course-correcting as you go. This inherently reduces your accuracy, which you can in turn compensate for by spending more time on the ghosting/preparation phase. Overall though the issues I see here are very minor.

Your ellipses suffer from pretty much the same problem, but as they are ellipses it tends to manifest a little differently. Here and there we can see a degree of stiffness to them, where you can see that the flow of your drawing motion has shifted slightly (likely due to your brain saying "no you're going off track, we need to adjust our course or all is lost!" Our first priority is always the evenness and smoothness of the stroke. Our second priority is accuracy - so a smooth ellipse that is slightly off from our intended target is better than one that is stiff but more precise. This may seem counter-intuitive, because when you're actually drawing something, being off by a bit can be catastrophic. Keep in mind - these are exercises and drills, so our mindset is not that of creating a perfect image. It's merely to train our bodies and minds, and this particular set of priorities will help us achieve both smooth lines and accuracy more easily in the long run.

Your plotted perspective boxes are well done. Your rough perspective boxes are good as well, but I see one issue. It's hard to tell due to the scan quality, but it looks like you were plotting lines back to the vanishing point. If you did this while drawing, don't. You are meant to eyeball it completely, and visualize those lines as opposed to drawing them. If you did them afterwards to double check your perspective, this is something you should be doing (and if you didn't I definitely recommend it as described here) but do not plot them back to the vanishing point. Instead, extend them back to the horizon line to see how far the intersection point is from the VP.

Your rotated boxes don't seem to follow the step-by-step instructions I laid out for the exercise, so definitely give that a good read. I'm guessing that you did these before I put up the more detailed set of instructions (the previous ones weren't really detailed enough).

You don't seem to have included your organic perspective boxes.

So before I mark this lesson as complete, I want to see:

• 1 page of the tables of ellipses

• 1 page of rotated boxes

• 1 page of organic perspective boxes

Uncomfortable in the post "250 Box Challenge"

2016-12-28 17:48

Looking good! Overall you've done great - your lines are very confident and your boxes are generally well constructed. There's just two things I want to point out - firstly, you do a bit of experimentation with line weight on your first page in a few of the boxes, but for the most part the others tend to be pretty uniform. Definitely continue to play around with that more in the future. Secondly, I noticed that a lot of your boxes tend to skew more towards the dramatic perspective end of things - you should be practicing shallower perspective as much, if not more, as this is what you'll end up using more often. Dramatic perspective (where the far end of a box is noticeably smaller than the closer end) generally signifies a larger scale (like seeing the top of a tall building from the ground floor). Shallower perspective will give you a more relatable scale, like something that can be turned over in your hands, or something not a lot bigger than you. Since most of the things we draw are of this scale, practicing shallower perspective is definitely important.

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

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

2016-12-27 19:47

Not bad! Your lines and ellipses sections are looking good - your linework is fairly confident here, and shows signs of forethought and preplanning. Your boxes are generally well done too, though I noticed in your rough perspective boxes you didn't apply the ghosting method quite as carefully as you could have. Remember that you want to invest all of your time into planning and preparing for each mark, then execute it with a smooth, confident stroke. Don't try and put less time into planning and more time into execution, as this will give your brain the opportunity to try and course-correct as you draw, resulting in wobblier lines. Additionally, be sure to double check your work for this exercise as described here.

Your rotated boxes are well laid out - I just have one little thing I want to point out. As your boxes rotate further out to any one side, you want to make sure you exaggerate that rotation more and more. Our brains like things to exist parallel to one another, fitting into neat little grids, so they'll actively fight against us when doing an exercise like this, making things feel like they've been rotated when they haven't (or at least not by much). As a result, you need to push yourself further outside of what you feel is comfortable. Where we want to hit a full 180 degree range of rotations on any one axis, yours are hitting something more like 90.

Lastly, your organic perspective boxes are about where I'd expect them to be - I'll admit that I throw students into this exercise much like tossing children into the deep end of the pool without teaching them how to swim. It's largely to get acquainted with the challenges involved in rotating boxes freely in 3D space, so that when I do explain the concepts involved, you'll understand the context into which those instructions fit.

I'll be marking this lesson as complete, but I'd like you to move onto the 250 box challenge next. Be sure to read through all of the notes on that page, and watch the two videos. The tip about drawing through your forms is especially important, as it will help you better grasp how each box sits in 3D space.

Uncomfortable in the post "250 Box Challenge"

2016-12-27 19:38

Your confidence definitely improves over the set, and you're doing a good job with your line weights. I believe you're showing signs of missing some issues during your correction passes though. Before we get to that though, I want to mention one thing - since I'm encouraging you to draw through your boxes, it's normal to be a little confused when looking at the end result, since it can be at times difficult to tell apart which faces point towards the viewer and which ones point away. An easy way to get around this is to fill one of the front-facing planes with tight hatching lines. This gives the appropriate visual cues to clear up this sort of illusion.

Anyway, as I was saying, I'm seeing quite a few issues with near/far plane size relationships, and issues with the angles of your lines being somewhat off, that you're not catching in your correction pass. For example: http://i.imgur.com/M3Ah1pR.png.

Lastly, it does look like you should be spending a little more time with each line, making sure you apply the ghosting method properly and executing each one with a smooth, confident pace.

Anyway, I'll go ahead and mark this challenge as complete. You are showing improvement, so keep at it. Make sure you keep up with practicing this stuff, but you may feel free to move onto lesson 2.

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

2016-12-27 19:12

Nice work on the arrows, they flow nicely through space. Your organic forms with contour ellipses are looking nice as well, though I'm noticing that you tend to have your ellipses not quite correctly aligned with the central minor axis line, so watch out for that. The minor axis should cut each ellipse into two equal, symmetrical halves through its narrower dimension.

For the most part your organic forms with contour curves are alright - there's a few that don't quite wrap around the forms properly, but most do and I noticed that you're using the overshooting method to correct this. Keep it up.

As far as your dissections go, they're not great, but this isn't unexpected. I recommend that you give the notes on the 25 texture challenge page a read. From the looks of it, you're jumping into implying and simplifying detail far too early, before properly having the opportunity to develop your observational skills. Furthermore, you have a tendency to use randomness/scribbling to create texture - this is not a good habit to get into. Instead, try to spend significantly more time observing and studying your reference image, and make sure that every mark you put down is carefully planned. This may take a lot more time, but that is simply the way it goes. A drawing will look sloppy if it is the result of scribbling and randomness.

Lastly, when you want to make something solid and black - actually fill it in completely, don't leave little slivers of white. This is where felt tip pens and even a brush pen will come in quite handy. Lessons 3-7 no longer allow you to use a ballpoint pen, so you should make sure you pick up some 0.5mm fineliners/felt tip pens.

Your form intersections are fairly decent. The focus of this exercise, as mentioned in the lesson, is more on having the forms exist within the same space while feeling consistent and cohesive. It's not actually about the intersections themselves. Your intersections were definitely a lot flatter than what I would consider to be correct (think of how those intersection shapes would wrap around the rounded surface of a sphere or cone or cylinder - yours tended to straighten out too much which flattens things out. That said, these are things that will improve as your sense of 3D space develops.

Your organic intersections did leave a little to be desired. When doing this exercise, it's important that you start off by focusing on creating a single solid sausage form. Once you are convinced of its solidity and three-dimensionality, you can then drop another form on top of it. At this point, you have to focus both on making this second form solid, and also considering how it's going to interact with the previous form. Where its weight is supported, it will cling to the form supporting it, where it is not supported, it will sag.

In your work, it feels fairly flat to me, and I don't get the impression that they exist together within the same space. There's a few signs of interaction between the forms, but you need to push them farther.

Before I mark this lesson as complete, I'd like you to try one more page of organic intersections. Try not to use overly long forms, just focus on fat sausages, constructing one at a time, being sure to make each one solid before moving onto the next.

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

2016-12-27 00:40

Very nice work! For the most part, everything's looking lovely. Your organic forms convey a strong sense of volume and push the roundedness of the surfaces quite well. Your dissections have a lot of great variety of texture, and you've tackled each one with deliberate, clearly planned and well executed marks. Your form intersections are looking solid and consistent, and the intersections themselves (which certainly aren't the focus of this exercise) seem to be correct for the most part.

Your form intersections are a little bit weaker, but that's more because the other sections are so well done. I'm still getting a general sense that you understand how each of these forms interact with one another, so I believe it's just a matter of additional practice. The only other thing I noticed was that your contour ellipses for the organic forms exercises seemed a little bit stiff, so try to loosen up and draw them a little more confidently. Remember that the evenness of the shape is the top priority, with accuracy coming in a close second.

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

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

2016-12-25 22:33

Unfortunately it's largely a matter of practicing more. Our observational skills are poor when we start out, and they improve as we do more and more studies. There's no real way around that.

Uncomfortable in the post "250 Box Challenge"

2016-12-25 17:52

Nice work! Your linework definitely looks considerably more confident by the end of the set, so you're applying the ghosting method quite well. As for the foreshortening, I think it's generally good that you practiced some with more dramatic perspective and others with shallower foreshortening - regardless of how dramatic the foreshortening is, whether or not it's an actual box will depend on the context it's placed in. Since all of these are in isolation, we have nothing else to compare them against, so they're all boxes. That said, you'll find yourself applying shallow foreshortening far more often, so make sure you're comfortable with that.

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

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

2016-12-25 16:32

Yes, at the end of the second paragraph I was referring to applying the ghosting method to your ellipses. Of course, you should be applying it to everything. And yes, you should do the 250 box challenge before moving onto lesson 2.

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

2016-12-24 20:52

You've done a pretty decent job. Your lines are quite smooth and confident, which helps keep them straight. Your ellipses vary depending on the exercise - there's a bit of stiffness regardless, but your ellipses in tables are considerably stronger than the ellipses in planes and the funnels. The main thing is that above all, you need to try to keep the shape as even as possible. Beyond the preparation stages, your brain won't help you much - you've got to draw from your shoulder and trust that your muscles understand the task at hand. If you let your brain drive your drawing motion, it will course-correct as you go, resulting in some stiffness.

Alternatively, relying entirely on your muscles will undermine the accuracy of it all. This is a secondary priority (so the evenness of the shape is most important), but you can compensate for the decrease in accuracy by applying the ghosting method in order to build up the correct muscle memory. This is where your brain should be focusing.

For the funnels, keep in mind that the minor axis line should be going down the middle (use a ruler if necessary), and that each ellipse needs to align to it such that it cuts each ellipse into two equal, symmetrical halves down its narrower dimension.

The issue with the ellipses in planes is more or less the same stiffness problem, but it's fairly normal to see it here. We tend to get a bit overwhelmed with the need to fit our ellipses into this awkward shape that we let our brains take the reins. Fight against that urge, and push yourself to ensure that the ellipse is as smooth and even as possible.

Your plotted perspective boxes are solid. As are your rough perspective boxes, though I do recommend that you go over your completed work for this exercise as described here.

Your rotated boxes are coming along decently. Your organic perspective boxes do have issues, but these are more or less expected. I know you mentioned that you were going to move onto the 250 box challenge, and I definitely recommend that route to further develop your sense of 3D space. Make sure you read through all of the notes on that page, especially the tip about drawing through your forms. This in particular will help you better grasp how each box sits in 3D space.

Additionally, one thing you should read over again in terms of your organic perspective boxes, is the issue of overly dramatic perspective.

I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete, so feel free to move onto the 250 box challenge when you're ready.

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

2016-12-24 20:45

There's a lot of interesting work here, but one thing that becomes very clear to me is that you're distracted yourself by thinking of the end result far more than the actual underlying construction. You're too focused on detail.

Firstly, I see some drawings where you seem to do a constructional study, then do the same drawing without construction, focusing on detail. Don't do this - if you're going to add detail, add it on top of the construction, as that construction is necessary to uphold the solidity of the overall object. You're a long way off from being able to draw these things without the constructional phase, and I worry that you'll toss construction aside far too early if you continue down that path.

Now, while there are some drawings with fairly weak construction, there's a few that I really liked. For instance, the tiger on the bottom right of this page is excellent.

As far as texture goes, this bird has a lot going for it, but it's also very noisy. You should be more willing to let the areas that get dense become a single solid black area, as I explain in the 25 texture challenge. As it stands, the viewer's eye doesn't know where to focus because there's so many high-contrast areas. The blank areas on the bird's chest are nice, but you need the same sort of thing for your darks.

While in that drawing you've got a lot of careful, specific and deliberate marks used to denote feathers, in later drawings you tend to be much more sloppy, relying far more on randomness and almost scribbling to create texture. While it surely is less time consuming, you need to be deliberate with your details. Now you don't necessarily have to bury your drawing with detail, and you can get away with hinting just a little here and there, but those marks need to be carefully crafted and designed all the same.

That said, I don't want you to focus on texture right now. I'd like you to do four more pages of animal drawings with no detail whatsoever. Focus entirely on construction, observing your reference more carefully and trying to maintain proper proportion.

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

2016-12-24 20:36

Sorry for the late response - I usually try to get critiques in within a day, but I was working on new lesson material for drawabox and ended up coming down with a fever last night.

Looking at your work, I see a lot of things I've seen from some other students, and I'm very confident in saying that you can certainly do much better. As a rule, what I ask for is not perfect work, but rather the best a student is capable of at this moment, and I've become pretty adept at spotting when students are hitting their personal limit, or when it's really just a matter of requiring more time and patience. Yours is falling under the latter category.

Firstly, try to work on blank paper - I've seen a trend in the use of lined or graph paper corresponding to a somewhat sloppier mindset, leading to more rushing and less care taken when completing the exercises.

As for the specific exercises:

• Super imposed lines. This is generally looking good. For the most part, you're taking the time to line up your pen at the correct starting point.

• Your ghosted lines are roughly where I'd expect them to be. There's a bit of wavering here and there, but I think that's more of a matter of requiring more practice (which is totally fine and expected) than incorrect technique.

• Things start to get a little sloppier with your planes. There's two issues - I feel that more and more you're becoming lax in terms of applying the ghosting method. When you start out, you seem to be applying it reasonably well, but as you push through you probably try and take less time with each line, resulting in sloppier work. Additionally, don't immediately correct or reinforce an incorrect line. This is a bad habit to develop, and if you do it while working on a proper drawing, you'll end up drawing more attention to your blunder. Instead it's best to leave it be for now. Corrections are a good way to reflect upon your work, but those should be entirely separate from the process of actually drawing the lines in the first place. Basically, if you want to do corrections, come back later to do them once the whole page is complete. That way you get the benefit of reflecting upon your work without the development of the bad habit.

• With these ellipses, it's very clear to me that you've gotten somewhat overwhelmed with the prospect of drawing quite so many - your mind has simply given up and aimed for quantity over quality. It's true that I'm asking for a lot, but for this reason you should take ample breaks whenever necessary and spread the work over as long a period of time as is necessary. A lot of students take over 8 hours to complete just this first lesson, so don't feel that you need to rush at all. When drawing these ellipses, focus on each individual one - ghost through the drawing motion required, and make sure you're drawing from your shoulder. Once you've completed an ellipse, then you can shift your brain to drawing the next one. Here it seems to me like you didn't draw them with much planning or forethought, and that your mind was continuously directed more to the next ellipse rather than the one you were drawing at the time. Don't get me wrong though - when you actually draw the ellipse, your motion should be confident and quick. What's important is that you put all of your time into the planning of it.

• When it comes to your box exercises, pretty much across the board I'm noticing varying line quality, and large chunks of work where you stop applying the ghosting method. This ghosting method is key to all of these lessons - you must build a habit of it, of patiently planning and preparing each mark before executing it, rather than trying to do all of this at once.

• Additionally, for the rough perspective boxes exercise, you should go over your completed work as described here to check for areas where your estimation is off.

Now, I want you to try to go through this entire lesson once again. In terms of technique, I could simply ask you to redo a few specific exercises and then push you onto the 250 box challenge, this is more than just technique. It's about patience, and developing the ability to focus on what you're doing at a given moment, rather than thinking too far ahead and rushing through it all to reach the finish line.

Redo all of the exercises and submit them to me again. Take as much time as you require, and be sure to break it up over several sittings. Once you're done - and I'm sure that it will have vastly improved - I will mark this lesson as complete. At that point I would like you to move onto the 250 box challenge to help further develop your sense of 3D space and your ability to rotate boxes freely. At that point, I'll want you to read through all of the notes on that page, especially the tip about drawing through your forms. This in particular will help you better grasp how each box sits in 3D space. I'm mentioning this now, in case I forget to mention it later.

Uncomfortable in the post "Lesson 14: Composition"

2016-12-24 20:22

There's some improvement, but there's still a lot of those arbitrary details that you've put down with no real grasp of the muscle forms that would produce them. Also, I noticed that you generally half-ass your hands and feet - even if you're not confident with them, push yourself to draw the figure to completion. The only way you'll improve at something is by pushing through it.

I also noticed that with your more obese figures, and breasts as well, the forms stop following any kind of real structure and end up reading fairly flatly.

Today I uploaded a rewrite of Lesson 8 with more demo videos and an intro lecture video as well. It'll take a lot of time for me to rewrite all of the figure drawing lessons, but I think you should try to start over from there.

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

2016-12-23 02:28

Pretty nice work. I can see your understanding of form and construction improving between your drawings, and by and large your results feel tangible and solid. I can say with confidence that you're absorbing the main focus of these lessons wonderfully, and that you're certainly ready to move onto the next lesson.

I do want to mention however that I noticed that while your texturing is interesting, I see hints here and there that you're rushing through it a little bit - but not in the way I generally tend to see from students. You're not relying on the same repetitive approach to all textures, there's distinct differences between the various kinds of surfaces you're capturing. You're also considering how fur exists in tufts, and are allowing details to cluster together into large dense areas of black. The only thing that's off is that once you identify what kind of marks you want to put down, you rush through the actual execution of them a little bit. Most people will rush through both steps - deciding what to put down, then putting it down. Yours are considerably more advanced, since you are devoting a fair bit of time to the observational portion. Just try and be as deliberate with your mark making, consider each stroke separately and try not to cut corners.

Anyway, keep up the good work and consider this lesson complete.

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

2016-12-23 02:05

Excellent work! A month isn't particularly surprising to me. The material is challenging, and back when I was going through this sort of material, all of my time was focused on the classes I was taking, and even then we were given a full week per lesson. On top of that, I kind of think that spacing the work out over time helps give you time to process what you're doing, to reflect and think back on past mistakes (as long as the intervals in between sittings isn't too large).

You've generally shown an excellent use of the subdivision technique with a lot of these, like the V22 - Osprey, the Caterpillar 797F and so on. I especially loved the Chevy Camaro lay-in and the proportion study. Despite being a fairly early block-in, you can feel the solidity of the overall construction, and that's what I want to see more than anything else. The notion that even if you deviate from the original design, that it feels tangible and plausible when you're done.

At this point, all I can say is keep at it - practice will only sharpen your skills, improving your ability to maintain consistent proportions, to drop in accurate ellipses, etc. You're absolutely on the right track though, so keep up the great work and a big congratulations on completing the dynamic sketching material.

In case you're planning on moving onto the figure drawing material stuff, wait just a little bit - I'm planning on putting out the new stuff for lesson 8 very soon.

Uncomfortable in the post "250 Box Challenge"

2016-12-23 01:59

So I want to start off by making one thing clear - you definitely improved a fair bit over the set. The boxes at the end are generally more consistent and solid than those at the beginning.

The downside is that one of the big downsides to having a life, having children, and ultimately having to put things off for 7 months is that the initial instructions tend to get lost along the way. Now since giving up your kids in favour of drawing boxes will probably get you a lot of scowls from your neighbours, the solution is that every time you sit down to do the work, review the information you've received thus far. Reread the instructions for the given exercise, and reread the last critique you received.

One major thing you missed is something I pointed out when marking the previous lesson as complete:

The challenge page itself includes a lot of helpful notes on the topic, so be sure to read it in full before moving onto the work. Focus especially on the tip about drawing through your forms - this will help you gain a better understanding of how each box sits in 3D space, and will allow you to identify more easily mistakes where your near/far plane size relationship is reversed (which is a fairly common one).

I'm absolutely marking this challenge as complete, as you've learned a fair bit from it and can always draw more boxes for yourself, but I do want to point this out as something that could have made your use of your time a little more effective. It's that much more important when you don't have a lot of time to begin with.

Additionally, when doing corrections, stick primarily to drawing in the correct lines rather than writing down notes, as it's going to be the most effective use of your effort. We generally learn best from doing, and drawing in the correct lines is the method that aligns closest to that notion.

Anyway, as I said - congratulations on completing this challenge. Feel free to move onto lesson 2.

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

2016-12-22 02:05

Definitely better. I'll mark this lesson as complete, but you've really got to reel in that sloppiness. Ghost through your marks before you draw them to maintain your accuracy.

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

2016-12-22 02:04

Looking much better! I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete. As for what you mentioned about the rotated boxes... I'll let you in on a little secret. I made the same mistake when doing the demo - but since it was all digital and set up to be saved off as a step-by-step breakdown of my process, I just kinda scooched those four boxes over. Ultimately those boxes are just there to help you remember that you've got to cover a full 180 degree arc of boxes. Not a big deal if they're further off than they should be.

It's perfectly fine - and even a good idea - to continue drawing from life while working through the exercises. By no means should you try and just do these lessons, especially while you're going through the particularly drab landscape of lessons 1 and 2. Feel free to draw things for fun as well, or to follow other lessons. Just make sure that when you do the work for these lessons, that you give them your full attention and do everything you can to do them by the letter.

Keep up the good work and feel free to move onto the 250 box challenge.

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

2016-12-22 01:59

Nice work! I definitely did notice the heavy use of red pen there, circling every little mistake and noting things down. It's perfectly fine - and perhaps important - to be aware of the mistakes you're making so that you can work towards correcting them in your next attempt, but I do want to make sure that you do understand that it's perfectly okay to be making those errors. I'm sure you do already get that, but it's important for me to state it - don't go so far with pointing out your failures that you don't get the chance to appreciate your successes. It's a great way to burn out.

One great thing that I've seen across your work is that you tend to draw with a very confident stroke - your lines and ellipses generally come out with a very smooth, even stroke, with very little in the way of wobbling or stiffness. It's this that makes me figure that you probably understand that mistakes are inevitable. This confidence will serve you well.

Your box exercises are generally done quite well, so I'll skip on over to the organic perspective boxes. It's clear that you struggled with this one - and to be honest, that's how I designed the lesson. For this exercise, I purposely drop the student into the deep end of the pool without really teaching them how to swim. This way they get a sense of the challenges faced when trying to rotate boxes freely in 3D space, so that when I do ultimately explain how to deal with it, they can understand those instructions with greater context.

So, I'll be marking this lesson as complete - I'd like you to move onto the 250 box challenge next. Be sure to read the notes and watch the video there on that 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, which will in turn help you understand some of the mistakes you were making when trying the organic perspective boxes exercise.

Keep up the good work!

Uncomfortable in the post "250 Box Challenge"

2016-12-22 01:45

Very nice work! Your boxes are looking solid, and your use of line weight is very effective in terms of making each form feel cohesive. Box 250 also looks very pleased with himself...

Now that you've completed this challenge, you have two choices - you can go straight to lesson 2, or you can go onto the 250 cylinder challenge. You can choose to do either - or you can even do them both together. The cylinder stuff will help with the form intersection exercise in lesson 2, so you should at least read over those notes before attempting that exercise.

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

2016-12-22 01:42

Your use of form and construction is coming along quite well. One thing that jumps out at me though is that in favour of having more notes/explorative sketches and such, your actual insect drawings end up being quite small. The downside to this is that it means the smallest mark you can make relative to the overall size of you drawing isn't going to be that small (resulting in some sloppy texturing like here and here), and even more importantly it leaves you with less room to think through spatial problems, which can in turn result in some shoddy construction work.

That said, you're generally doing pretty well. I especially liked this one, both for its solid use of form and awareness of volume, but also for the little bits of texture that are very clearly made up of highly intentional marks (rather than scribbling or randomness that can be seen in some of the ones I linked above).

Keep up the good work and consider this lesson complete.

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

2016-12-22 01:30

Definitely a move in the right direction, so I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete.

One important thing to keep in mind is what you mentioned about things still feeling very inaccurate and stiff. Trying to achieve perfect accuracy in all things is what makes our marks come out stiff. If we didn't have to care at all about what line we put down, and just put down whatever our arm wanted to at the time, all of our marks would come out nice and smooth - that's what you need to channel when drawing.

Obviously every mark we put down exists on a spectrum in terms of what we require of it - on one end of the spectrum exists flow and smoothness, on the other exists stiffness and precision. Drawing from the shoulder will result in more gestural lines, while drawing from the wrist will give us that overly-careful accuracy.

While we obviously always have a certain line we want to draw, you'll find that pretty much any time you want to capture a solid form, you're going to want to lean more towards the side of flow and smoothness.

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

2016-12-22 01:17

The thing is... that's not at all what you're meant to be focusing on. Your coworkers can't explain it to you because it's very complicated - and things this complex cannot merely be explained, they need to be discovered on your own terms. That's why the very beginning of the exercise description says this:

This exercise is, in all honestly, not really about the intersections. It's about being able to arrange forms together in 3D space. Ultimately that is what I gauge when critiquing homework submissions, though general intersection mistakes would also be pointed out. Still, that should not be your focus.

The main point of this exercise is to get you to start thinking in terms of 3D space - to consider how these objects can exist together, and feel cohesive and consistent (rather than having each one follow completely different rates of foreshortening, throwing the sense of scale way off). This is the starting point for understanding how to think in three dimensions.

An understanding of how forms intersect will develop under the surface as you continue along. It's mainly nurtured by use of the constructional method which is espoused in all of the lessons, and it's generally the result of understanding how 3D space works.

So relax - put the potatoes down, and focus on what the exercise is really about.

Uncomfortable in the post "250 Cylinder Challenge"

2016-12-20 22:30

Looking good. There's definitely some improvement over the set, but I think by the last page you get kind of sloppy - take more care when drawing your minor axis, be sure to apply the ghosting method and keep everything straight and solid. Other than that, consider this challenge complete!

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

2016-12-20 22:27

Looking good. There's definitely room for improvement, but for the most part you seem to understand the concepts and are working towards applying them correctly.

Your lines are coming out well - they'll improve with practice (becoming straighter and more solid as you train in the use of the ghosting method), but right now they're generally pretty straight and smooth, and you're taking the time to prepare for each one properly. Your ellipses are much the same - they start out a little bit stiff, but I can see signs of improvement as you push yourself to draw with a more confident pace, relying less and less on your brain course-correcting as you draw. When doing the funnels though, take a little more care in drawing the line down the middle, and keep in mind how each ellipse must be aligned to this line as its minor axis - so the line should cut each ellipse into two equal, symmetrical halves down their narrower dimension. Additionally, work on expanding the degree (width) of each ellipse as it moves away from the center of the funnel. Right now they are mostly pretty much the same degree.

Your plotted perspective boxes are solid. Your rough perspective boxes are coming along well too, though I do recommend that you go over your completed work for this exercise as described here. Since this exercise is all about estimating, it's natural for there to be discrepancies, so we need to take the time to identify them, so we can ultimately learn from them.

Now the thing about the rotated boxes and organic perspective boxes is that I've pretty much thrown my students into the deep end of the pool before reaally explaining to them how to swim. Essentially, I'm letting you drown a little (just a little!) so you can get some water in your lungs and understand how it tastes.

In doing so, there's a few benefits - firstly, you're getting acquainted with the specific challenges involved in rotating boxes freely in 3D space, so that when you do actually receive instruction on this front, you'll understand it in its proper context, so it'll make more sense. Secondly, you learn to face failure head on. Failure is an inevitability, and it's entirely necessary for growth, so it's important that you work towards growing to be at least somewhat comfortable with it. Without failure, we can't really learn from our mistakes.

Long story short, I expect students to struggle a lot with these two, and you're no exception.

For the rotated boxes exercise, there's two points that would help considerably. Firstly, try not to leave big gaps between your boxes - think of them as more of a grid with very small gaps between each box. They're tied to one another, and as demonstrated here, we use neighbouring marks as hints when drawing a new line.

Secondly, draw through your boxes. As shown here, I draw all of the lines of the box - including those that I cannot see directly. This exercise is very much about understanding how your box sits in 3D space, and how that changes as it rotates, so drawing your box in its entirety is important in order to gain a full understanding of how it occupies space.

With the organic perspective boxes, there's some examples of the two major common issues I outlined in the lesson:

• Far Planes Larger than Near Planes

• Inconsistent Foreshortening Between Boxes in the Same Scene

Additionally, I noticed a lot of little corrections drawn in while you were drawing each box. Corrections are important, but they can also lead to a bad habit of immediately correcting your mistakes as soon as you make them, which results in messy linework. Corrections should be something entirely separate, done to a completed exercise in order to identify and learn from your mistakes. Conversely, as you'll see in later lessons, we put a lot of importance on learning how to deal with one's mistakes - to work around them, to diminish them, and to compensate for them.

Anyway, I'm going to be marking this lesson as complete. I'd like you to move onto the 250 box challenge next for more practice with these freely rotated boxes. Be sure to read through all of the notes on the challenge page before starting the work, especially the tip about drawing through your forms. This is directly related what I mentioned in regards to your rotated boxes exercise, and will help you better grasp how each box sits in 3D space. In turn this will help you avoid some of the more common mistakes you made in the organic perspective boxes exercise. Lastly, when doing the challenge, make sure you apply the ghosting method to each and every line, so that every mark you put down is the result of clear and conscientious planning rather than any kind of reflexes or instincts.

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

2016-12-19 21:29

Really, really solid work. You've done an excellent job through the lines section, your ellipses are all smooth, confident and evenly shaped, and your boxes feel solid and tangible. You even really blew away the rotated boxes exercise, which was largely included as a challenge that I expect most students to do fairly poorly at - like I'm throwing them into the deep end of the pool before teaching them to swim.

This is largely because I find that if a student has the chance to get accustomed to the challenges involved in rotating boxes freely in 3D space (even if they have some catastrophic results) they tend to grasp the actual explanations much more easily once they're given, since they understand the context for it all.

The organic perspective boxes falls much into the same category, and I'd say that this is an area where you could definitely use some more work. You're still doing pretty well, and as far as line weight and cohesiveness goes your forms feel solid - they just don't match up quite right with perspective.

I'm going to mark this lesson as complete, but I'd like you to move onto the 250 box challenge next to get some more work on this area. 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, which in turn will work towards fixing some of the awkward angles and near/far plane size relationship issues that are currently showing up in your more arbitrarily rotated boxes.

Keep up the great work!

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

2016-12-19 21:23

Nice work! I have to admit, while self-critique and making your own observations is super important, I generally don't read them when students include them in their submission. Reason being, I don't want my own view of the work to be tainted by thoughts of "oh but they know this already". I prefer just to present my view on its own, whether that overlaps or not.

Anyway, you're doing pretty well. Your lines are solid and smooth. For your ellipses I did notice some stiffness, especially in the ellipses in planes exercises (which is normal since we tend to get a bit stressed when having to fit ellipses into awkwardly shaped planes), but I did notice it in your tables of ellipess at times. You did have one particular page which was much smoother and more confident though, so aim more towards that. The main point is that you need to draw your ellipses with a more confident pace, not allowing yourself to slow down and let your brain course-correct as you draw. All of that should be handled in the preparation stages, building up the muscle memory so you can eventually trust your arm more when actually drawing.

Moving forwards, you did quite well with your box exercises. I'm glad to see that you applied the double checking method to your rough perspective boxes, and you seem to have done a solid job with the rotated boxes. There is of course room for improvement here and with the organic perspective boxes, but I fully expected that going in. I generally use that as a gauge for whether or not I want a student to move onto the 250 box challenge - which you already seem to be doing. I definitely think that's the right path to take, as it should help you better develop your ability to rotate boxes freely in 3D space. Make sure you read through all of the notes on that challenge page before starting the work - especially the tip about drawing through your boxes, as this should help you better grasp how each box sits in 3D space.

Anyway, keep up the good work and consider this lesson complete.

Uncomfortable in the post "250 Box Challenge"

2016-12-19 21:13

Your boxes definitely improve considerably over the set, but there definitely a lot of room for improving. One thing that jumps out at me early on is that you started off by using a pretty small notebook - I'm glad to see that you moved to something larger. Often times I find that working smaller tends to limit the amount of room you have to work through spatial problems like drawing boxes, so it inherently leads to mistakes and general clunkiness.

While your later boxes are considerably better, there are still a lot of problems where your angles tend to go a bit wacky - so while they obey the basics of perspective, the resulting form would not really be a box (where all angles in 3D space are 90 degrees). You are catching many of these, but there are still a lot of situations where you don't seem to have added any corrections. For example, 229, 221-227, 204, etc. There's others, and it happens to varying degrees, but this is definitely something you'll want to work on.

So I'll mark this challenge as complete, but definitely keep practicing this stuff. I also added more recently a more advanced version of this exercise that may help moving forwards: https://youtu.be/y9DRITQ-HpA

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

2016-12-18 22:53

Nice work! You're doing really well so far, I have just a couple of things to point out to help keep you on the right track and ensure that you get the most out of these lessons and exercises.

So your lines section is coming along well. Your lines waver a little bit, so keep pushing yourself to apply the various steps of the ghosting method to prepare, before executing your line with a confident stroke just quick enough to keep your brain from course-correcting as you draw. The little wobbles are basically signs that you're second-guessing yourself. When we do this, we slow down and let our brain control our hand as we go. Instead, we want our brain to be involved in the preparation stage only, ultimately trusting in our built up muscle memory (from ghosting) to control our drawing motion.

I'm very glad to see that while in your first page of ellipses you seem to have forgotten to draw through your ellipses, you corrected yourself and did a pretty good job of it from then onwards. Here and there I do notice a liiiittle bit of stiffness in some of your ellipses (not all of them, many of them are really well done). When your ellipse starts to feel stiff, it's the same thing as what I mentioned above for your lines section - it's all about confidence. Trust in yourself. You may end up making mistakes in terms of accuracy, but the biggest priority we have is being able to make consistently smooth and even lines and ellipses. The second priority is then to be able to control them and draw them where and how we want them, but ultimately we need to get drawing them confidently down first.

This stiffness actually becomes more noticeable in the ellipse-in-planes and funnels exercises. This is completely normal - we tend to stress ourselves out when trying to fit them into those awkward shapes, so we slow down. Just keep pushing yourself to be confident and you'll do fine.

Moving on, your boxes are looking great. The plotted perspective boxes are excellent. Your rough perspective boxes are well done too, though I do want to recommend that you try applying the double checking method described here after you've completed the exercise.

I'm very pleased with your rotated boxes exercise. This one, as well as the organic perspective boxes, were assigned largely with the expectation that students would struggle a lot with them (since I purposely never fully explained how to deal with arbitrarily rotating boxes in 3D space). This is because I feel that if a student is given the chance to get accustomed with the struggles involved (even if, and especially if that involves failing a few times), they tend to understand the later instruction much better. It basically gives those future instructions more context.

So while my expectation is generally that students will have a lot of trouble in this area, you've done a great job. My only recommendation is that along the edges (the far top, far left, far right, far bottom) you kind of ease up on your rotation of those boxes. This is because our brains naturally like to keep things in grids - when we rotate these boxes, we're actively fighting against our natural tendency to keep things parallel to one another, so we really need to push ourselves to exaggerate that rotation.

Your organic perspective boxes are decent, but as expected there's definitely room for improvement. One thing that I'm seeing a fair bit of is that you've got some pretty dramatic foreshortening applied to many of the boxes - this inherently makes the perspective of the whole scene feel kind of inconsistent. I go into this issue in greater detail in these notes.

As you've demonstrated a strong understanding of the concepts covered in this lesson, I'll be marking it as complete. I would like you to move onto the 250 box challenge next - be sure to read through all of the notes on that page before starting the work, especially the tip about 'drawing through your forms'. This in particular should help you better grasp how each box sits in 3D space.

Keep up the great work!