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

2016-10-30 18:21

Pretty nice work! Your lines and ellipses sections are really solid. Very confident linework, smooth strokes, even ellipses. All very well done. Your boxes are generally okay, but one thing that really jumped out at me was that your linework isn't nearly as good as it was in the previous section. This isn't uncommon, but it is something to be aware of. It's easy to put lots of focus into drawing individual lines, but when we look at drawing a box, the definition of what constitutes the "whole task" expands from one mark to eight, nine or more. As a result, we're used to putting a certain amount of effort into one "task", and so the same focus and time that may have gone into a single mark is now spread out over many. Of course, this is all just in our heads - it's important to force yourself to recognize that a line is a line is a line, and you can draw it extremely well if you give the time that line requires. Yes, a box will take significantly longer to draw, but it's important to develop that kind of patience. You're already most of the way there, as most people have great difficulty forcing themselves to just draw a single line with any degree of focus. Just push a little harder.

There's just two more things I wanted to mention:

Firstly, in your rotated boxes exercise it looks like you skipped the early step about drawing the farthest boxes on the top/bottom/left/right. Don't skip steps!

Secondly, your organic perspective boxes are coming along well. This exercise was included here to give students a chance to struggle a bit with the challenges of rotating boxes freely in 3D space. It's not expected that anyone would nail it this early on. You're doing reasonably well, about where I'd hope for you to be at this stage.

I'll be marking this lesson as complete. I want you to move onto the 250 box challenge, both to get more practice with constructing freely rotated boxes in 3D space, and also to help bump up your line quality when drawing larger forms rather than just individual lines. Be sure to read through all of the notes 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.

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

2016-10-30 18:15

It's definitely coming along. The reproductions of my demos are actually really impressive, though I suspect at least a part of that has to do with the final result being laid out for you. Still, it does show that the technical ability is there in a significant quantity, you just need to be able to figure out how to make the decisions that get you there.

As it stands, your drawings are a mix between clean, conscientious, planned marks, and a lot of very sketchy, more exploratory ones. Through my lessons, I want you to lean more towards the first type, and less towards the second. The second tends to be much more useful when it comes to just reproducing a photograph onto your page, but when it comes down to actually reconstructing the object (and fully understanding how it sits in 3D space), it'll result in really flat, unconvincing drawings.

Here's a few things I'm seeing right now:

• You're drawing somewhat small in a lot of cases. This limits the amount of space you have to think through spatial problems, resulting in stiffer, less confident drawings. The tip of your pen also ends up being much larger relative to the overall drawing, resulting in some clunkier looking line work as well. It's usually better to give yourself some more room.

• You're not drawing through a lot of your ellipses - I insist that you draw through each and every one you do for my lessons.

• Your leaf constructions are coming along well, though things like cylinders (mostly your flower pots) tend to be quite weak. Make sure you draw through your forms - so if a flower pot has a section that is somewhat wider at the top, like a lip or something, your pot is made up of two distinct cylinders. As such, you should be drawing the bottom cylinder completely first, then draw the next cylinder on top of it. Don't try to draw them both simultaneously in order to avoid drawing the "unseen" lines. Those unseen lines are extremely important, and help you understand how everything sits in 3D space. Always keep in mind that the final goal here is NOT to create a pretty final drawing. It's to understand the forms that exist in the object you're drawing. This also means that you should not be drawing through your ellipses and forms faintly or timidly - this generally makes your forms less solid.

• When your forms get cut off on the side or bottom of a page, you tend to leave them open - I believe I mention this in the intro video, that you should always cap them off in order to reinforce the form. Leaving it open (basically two lines that just stop suddenly) will flatten your drawing out.

• The tree was probably a bad idea. Again, remember that the focus here is your forms and construction, not on detail or texture. As far as maintaining solid forms goes, if you look at your tree you'll see that the sides of any given cylinder that makes up a branch or the trunk are quite wavy. This inherently makes the tree feel much less solid. Always construct the simplest level of form first, then add more complexity and break up those forms in successive passes. This means drawing cylinders with smooth lines (rather than wavy or bumpy ones), then adding the bumpy detail later. Break everything up into stages, where you're moving from simple to complex. Still, a tree was definitely outside of the scope of this lesson, and was definitely very challenging because of its overall scale and complexity.

Anyway, I am going to mark this lesson as complete, but I want you to take everything I've said here to heart and apply it in the next lesson. Also, make sure you pay more attention to my intro videos, as many of these points are things I've mentioned there.

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

2016-10-30 17:59

It's coming along. There's a lot of shortcomings, but I think it comes down to needing practice (this kind of construction is goddamn difficult) and a matter of patience.

There's definitely a considerable improvement when you transitioned from freehanding your straight lines to using a ruler. A similar thing would happen if you did the same thing for your ellipses, but admittedly ellipse guides aren't the sort of thing most people have lying around.

One thing that I don't see you doing as much as you should though is starting your cylinders off as boxes, and your ellipses off as rectangles. You do it here and there, but as you progress through the set, your willingness to go through all of the steps definitely decreases. For example, you've got a lot of cylinders for which alignment is imperative for that locomotive, but most of them were not constructed as boxes first. Creating the box first, then using the approach I demonstrate in this video to ensure that the ellipse's degree is correct goes a long way towards helping you align these forms believably. The alignment being even slightly off tends to contribute a lot to the overall willingness of your viewer to buy into the illusion you're creating.

Ultimately it is really important that you focus on drawing a bunch of primitive forms for 80-90% of the drawing process, rather than trying to draw the exact objects you're seeing. There's definitely a lot of signs here of you getting too caught up in the little details before your overall structure is properly built up. While your first two pages definitely were rough, I think they were going in the right direction. Using an enclosing box and a couple of proportion studies would have been a big plus, but overall you were very clearly drawing cylinders and boxes, rather than a cab, wheels, an engine block, a cement mixer thing, etc.

Lastly, about the shadows/black parts, keep in mind that I generally don't make those decisions based on the actual reference image. I'm not really drawing shadows so much as using the heavy black sections as a tool. It allows me to choose what parts of the drawing I want to really emphasize, and which parts I want to push back. Often times, even when drawing cast shadows (like on the coast guard boat) it'll be my own shadows rather than those I see in the reference image. It's largely a matter of deciding where your primary light source is in 3D space, and then considering how that's going to hit your forms. Admittedly it's not something I talk about at all in the lessons, because I find that people tend to get distracted from the main matters of form and silhouette.

One last thing I want to mention is that your boxes do need work - that is, the initial boxes you construct to contain everything. The integrity of your boxes is going to really determine how solid and believable the forms you construct inside of them are going to feel. So always remember that you should continue to practice just drawing regular boxes, and stay on top of pinning down the mistakes you tend to make when doing so, so you can grow from them.

As I said before, you're showing that you've understood most of the techniques I explained in this lesson - for the most part, you just need to push forwards with more practice and more patience. 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)"

2016-10-30 17:41

Your use of construction is coming along great. I especially like the solidity of this one. Now while that is enough for me to mark the lesson as complete, there is something significant that I want to point out, that you need to work on above all else: your line quality.

You're chicken scratching. Instead of planning, preparing and executing each individual line using the ghosting method, you're roughly scratching your lines along with short segments. This isn't the case for all your lines, but it is definitely present and it's a terrible habit that you need to break, and it's more than likely happening because you may still be drawing from your wrist rather than your shoulder. You should be applying the ghosting method to everything. What you're doing right now is more thinking on the page, rather than in your head.

Another issue that I'm seeing is that once you've laid down some rougher linework, you come back and clean it up by replacing your initial lines with darker strokes. Basically you end up with two phases - one phase of lighter, more confident, but somewhat poorly planned marks, and one phase of stiff, overly careful, darker ones. The approach focuses on sketching, then replacing the sketchy lines with clean ones. It too is a bad habit.

Instead, what I want you to do may seem similar, but the manner of thinking is different. Draw your initial lines without trying to hide them. Don't worry about their weight too much, just don't make them needlessly faint or needlessly heavy. Focus on drawing well planned lines using the ghosting method, and focus entirely on using those lines to create individual solid forms. Don't get caught up in the details of the object you're drawing, just focus on the rudimentary, simple forms.

Once you've got your construction laid out, then you can start thinking about which lines you want to emphasize by adding some line weight to them. Keep in mind that you're not replacing your linework - you're drawing more attention to the lines that already exist (and in turn taking attention away from other marks). It's important that you draw with a confident pace at all times. At no point should you be drawing your forms from the wrist (or really from the elbow for that matter, as it's easy to slip from drawing from your elbow back into drawing from your wrist).

Anyway, like I said - your constructions are good, so I am marking this lesson as complete. You need to make sure you break that chicken scratching habit (which I'm sure you can, as you're not chicken scratching every mark). Also, I want to reiterate the importance of keeping up with your lesson 1 and 2 exercises. I'm not sure if you have been, but you should be incorporating them into a warmup routine, picking two or three exercises from those two lessons each day to do for 10-15 minutes before moving onto the day's work.

Uncomfortable in the post "250 Box Challenge"

2016-10-30 17:16

Looking pretty good! I have only one suggestion - it may help to clarify which side of the box faces the viewer and which side faces away if you fill in just one of the front-faces with tight, parallel hatching. This gives the eye the added visual cue that it needs to grasp what's going on. That said, you did a solid job with your line weights - this would just be a little added push.

As for your troubles with not being able to erase, that's the point - erasing implies that the resulting box is the goal. That is, to draw a pretty box. It's not. You could just as well burn every sheet of homework you do, and you'd still retain its purpose. We learn from those mistakes, and we grow from being forced to come to terms with our failures. Slipping up on the first hundred lines, so long as you reflect upon what made them incorrect, is what will make your next hundred lines just a little bit better.

Keep up the solid work and consider this challenge complete. As for your question, I don't have any limitations on how many submissions a student can make - I may add this if I find myself getting overwhelmed with the workload again, but I see no need to right now. That said, you really shouldn't submit work you've done before getting a prerequisite marked as complete. Completing lesson 2 before I review the box challenge is totally fine because it's not a prerequisite. Completing lesson 2 before having lesson 1 marked as complete is not, however. It means that a lot of the mistakes I may have brought to your attention in lesson 1 would not be reflected in your lesson 2 work. So keep that in mind when deciding what to submit, and what to redo.

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

2016-10-30 17:10

As you progress through the set, your sense of construction and your use of line and form definitely improves considerably. By the end of it, I'd say you've gained a pretty decent grasp of how to make the different forms fit together believably. The only problem I'm seeing remain however is that you're still a little bit too focused on the details. Focusing on details during the detail phase is totally fine of course, but the problem occurs when we start thinking ahead - when we're dealing with the construction phase, and our mind wanders to the various more complex bits we'll be adding soon.

I'd say that when doing these exercises, you should avoid adding colour and values entirely. The more you pile onto your expectations of your drawing, the more your mind's going to be split as you tackle it. Keep in mind that these exercises are all about construction and form. That isn't to say you can't do other drawings where you play with colour and whatnot, but don't mix them up. Another thing to keep in mind is that we don't actually care about what the resulting drawing looks like - we don't care if we're creating a pretty final drawing. We care about the process itself, and what it teaches us. We care about actually drawing with the confidence and boldness to make the mistakes that allow us to learn and grow. Keep that in mind as you move forwards.

I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete - make sure that for future homework that you submit to me, you focus only on what the lesson asks for.

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

2016-10-28 22:36

You've done a pretty decent job. One thing that I do want to point out though is that you have a tendency to draw in a particularly delicate, sketchy manner - like you're skirting around the edges of the drawing, trying not to leave more ink on the page than you need to in the interest of having a cleaner resulting drawing.

This comes dangerously close to chicken scratching, and generally results in constructions made up of forms that do not feel particularly solid. It can be daunting to really pin down the exact mark you want to make - largely because of the fear (and in many cases, inevitability) that you won't draw it correctly - but you really need to push yourself to do that. This is what the ghosting method, which should be applied to every mark you put down, is all about. You set yourself up to make a specific mark, and you can see clearly whether or not you've nailed it.

There's nothing wrong with making a mistake - in fact, mistakes are entirely necessary in order to grow. If you tiptoe around and avoid challenging yourself to put down these solid, specific strokes, you will find your progress to be rather shallow.

This applies as well when you're texturing - you didn't apply very much of it (which is totally fine, we're really more focused on solid constructions rather than detail), but when you did, it was generally very loose, relied heavily on randomness and didn't reflect a whole lot of actual observation.

Here's a few things to keep in mind when tackling any kind of detail or texture:

• You should be spending far more time observing and studying your reference, than you spend actually drawing. It's very easy to get caught up in drawing from memory - within seconds of looking away from your reference, your brain will already have thrown away major, important chunks of information pertaining to what you had seen. You absolutely need to constantly look back, even after just one or two seconds of drawing.

• Be deliberate - try and identify the rhythms and patterns present in the textures you see, and consider what exactly gives that texture the appearance of the qualities it holds. That is to say, what makes something look rough, wet, smooth, spongy, and so on. As you identify these qualities, put down specific marks that reflect your observations. Don't rely on any kind of randomness.

• Avoid hatching - while hatching only really reflects a very small subset of textures, people tend to apply it all over as a sort of shorthand for "I want to fill this space but I don't want to take the time to really see what's there".

• Don't feel compelled to cover everything with texture - you're already pretty comfortable with blank surfaces, and that's a good thing. Don't ever feel that it's necessary to cover everything with detail, as that will only result in visual noise. Detail is merely a tool to draw your viewer's eye around your composition.

There's one last thing I want to mention - you last completed the basics lessons quite a while ago, so it's important for me to remind you that you should continue practicing those exercises regularly. Pick two or three exercises from lessons 1 and 2 each day to do as a warmup for 10-15 minutes. This will ensure that you keep sharpening your skills, and that you avoid getting rusty and forgetting important things (like the importance of the ghosting method).

Anyway, I am going to mark this lesson as complete. You're free to move onto the next lesson, where I hope you'll be more deliberate with your linework, and face the challenges of construction more directly. That particular subject matter - insects, arachnids and the like - are an excellent topic to really flex your sense of form and 3D space.

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

2016-10-26 21:25

Half a page at minimum - don't be afraid to go bigger than that. Remember that you want to get a sense of how each form sits in 3D space, and you want to make sure that it feels solid. If you need to draw bigger to feel that, then draw bigger.

As for your other question, it's not really a matter of how much practice or confidence you need - give it a shot regardless. You will make mistakes, you will encounter failures, but that is how you will grow and learn. In fact, it is a very good way to force yourself to think in terms of those objects as forms - just make sure that you are considering the individual forms, and not getting caught up in the detail of the object you're trying to draw.

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

2016-10-26 20:02

Overall your sense of construction is coming along great. Drawing through your forms, looking at how the different forms connect to one another, and so on. There is of course plenty of room for growth, but this comes from continued practice, and develops over time. The biggest thing as far as what develops over time is your observational skills - you definitely do need to keep pushing yourself to study and look at your reference more frequently. Try not to draw more than a mark or two without looking back at your reference. Try to think about how your reference breaks up into those different forms, and how those forms relate to one another.

One thing I see you struggling with is definitely fur - I've got a handful of demos on it, but I really recommend that you look at this one and this one. The most important thing to remember is that your tufts of fur have to be designed - you can't rely on randomness, each bit needs to be drawn with consideration. Don't draw continuous lines for multiple tufts - draw each spike separately, and consider the variation in their thickness, curvature, angle, etc. And don't go overboard with them - a few here, a few there is enough. Focus more on building up those tuft shapes along the silhouette of the form as well, as this is where they'll have the greatest impact.

Another point that I think will help a lot is to draw bigger. A lot of your drawings are actually coming out quite small relative to the overall page. When you draw smaller, you end up with less room to think through spatial problems - construction is all about spatial problems, and understanding how forms relate to one another. Limiting how much room you have can result in a lot of stiffness and clunkiness to one's drawing.

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

Uncomfortable in the post "A simple demo (relating to lesson 6) that I just did for a student, figured it'd be useful"

2016-10-26 19:43

Keep in mind that my lessons aren't about teaching people to draw. Meaning, I'm not teaching people to draw a mess of lines, so that's the only way they'll be able to produce art. I'm teaching people how to learn to draw. The use of all these extra lines, the use of ink, and so on are all tools to ensure that students understand and internalize the concepts that are important.

Down the line, after lots of repetition and practice, you will start to need those lines less. Gradually you'll behave as though the lines are there before you've even drawn them. Now when it comes to more technical drawings like these, the tricks are difficult to estimate but when actually drawing something for some purpose other than learning, you can avoid a lot of the extra linework by using a ruler. For example, steps 4 and 5 show how you'd draw a line going from the end of one mark, through the center, to find the same distance mirrored across - you could just use a ruler instead of actually drawing a physical mark.

It's incredibly damaging to go in thinking about "I want to draw beautiful things!" because then you become far too focused on the final result. What's important is that you focus on the process, how you learn to think in 3D space, and so on. That, at least when using the methods I espouse, requires a lot of extra, well planned and well executed marks that contribute to your understanding of the object you're drawing, moreso than the final drawing itself.

Uncomfortable in the post "A simple demo (relating to lesson 6) that I just did for a student, figured it'd be useful"

2016-10-26 16:12

Ahaha, my god, actually drawing the vanishing points for that? I imagine you either ran into a problem where your drawing ended up really small (due to having to fit the VPs in your page) or your perspective ended up overly dramatic (due to having VPs too close to the object). That's why I really push for using boxes to imply VP positions.

Still, all things considered that sounds like an interesting thing to try.

Uncomfortable in the post "A simple demo (relating to lesson 6) that I just did for a student, figured it'd be useful"

2016-10-26 15:13

I don't do anything akin to erasing in any of the demos in the given lessons. For example:

• http://drawabox.com/images/lesson3/demo2_8.jpg

• http://drawabox.com/images/lesson4/demo2_7.jpg

• http://drawabox.com/images/lesson5/demo1_6.jpg

• http://drawabox.com/images/lesson6/demo2_8.jpg

• http://drawabox.com/images/lesson7/demo2_9.jpg

I specifically use a brush in those demos that has no opacity variance (only size is set to pressure). It's actually considerably more difficult to control than a fineliner because of all sorts of digital finickiness. The point of the matter is that once you've drawn all your lines, you can use line weight and fill areas in with black in order to emphasize and bring forward certain lines, while pushing others back. The lines are all there, but these tricks let you organize them, and communicate to the viewer's eyes which ones are important and which ones aren't.

Uncomfortable in the post "A simple demo (relating to lesson 6) that I just did for a student, figured it'd be useful"

2016-10-26 14:19

<_< it's more or less how I picture all of my interactions with my students.

Uncomfortable in the post "A simple demo (relating to lesson 6) that I just did for a student, figured it'd be useful"

2016-10-26 13:33

Thanks for the excellent explanation!

Uncomfortable in the post "A simple demo (relating to lesson 6) that I just did for a student, figured it'd be useful"

2016-10-26 13:32

They're actually imperative - steps 4 and 5 are where you actually transfer the measurements from one side to the other, ensuring that the width and height of each corner is consistent as you move them around in 3D space. More than anything, this whole demo is an example of how and where to use this technique - drawing a line some distance away from the center of a plane, then mirroring that same distance across to the other side. I discuss it in greater detail in the intro video for lesson 6.

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

2016-10-26 00:37

This is so much better. I'll go ahead and mark the lesson as complete. There's certainly plenty of room to grow, but you're definitely understanding the direction you have to take. Many of these feel considerably more solid now, and it's clear that you're focusing on each individual form and how they connect to one another. Keep up the good work!

Uncomfortable in the post "250 Box Challenge"

2016-10-25 20:11

Looking good! Your boxes, their general solidity, the confidence of your linework definitely improves considerably over the set. Your use of line weight in those last 50ish boxes also goes a long way towards really unifying and solidifying the forms, giving them a sense of weightiness. There's still plenty of room for improvement of course, and a few mistakes you didn't catch (240 for instance, the back bottom corner is a bit too high so the angles are off), but you're making great headway. Keep up the good work, and consider this challenge complete.

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

2016-10-24 21:56

There's some nice stuff here! I liked the gun and the game controller a fair bit, as well as the perfume bottle (#9). Overall you're doing a pretty good job when it comes to applying subdivision and going from very simple forms (boxes) and breaking down your forms to add more complexity in successive passes. You're right though, you definitely do need to work on your cylinders. One thing that should help is giving this video about circles in 3D space a watch. It'll explain why a lot of your ellipses are off.

You certainly do have room to improve with these (proportion is also an area you're struggling with in some of these drawings, such as the table lamp), but I think you should be good to move onto the next lesson, which expands on a lot of the material introduced here.

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

2016-10-24 21:50

I caught your pledge and sent you a message through patreon's messaging system. Since you changed your patreon name to match your reddit username, I went ahead and noted it down and added the appropriate flairs to your username here.

As for your homework, there is some improvement over the set but overall I am getting the impression that you're a little too loose with your linework. When it comes to constructing your forms, you're not focusing on completing each individual form and making them appear solid - you seem to be half drawing different forms, being very exploratory and quite rough. This results in an overall construction that ends up feeling flimsy, and doesn't stand up on its own.

Additionally, when you add detail, I see signs that you're working primarily from memory, and not observing and studying your references close enough. The marks you put down in many cases just don't really reflect what's there. At best they're a serious oversimplification that comes from looking at your reference every now and then, but primarily relying on what you remember. Unfortunately, our brains are designed to throw away important information the moment we look away, and ultimately simplify everything down into the barest of symbols. Because of this, we need to look back at our reference and refresh our memories after a mere second or two of drawing.

Because you've been working on them for a long time, and because of the work itself, it seems to me that you may not have seen the newer content (the intro video, the new demos, etc.) that were posted in August. If you have seen them, then you need to give them another watch and pay closer attention to the things I discuss as far as the constructional approach goes.

I'd like to see another three pages of plant drawings, once you've had a chance to review the newer material. Be sure to do the following:

• Focus on constructing forms that are solid. Don't sketch loosely - actually construct these forms.

• Think through every mark you put down - don't just shoot from the hip. You should be applying the ghosting method to every single mark

• You're expected to include the lesson 1 and 2 exercises in a regular warmup routine - pick two or three exercises each day to do for 10-15 minutes before moving onto the day's work.

• I could be wrong, but it looks to me like at least some of these were drawn in ballpoint - make sure you're drawing with a fineliner/felt tip pen.

As far as construction goes, some drawings are better than others (this one's not bad) but I generally do feel like you need to focus a lot more on every mark you put down, and review my explanations of what the constructional method entails. Looking back on some of your work for lesson 2, you had some great examples of clean, conscientious drawing. You need to get back to that, it seems that in the 5 months between submissions, you've gotten rusty.

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

2016-10-23 23:11

I'd recommend taking a peek at the next lesson's material then - in general, I accept that proportion is going to not be ideal, because that's something that progresses with time and practice. That said, there are techniques that will help you achieve more accurate proportion. It starts to get pretty heavily in to the technical side of things, but you may at least want to give it a try: Measuring in Perspective: Constructing to Scale.

Keep in mind that right now proportion is not a big concern. It'll be important down the line, but if your only issue were proportion I would have marked the lesson as complete. What's much more significant is generally breaking your objects down into primitive forms, and applying more constructive principles in the manner the lesson describes.

Uncomfortable in the post "250 Cylinder Challenge"

2016-10-23 22:38

Looking good! Your confidence with the material and the solidity with which you capture each form definitely improved over the set. The quality of your ellipses is also improving, resulting in smoother, more consistent shapes. Keep up the great work, and consider this challenge complete.

Uncomfortable in the post "25 Texture Challenge - fleshed out into an actual challenge for those of you struggling with how to render different materials"

2016-10-23 22:35

I'm not surprised! It was well worth the time though. Over the set, I can see that your general grasp of how to approach textures in general, how to identify the play of light across the surfaces of your reference objects certainly matured. This is as much a product of the span of time over which you did this exercise, as the number of textures you explored. Sometimes it just takes time for concepts to start to bud in your mind.

One recommendation that I'd like to make as you move forward is to decrease your use of exploratory, sketchy lines and try and think more before each mark you make. It's very easy to get caught up in doing a lot of short, more random strokes, but this takes away an opportunity to really think and plan out every mark, and to convey a sense of deliberateness.

Still, great work. Congratulations on completing this challenge!

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

2016-10-22 23:27

That's a pretty interesting concept - it's basically taking the whole principle of what an ellipse is in 3D space and projecting it back down onto a 2D plane.

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

2016-10-22 22:33

I'd probably use them more if there was such a compass type device, though I haven't actually looked it up. There could be. I mean.. technically I don't think it should be impossible, you'd just have to have two focii instead of a single central point. But either way, by ellipse guide I am referring to the stencil type thing. In the intro video to lesson 7, I believe I momentarily bring up a photo of one.

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

2016-10-22 18:42

I'll be honest - when received your submission, I was immediately a little worried due to how recently you'd submitted the last one. My concern is that it was unlikely that you'd given yourself enough time to really absorb and digest the information in the lesson. Looking at your work, this seems to be the case.

The biggest thing that jumps out at me is that you're drawing more from memory than from observation. When you look away from your reference image, even within a couple seconds, your brain will immediately start throwing away key information, making your resulting drawing appear very cartoony. It also tends to throw your proportions way off, as these generally require a lot of close studying to consider how different components relate to one another in size. Come to think of it, I believe I actually mentioned this in regards to textures in my last critique.

Overall, you need to slow down and give yourself the chance to really soak in the information in the lesson.

There was one drawing that I liked a lot, though, and I think it's important that I point that out. The fly on page 5 is fairly well done. The individual forms feel solid, I can see how the legs attach to the thorax, and the legs themselves don't feel stiff, but they also feel like they're three dimensional. The only thing that's missing is that you should have drawn ellipses between the three major masses to mark out where exactly they intersect. When two shapes (2D) intersect, they do so at a point (1D). When two forms (3D) intersect, they do so in a shape (2D). If two balls intersect, they'll intersect in an elliptical shape. Actually marking out this shape will really help solidify your understanding of how those two forms exist in relation to one another.

I want you to try this lesson's homework again. Take the time to go through the material slowly and carefully, and don't forget that you need to be doing exercises from lessons 1 and 2 regularly as a warmup (picking two or three each day to do for 10-15 minutes before moving onto that day's work).

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

2016-10-22 18:38

Try this - first, revisit the 250 box and cylinder challenges. You don't have to draw as many, but you do need to work on getting those basic building blocks down. My guess is that you've allowed yourself to get a little rusty in those areas - looking back on those completed challenges, they were a fair bit better than they're looking now.

Once you've done that, try replicating my demos - the speaker in the intro video, the wooden barrel, etc. working your way up to the computer mouse. This should also help you absorb the concepts more effectively, since you'll be able to follow along with the steps. Just don't rush through.

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

2016-10-22 18:26

It's a good start, but there are a few things that I do need to point out in order to get you on the right track. Firstly, for a lot of the more complex objects, I'm seeing you starting off with a box and subdividing it.. and then kind of ignoring it (at least partially) when drawing your object. For example, the pliers and the scissors on the second page - it's extremely important that if you do decide to use the encapsulating box method (which isn't always the best approach) that the object should fit very snugly within the box. That means that each extremity of the object should be touching one side of the box. With your pliers, the tip falls short of the end of the box, with your scissors, the left side of the handle doesn't quite touch the box either. Additionally, all of these objects kind of ignore the whole "start as simple as possible" rules, and jump in with fairly complex forms rather than simple, primitive forms. Admittedly these kinds of objects are actually considerably more challenging choices, since they have so many small components that are connected at odd angles. It'd probably be better to focus on things with simpler forms arranged in a more predictable fashion.

Cameras are definitely a good choice as a subject matter. In this one, you've got a lot of complex curving going on - near the top, a lot of those curves are the result of some degree of guesswork. A better approach would have been to construct boxes inside of your overall encapsulating box to construct the bulk of the forms concretely, before just lightly rounding off the corners near the end. This is another example of jumping into complexity way too early. Check out how I approach a similar challenge in this demo.

In general, your boxes and cylinders do need to be refined for sure. I definitely want to stress the importance of drawing through all of your initial boxes here (you do for a lot of them, but not all), and in general you do need to work on avoiding near/far plane size relationship problems. Your general construction of cylinders also needs some work - specifically when it comes to aligning them to the minor axes. For example the mug on this page wasn't great. Extending your minor axis further and having the ellipse sit such that the line cut all the way through it (rather than stopping at its center point) would have helped.

Lastly, just a note about the hairbrush. It raises an interesting issue - how do you deal with all these little bits? The answer is actually a matter of interpreting them as a single, solid mass. You can treat all the bristles as being a short, wide cylinder-like form, basically repeating that base ellipse above. This is similar to how artists are encouraged to deal with hair - when drawing a portrait, for example, we don't draw every individual strand. Instead we deal with hair in chunks, identifying how the strands naturally group together to create larger forms.

Anyway, I've mentioned a lot of things here, so take some time to absorb it. I also recommend that you give the lesson another read through, revisit the demos and rewatch the demo recordings. Then I'd like you to try another 4 pages of object drawings. Try not to pick anything too complex - this subject matter is quite difficult, so what's most important is just getting the hang of constructing solid boxes and ellipses together, and getting used to breaking things down into their simplest forms.

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

2016-10-22 18:01

Very nicely done! I absolutely love the gallon jug drawings - the angles were admittedly quite difficult, but your use of the various constructional tools covered in the lesson were spot on. Yeah, sure, the ellipses aren't the greatest, but it's still an impressive drawing. Just remember to work on aligning your ellipses to minor axes! And you'll be glad to know that in the next lesson, I outright tossed freehanding out the window and allow students to use ellipse guides and rulers. But it's still important to practice doing them freehand, as reaching for an additional tool will generally be a little jarring when it comes to the design process.

In general, very nice work. The only one I feel was somewhat weaker was your gear-sphere. Admittedly a very interesting and unique challenge, but I think you jumped into the teeth of each gear a little too early, and could probably have applied some more constructional steps in between.

Anyway, keep up the great work, and consider this lesson complete! Feel free to move onto the next one.

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

2016-10-22 17:54

You're definitely hitting a lot of major important points with this work. Your form and construction is coming along well. There are a few things I want to mention though.

Firstly, you have a tendency to get really cartoony with your animals' legs. Keep in mind that there is a difference between this and basic simplification. When things get cartoony, it usually means that you're not observing and studying your reference enough - it tends to happen when you work more from memory. Your brain tosses out important bits of information very quickly, within a few seconds of looking away from your reference, resulting in only oversimplified, symbolic representations of what you saw remaining in your mind. It's imperative that you look back at your reference regularly - like after every mark or two that you put down.

Of course, learning how to properly observe and study is the development of a skill like any other - it comes with time and practice, so gradually you'll find yourself noticing much more of what's in front of you. Just make sure you give yourself the chance to see what's there.

Overall your use of form is quite good - I really liked the bird on the first page, as well as your second springbok (the first one made me burst out laughing, it looks like it was on stilts). You're definitely moving in the right direction here.

The only thing in regards to form that I wanted to stress was something I saw in your first giraffe drawing. For the additional hump on its back, near the neck, you added an additional form. You did the same thing for the second giraffe drawing, but the second one's result was considerably more solid - reason being, the first one has little bits of line jumping from one solid form to another, but where they themselves are not inherently supported. It's like stretching a bedsheet across two chairs that are a couple feet apart. You can tell that there's nothing underneath, and that trying to stand on top will end badly. These transitions aren't always avoidable - they're still there in your second giraffe drawing, but because you minimized them there, it feels considerably better built.

Anyway, there's definitely a lot of room to grow here, but you're making good progress and you're heading in the right direction. I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete, so feel free to move onto the next one.

Uncomfortable in the post "250 Box Challenge"

2016-10-22 17:35

Nice work! Your sense of form and space, and the general solidity of your boxes has improved a fair bit over this set. The only recommendation I have is that it does help to fill in one of the front-facing faces with some tight hatching, just to clarify which side is which (since drawing through the boxes tends to make that a little confusing at times). It's not a big deal at all of course, just helps to keep that straight when coming back to do corrections.

Speaking of which, your corrections are coming along nicely as well! Keep up the great work and consider this challenge complete.

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

2016-10-22 17:32

I reaaaally can't stress the importance of... you know, not ignoring my instructions :P Since you understand that you should not be approaching fur in the way you did, and that you should be drawing deliberate, planned strokes rather than being rough and sketchy, I won't touch on those any further.

There's some good here, but overall I think you're moving too quickly. You're very interested in getting into details, and as a result you're not spending a whole lot of time on the construction of your animals, and your proportions are all over the place. A lot of what I'm seeing is the result of you drawing from memory, rather than observation. Remember that within a couple seconds of looking away from your reference image, your brain starts throwing away large chunks of what you saw, simplifying it into symbols. It's imperative that you look back at the reference image after every couple lines to refresh your memory.

One thing I did like was the heavy emphasis on form in your moose drawing. Still way too sketchy, and the leg construction is quite weak, but the head and neck feels solid. This drawing also demonstrates one major issue that is present in many of your drawings - absolutely do not cut off the feet, and when you do cut something off, never leave the form open-ended. Cap things off, otherwise they will flatten out.

So, what do I want you to do now? First, I want you to go back and reread the lesson, the demos, and rewatch the demo recordings as well. Then I want you to do four more pages of animal drawings, with absolutely no texture or detail. Focus entirely on construction, break everything down into forms and spend a lot more time actually observing and studying your reference. Don't let yourself fall into the trap of working from memory. Also try to be a touch more deliberate with your linework, and plan things out more. Some instructors will encourage you to be more exploratory and sketchy, but for these lessons it's imperative that you follow my instructions to the letter and not blend them with things you've learned elsewhere.

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

2016-10-22 17:09

There's definitely a lot of good stuff here. The coffee maker on page 3 feels very solid and quite well constructed. The cylinder at the base is a little off (alignment of the ellipses to the minor axis isn't quite right), but overall it's fairly well done.

The game controller was definitely a complex one to approach - I think I would have applied the technique I demonstrated with the computer mouse demo here, due to all of the organic curves and specific proportions.

The biggest issue I'm seeing here isn't an uncommon thing - you're struggling with your proportions. This will definitely improve with a lot of practice, but unfortunately there's no real trick to it other than giving yourself plenty of chances to draw from observation in this manner, and taking your time whenever you do. In the next lesson, you'll see me stress proportion studies much more (where you do orthographic drawings trying to break down how an object's height, width and depth relate to one another overall), so make sure you get used to doing those.

The only other thing I wanted to recommend is that you take more care in terms of having things fit snugly. That is, when you draw an encompassing box to start your construction, make sure the components of your drawing fit tightly within that box. Don't let them float arbitrarily within that box at all, as it undermines the purpose of constructing the box in the first place. Since at times it's harder to imagine how, say, a cylinder might fit snugly into a box, it can help to try and picture that cylinder as being a box instead, at least in terms of how to get it to fit snugly within the encompassing form, rather than having it floating inside or having little bits and pieces sticking out.

Anyway, I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete. There's plenty of room to grow, but you're moving in the right direction.

Uncomfortable in the post "250 Cylinder Challenge"

2016-10-21 21:01

See how the minor axis goes all the way through the ellipse? In yours, you had the minor axis line stopping in the middle of the ellipse, rather going all the way through. If you remember from the lessons thus far, the minor axis cuts an ellipse into two equal, symmetrical halves down its narrower dimension. If this is not the case, then the ellipse is misaligned. It's harder to tell if you've made a mistake with its alignment when your minor axis doesn't cut all the way through.

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

2016-10-20 19:59

Looking pretty good! I'm impressed with the quality of your constructions and your general sense of how things fit together and how the forms sit in 3D space, especially considering that your last submission was quite a while ago. Most people tend to forget a lot of the previous stuff if they don't keep up with it regularly.

I do have a few recommendations that you can apply as you move forwards:

• Draw a little more deliberately. Right now from what I can see, you're not planning all that much before each mark, so they tend to come out looking just a little bit sloppy. This definitely does have an impact on how solid your forms look

• Don't try and jump ahead too early. For example, this beetle. It's not badly done, but remember that this homework is not about drawing pretty pictures, but rather to improve your understanding of form and construction. Going through each constructional step and drawing through your forms will strengthen your understanding so when you do try to draw cleaner things in the future, you'll be able to visualize the lines you're skipping more easily, and won't have to rely on them being present as much.

• If you want to create a solid, black shape (a core shadow or whatever on a form) design the shape then fill it in completely. I can see that you tended to use hatching to fill your shapes on, and this tends to come out sloppy, with some unintentional little slivers of white poking through and increasing the amount of visual noise in there. Mind you I'm not talking about the lines you used to fill in the shadow underneath the wasp - this was a fairly unique and obvious stylistic choice, and that's perfectly fine. It's the things that don't look entirely deliberate that you want to avoid - sloppy hatching of any sort is something you should avoid, and hatching in general is more often than not going to convey that you didn't really want to consider what other textures may have been present on that form.

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

Uncomfortable in the post "250 Cylinder Challenge"

2016-10-20 19:43

Congrats on completing the challenge. Here are a few things that will help you with this in the future:

• Your ellipses are looking pretty uneven - it's a good idea to draw through your ellipses, and to draw them with a confident pace instead of doing so with a slow, belaboured stroke. As I explained in lesson 1, letting your brain course-correct while you draw will result in wobbly lines and uneven shapes. In my examples on the cylinder challenge page, I used a tool to draw those ellipses in order to better demonstrate the alignment accurately. When freehanding these ellipses - or any ellipses you draw for my lessons, you must draw through them.

• This video was included at the top of the page, you should definitely check it out. It'll explain why some of your cylinders appear to be squashed.

• Keep working on your application of the ghosting method in order to smooth out and straighten your lines

• Draw your ellipses so that they're sitting on the minor axis line completely (as opposed to being centered around the endpoint). This way the line penetrates through the whole thing, making it easier to tell if your alignment is off.

• Drawing small is definitely going to restrict the amount of space you have to think through spatial problems - consider increasing the size of your smaller drawings, maybe by 1.5x-2x.

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

2016-10-19 21:19

Ack, I'll fix that right away. Thanks for the heads up.

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

2016-10-19 20:07

You've done a fairly decent job. I do have a few suggestions that should help moving forwards though.

The big one is that you're drawing quite small on the page - this is something students often do when they're not feeling entirely comfortable with a particular subject matter or a challenge. Unfortunately drawing smaller has a negative effect on the result more often than not, as it reduces the amount of space the student has to think through the spatial problems involved. Drawing much larger (one plant per page, or at most two) is usually better and also forces you to draw more with your shoulder.

Additionally, I'm noticing that your ellipses do tend to be quite stiff still, so keep working on that - remember that you want to be drawing them with a confident pace. Sometimes just taking a blank page and drawing random ellipses on them (with no set goals or criteria) can help you to loosen up.

Lastly - and this isn't terribly important now since it has to do with texture which is not the focus of this lesson - when you are drawing details, make sure you spend a lot more time observing your reference image. It's common for beginners to spend more of their time drawing, but this results in them relying far more on their memory. Ultimately memory, especially untrained memory, is not terribly reliable. We have a tendency to simplify the things we see the moment we look away, so after a second or two of drawing you really should look back and start observing again.

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

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

2016-10-19 19:43

Definitely much better on all fronts. I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete, so feel free to move onto the next one.

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

2016-10-19 14:23

I used to have this habit of standing on the toes. I think it's because I'm very short, so I automatically did that to gain a little extra height when standing around. When people started noticing, they were.. horrified.

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

2016-10-19 13:21

They deserve it, the friggin' jerks. I'm not even jokin- wait, no, I'm thinking of gazelle. Many years ago I went on a safari in Tanzania and gazelle would just hang out in the dirt paths that the cars travelled on. When you'd come close, a third of them would go left, a third would go right, and then the remainder would just kind of jerk around unsure about which direction to go.

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

2016-10-18 22:15

Really nice work! I love the variation of subject matter (that old ship is fantastic), and I love the precision of your constructions. To be honest, these are considerably better than what I can do - admittedly I'm horribly out of practice, but all the same, you've nailed the points I outlined in the lesson and have definitely taken them further with some fantastic use of line weights, and some excellent use of form.

Keep up the great work and congratulations on completing all of the dynamic sketching lessons! I'm not sure if you're planning on moving onto figure drawing, but if you are, it'd be great if you gave yourself a little break in between (so I can get a chance to at least release the first rewritten figure drawing lesson).

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

2016-10-18 22:11

To start with, your drawings are beautiful. You have very strong observational skills, and in some cases you're exhibiting some nice construction. In general though, you're not really applying construction in the way that I espouse in my lessons. Construction is about actually building up really solid, unassailable forms. Forms that at every step of the process exist in 3D space and must be dealt with in one way or another. You can't draw a form by putting a mark down and then say that form doesn't exist - instead you must somehow interact with it either by carving a piece away (which means being conscious of the form being cut away, like when cutting a hemispherical-scoop out of a box you're aware of the spherical form itself that is being subtracted), or by adding more form to it. The issue that I'm seeing here is that you are treating your initial lay-ins much more like suggestions, rather than concrete forms.

A really good example of this is on the first page - that second vulture head, you've got the clear ellipse/circle you drew when starting out. It doesn't actually fit inside the resulting head. It's approximate, it's a suggestion.. it's like you drew the circle, then drew a vulture's head on top. The vulture's head is really nice, but unfortunately if I asked you to turn it 20 degrees, you'd probably struggle with it, since that's not what the photograph you're referencing shows you. This is why it's so important that we actually think of that head in terms of a network of simple forms, because we know how to rotate a ball, we know how to rotate a box, so we can jam a box into a ball and then rotate them together. With a few more forms, with a little bit of carving, we can get a fairly complex head while still understanding how it would look from different angles.

Your details are beautiful, of course - you really have a knack for capturing them, and implying lovely detail while controlling the amount of density of information spread out across the whole drawing. There's no real issue there.

What I'd like you to do is, I want to see three more pages of animal drawings. I don't want to see any detail on them at all - focus entirely on construction. Every step of the way, before moving on, I want you to ensure that you are fully convinced that the things drawn on the page are solid and three dimensional. The initial masses of the cranium, the ribcage, the pelvis, should be solid organic forms (or a ball in the cranium's case). Then expanding from there, you should merge the ribcage/pelvis into yet another solid sausage form, and connect the cranium to the torso with yet another solid form. If you don't feel the forms are solid, if you can't imagine turning the form in 3D space, add a couple well placed contour curves until you are confident of that. Then move to add more forms, to break down more complexity.

Remember not to sketch - your drawings aren't sketchy, of course, but when you make a decision - like the placement of a ball, or something - you have to stick with that decision. The odd line, sure, if you drew something and didn't actually go so far as to turn it into a solid-feeling form and you realized it was horribly wrong, sure. You can leave it aside, but anything beyond that you really need to deal with, especially if it's already a solid part of the world.

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

2016-10-18 22:02

There's some good stuff here, but there's one major problem that I want to point out across much of your work - what I'm seeing a lot of is that you're drawing in two steps. Your first step is faint and light, like you're trying to hide your initial lines. Your second step is bold and dark, but drawn slowly and carefully (to match and replace the fainter lines). This is not a good way to approach these lessons, as it does not encourage the development of your own confidence.

What you should be doing is instead drawing your initial lines confidently - not with any concern to keep them super light and hidden. These lines will be a part of your final drawing, and they will not be replaced. As such, you need to apply the ghosting method (as I'm sure you have) before executing them with a persistent stroke just fast enough to avoid any wobbling. Then once you're done, you can come back and add a little line weight here and there - this addition of line weight is not a matter of replacing the lines you've drawn, but rather merely emphasizing lines that already exist. You should be drawing those marks just as confidently.

A second major issue is that you're not drawing through any of the ellipses in your form intersections - this is something I stressed in lesson 1, and it is something I want you to do for all the ellipses you draw for my lessons, all the way through.

Now, onto the specific exercises.

• Your arrows, aside from what I mentioned above, are fine.

• Your organic forms with contour ellipses are also done well.

• Your organic forms with contour curves are okay at first, but you are definitely still struggling with the idea of getting those curves to accelerate as they reach the edges and hook around to continue onto the other side. In these notes I recommend overshooting those curves slightly after they hook around to get used to drawing that particular curvature. Additionally, it's best that you continue drawing the central minor axis line through your organic forms, as it helps you align your contour curves. The curves are the visible portion of larger ellipses, and the minor axis should be cutting each ellipse into two equal, symmetrical halves through its narrower side. Often the curves being misaligned also makes it harder to get them to look as though they're wrapping around convincingly.

• Your dissections are coming along nicely. In the future, one thing I'd work on is generally trying to draw less as though you're drawing with a pencil (creating transition by sketching short line segments), and try and consider ways to achieve different kinds of textures without hatching. Keep in mind that each tool will have particular strengths - so to draw with a pen as though it's a pencil is probably not the most effective use of the tool. That said, you're showing some great experimentation here.

• Your form intersections are okay, but the general issues I mentioned above are definitely a concern here. You should be drawing much more confidently, and not going to any lengths to hide your lines. If you believe a mark will help you understand how something behaves in 3D space, or that generally helps you construct an overall form (like drawing a box and using it to draw a pyramid inside of it), you should draw those lines confidently. Yes, it'll be a little messy, but then using line weight to emphasize some of the particularly important marks will help organize them. Ultimately all of the lessons here first prioritize learning how to think in 3D space, and how to construct. The end result being a pretty, clean picture really isn't a big concern to us.

• Your organic intersections suffer a lot from the fact that you've decided to make each form quite.. weirdly wobbly and awkward. This complex form detail really undermines the overall solidity of the forms. Naturally simple forms are easier to give the impression of solidity - this is why in later lessons when we start talking about the constructional approach to drawing, we always simplify complex objects into a bunch of simpler forms and then build the more complex information on top in successive passes. When you start a form off as already having fairly complex detail, it's almost always going to feel very flat. Here I strongly recommend just drawing simple sausage forms. In general your interaction between your forms is decent, but the forms themselves need work.

Before I mark this lesson as complete, I'd like you to do the following:

• One more page of organic forms with contour curves

• One more page of form intersections

• One more page of organic intersections

Uncomfortable in the post "250 Box Challenge"

2016-10-18 21:40

Your boxes are looking pretty solid! Your use of line weight overall was pretty nice early on too - I suppose you did make the right decision, assuming having to budget your time, as the box construction is definitely more important. It's good to see that you're moving in the right direction with both however. For the most part you're doing a good job - keep an eye on the angles of your lines as you keep moving forwards. keep in mind that any given set of lines that are parallel in 3D space are going to have to go off towards the same vanishing point somewhere in space. This means that you're not going to have any one line that falls more steeply than the others. For example, look at 164 - the two lines near the center there going down towards the right should actually be more or less parallel on the page because they're heading towards the same VP. Little things like that are good to note, specifically that you can use existing lines that are parallel (in 3D space) to the line you're about to draw as guides and hints for what angle this new line should assume.

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

Uncomfortable in the post "250 Box Challenge"

2016-10-18 20:29

Add weight afterwards - when initially executing the mark, just focus on keeping your line straight and smooth.

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

2016-10-18 03:38

I'm actually about to go to bed, but it's a good thing I caught your submission just in time - your link seems to be broken. I'll be adding your submission to the list anyway, so just edit it to fix the link when you get the chance.

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

2016-10-17 22:00

Much better! Your constructions are feeling considerably stronger, and your forms feel much more solid. You do need to work on your proportions (the lion's a bit odd, and the wolf's proportions are more similar to those of a horse) but in general that's a pretty common thing that people improve on over time and with practice. What's important is that in regards to construction, you're moving in the right direction.

I figured it'd also help to talk a little bit about the fur. I really like the fact that you're focusing primarily with building up that detail around the silhouette. When you draw those tufts of fur however, make sure you draw each spike separately, rather than as a continuous line. When it's continuous, there's often a tendency to make it more of a wave, which makes it somewhat repetitive. Try to make the tufts more organic and a little smoother, generally less spiky and stiff. Again though - right direction, just keep that in mind as you move forwards and things will improve with practice.

Keep up the good work and consider this lesson complete.

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

2016-10-17 21:03

The link doesn't seem to be working. Let me know when you get it fixed up.

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

2016-10-17 20:59

Really great work! I'm absolutely in love with your 'lumpy' aesthetic - it gives a fantastic sense of the volumes and forms in each construction, and it makes them feel especially tactile. I just want to reach out and touch them. In general they also happen to have a lot of character to them - those boobies look loveably daft. I guess that's really how the animals are, but you've done a great job of capturing that.

I have only a couple of things I'd like to point out. Firstly, try not to cut the legs off your animals - it tends to make things look really uncomfortable. I get that in those reference images you don't actually see the feet, but in such a situation I'd either guess based on previous knowledge of what their feet are probably like, or find other reference just to fill in the blanks. You can add grass afterwards, but drawing the leg to completion will really give you a fuller sense of how it all fits together, and will ultimately play a big role in the decisions you make that are visible. It's similar to the idea of drawing through a box to get a sense of how it sits in 3D space.

The second point.. actually it's not an issue, as it's not prominent across all your drawings. It was just about the stiffness of your bears' legs. It helps to flesh the whole leg in as more of a 2D shape to capture that sense of gesture before exploring its form. You did a good job with the other drawings.

Lastly, I wanted to just mention that I love this drawing. Great form, great line weight, great motion. So keep up the fantastic work, and consider this lesson complete!

Uncomfortable in the post "250 Box Challenge"

2016-10-16 21:24

Nice work! Your boxes definitely improve over the set, and by the end they feel considerably more solid and well thought out. Your line weights also feel considerably more confident, which helps bring everything together. I'm also glad to see that you're double checking everything quite diligently. Feel free to consider this challenge complete.

You're welcome to move onto the 250 cylinder challenge - it's not required, but it definitely wouldn't hurt.