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Uncomfortable in the post "Lesson 3: Drawing Plants"

2016-08-29 23:26

The lessons go through various iterations of evolution, and it seems I've forgotten to update the homework section to match. I've now changed it to 8 pages of plant drawings, the first four of which may not have any texture or detail and should just focus on form and construction.

The study diagram/notes stuff was part of a previous set of demos that I replaced a couple weeks back, and I find it generally to be distracting from the core element of construction. Lay-ins pretty much relate to those first four pages - focusing entirely on construction and not on texture or detail.

Uncomfortable in the post "Lesson 14: Composition"

2016-08-29 21:11

Yes, but also consider how the terrain itself can be broken up into different value shapes. Additionally, keep an eye on your edgework there. Right now it's kind of rough and unrefined - be more specific and purposeful when carving out those edges. Blocking them in as you have done now, and then going back over them with an eraser or another brush to cut back into them can be a good way to first start out sloppy and then clean up with a clearer intent.

Uncomfortable in the post "Lesson 14: Composition"

2016-08-29 19:44

Nice work, but one thing I want to draw your attention to is how in my example, I'm not necessarily attributing one value to a whole object, but rather letting the values bleed across objects. What you've got now is a good start to define what the darkest values will be for any given object (or more accurately, any given level of depth). The next step would be to take the next value up and start cutting in with lighter shapes.

Aaaalso, laying them out vertically's probably a better idea considering how web pages are designed to scroll down rather than across. And thanks for the heads up about the website link! Someone else had pointed out to me that the thread had been locked, and I felt like it was really early, but never double checked. Almost ended up posting a new thread entirely, the only thing stopping me being the feeling that it just wasn't... right.

Uncomfortable in the post "Demo: How to draw a sky sausage (airplane)"

2016-08-29 19:40

Ahhh, that makes a lot of sense. I'll look into fixing that in a couple weeks when I get back home. Thanks for the heads up.

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

2016-08-29 18:21

Generally your constructions are pretty good. I am noticing though that you aren't drawing through your ellipses. I expect that you apply this method to every single ellipse you draw for my lessons, without exception.

There is one little thing that caught my eye, in terms of construction. For your ladybug (the coccinelle), the shell covering the abdomen doesn't feel terribly solid. I can see that you laid in an ellipse for that section of the body (which itself, doesn't feel terribly solid - keep in mind that what you're laying in is a ball, not just a 2D shape, before wrapping the 3D form of the shell around). The other issue is that after drawing the shell, the ball kind of... disappears. It's not a part of the construction anymore, which results in the drawing looking awkward. The forms you lay in should for the most part be the masses of your construction - not imaginary volumes. It's true that we do carve into those volumes, but here you've negated it to such a degree that it's undermined the solidity of the whole thing. Instead, try and figure out what the shape of the ladybug's body is underneath the shell, and figure out how much of it sticks out underneath, and conform your initial ball to that.

The other point I wanted to raise was how you deal with filling things in. I can't be sure, but from the looks of it you're using a ballpoint pen - those are only tolerated for lessons 1-2, from lessons 3-7 you MUST use a felt tip pen or fineliner with a 0.5mm tip. When drawing with a fineliner, you largely get either a full dark mark, or no mark at all, and it'll vary in size based on how much pressure you use. On the other hand, a ballpoint pen's stroke will vary, sometimes functioning a lot more like a pencil.

It's true that the felt tip pens are rarely ideal, and sometimes their ink won't flow properly resulting in a fainter stroke - but you should be basing your approach to drawing around the idea that it's either full dark, or it's not. So, when you have to fill in a shape in your drawing, you should fill it in completely to be a solid black. In your drawings, we can see how you've used a sort of tight hatching that leaves little slivers of white in between, creating a rather noisy, somewhat distracting pattern relative to a solid black shape. Additionally, hatching in general is usually not something you want to use when actually trying to add texture or detail. It's a filler - it signifies that you don't want to leave this area blank, but you aren't going to put in the time to actually see what texture and detail is present there. The primary way I use hatching in my drawings is when I purposely want to flatten something out, to push it back and mark it as unimportant. Everywhere else, it's important to take the time to observe what textures are present. The notes on the 25 texture challenge may be worth reading.

Anyway, since your constructions are generally well done, I'll mark this lesson as complete. I don't know when you last read through the lesson material, but if it was more than 10 days ago, you should give it another look, as I added a 40 minute intro video and three more demos. I did the same thing to lesson 3, so that may also be worth looking over in order to refresh your memory.

Uncomfortable in the post "Lesson 3: Drawing Plants"

2016-08-29 17:02

There's One thing you're doing consistently that is hindering you quite a bit - you're drawing things really, really small, and it's limiting the amount of space you have to think through spatial problems. Looking at your stems/branches exercise for instance, you've got so much room on that page, but each one is tiny. This continues on until you start doing more detailed drawings, which are better in various ways - then you go back to drawing small again.

Then there's some other things that we've covered in previous lessons that you seem to have forgotten.

I'd like you to take another stab at this lesson. Be sure to read through the lesson again, watch the intro video, and perhaps look through some of the material from previous lessons as well. Don't forget that you're expected to continue practicing those exercises from lessons 1 and 2 regularly, picking two or three from that pool each day to do as a warmup for 10-15 before moving onto the day's work.

Also, In this nextattempt I want you to ignore all detail and texture. Just focus on drawing the underlying forms and construction.

Uncomfortable in the post "250 Cylinder Challenge"

2016-08-29 16:52

Looking good, I have just one recommendation. If you look at my step-by-step example on the challenge page of how to construct a cylinder, you'll notice that I don't position my ellipses on the end points of the minor axis, but rather have them sit on the minor axis such that it penetrates all the way through. This makes it considerably easier to get the alignment right. Your alignments generally appear to be fairly well done, but it's definitely something to keep in mind.

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

Uncomfortable in the post "Lesson 3: Drawing Plants"

2016-08-29 16:48

The issue is that for the most part, you're not really following my lesson material at all. You're chicken scratching all of your lines instead of applying the ghosting method, you're not constructing petals and leaves starting with the center line (aside from in the actual leaf exercise which was fairly well done), you're not drawing through your ellipses, and for the most part (aside from a few loose cylinders) you are definitely not breaking down your forms as I outlined in my demos or in my intro video.

Read the lesson again, and take another shot at the homework. It's fairly easy to get overwhelmed by the challenge ahead of you and fall back to the way you drew before taking my lessons, but you have to fight against that urge. Also, for now I recommend that you not apply any detail or texture and focus entirely on the form construction of each of your plants.

Uncomfortable in the post "Demo: How to draw a sky sausage (airplane)"

2016-08-29 16:04

Hm, that's rather peculiar. Even on mobile, you shouldn't have any trouble. Perhaps try clearing your cache? Also, if possible, could you send me a screenshot of what you're seeing?

Uncomfortable in the post "State of the Union - September vacation, and dealing with the overwhelming number of homework submissions"

2016-08-29 16:03

Thanks for the extra info! :D

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

2016-08-29 16:03

To be honest, I'll be able to give you a better response when you actually submit your homework. There is going to be a lot of stumbling, a whole lot of failure as you go along, and it's pretty normal for things to turn out better when you follow along a step-by-step demonstration. In those demos, I pick apart the forms and lay them out for you - when doing it on your own, you have to rely on your own sense of space, which is still developing.

All you need to focus on is putting your best effort in for now - once I look over the completed homework submission, I should be able to identify certain things you may not have noticed or have been aware of, so leave that to me.

Uncomfortable in the post "Demo: How to draw a sky sausage (airplane)"

2016-08-29 04:23

That's some interesting imagery there.

Uncomfortable in the post "Lesson 3: Drawing Plants"

2016-08-28 22:49

This is vastly better. Big improvement. It's much more clear to me that you're thinking through your construction in stages, rather than being distracted by all of the detail and texture. Your forms are much more convincing as well, in terms of how they flow through space. Just one minor bit - on the palm tree page, the little sketch of the top of the trunk to the right, I think you just didn't put as much effort into that one (which is fine, since everything else is looking good), but it definitely came out pretty flat. Try not to leave any of your drawings open-ended. Cap off the forms, instead of having two parallel lines just suddenly stop in space.

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

Uncomfortable in the post "Lesson 14: Composition"

2016-08-28 22:44

Yup, you can pledge in september and still receive a critique that month.

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

2016-08-28 17:08

Definitely an improvement. I agree that the camera is looking pretty solid - great work with the cylinders for the lens, that's quite a tricky thing to pull off. The soap container's pretty decent too, though I probably would have constructed the core cylinders of the nozzle starting off with a box.

Those two chairs were attempted with some rather tricky angles, to be sure. I think this also would have benefitted from being drawn in a overall box that encapsulated the whole form. With the first one, I get the sense that it's completely straight-backed (making the whole chair likely fit quite nicely inside of a box). With the second one, I'm not sure if it's intentionally meant to have the back set at an angle or not. I'm assuming it's a mistake, but even still. you could start that one with a box that fits tightly around the legs of the chair and comes up, with the back sticking out slightly.

Anyway, overall you're improving. I do agree that your linework tends to be rather messy, but you seem to be mindful of that. Fight the urge to make corrections, only ever draw a single mark for every line, and for when you come back to add line weight, make sure you've been practicing the super imposed lines exercise in your warm-ups. I think the importance of continuing to practice the exercises from lessons 1 and 2 are definitely important here, as it's those basic mechanical exercises that will improve a lot of the core challenges involved here. Keeping your lines straight, keeping your lines smooth, constructing solid boxes, adding line weight, etc.

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

Uncomfortable in the post "Lesson 3: Drawing Plants"

2016-08-28 16:37

You are veeeeeery much caught up in texture and rendering, and I honestly don't think that's working to your benefit this early on. In my intro video (which I hope you watched), I mention how I recommend that you should refrain from any texturing at all for the first half of the lesson's drawings, and this is why.

Looking at your drawings, you are getting distracted. Your focus, even when drawing the constructions, is on thoughts of how you're going to tackle your details, how you're going to tackle lighting and so on. You're not spending enough of your cognitive ability on figuring out what the basic forms that are present are, and how they interact with each other in 3D space.

Your leaves are okay though vastly overrendered. There are some good ones here as far as construction goes, but you've also got a few that go beyond the initial lay-in, and start treating it as more of a loose suggestion rather than an actual supporting scaffolding. For example, on the very last page of leaves, the bottom left - those spikey leaf shapes stop following the initial flowing shape completely. That initial shape is actually quite nice, in the way that it flows through space, but by ignoring it, your final leaf doesn't really carry any of that information.

Now, while I absolutely want you to push texturing and detailing aside for now, I will give you a few tips about that area.

If you read through the 25 texture challenge page, you'll see that I break down the process of learning how to draw texture into two stages. First you learn to properly observe ALL of the detail of an image in all of its noisy, overwhelming glory, and you copy that over. You forget about organizing any of that information, all you focus on is fighting against your brain's propensity to throw information aside the moment you look away from your reference and start working from memory. For example, if a surface has little pocks or pores or bumps, a beginner will register that and then cover the surface in bumps. Because they're no longer looking at their reference image, they're retaining no information in regards to how those bumps are arranged - are they spread out evenly across the surface? Do they cluster into groups? Is one area of the surface more dense than the other? And so on.

So, you really need to force yourself to keep looking back at your reference, never really letting yourself work from your untrustworthy memory.

The second stage is the one you seem to be attempting to tackle here - taking that information and organizing it to reduce the amount of visual noise, competing elements, etc. This has a lot more to do with using that texture you've learned to identify in the first step as a tool, using it to create smooth transitions between areas of full black and full white, and knowing where you want soft transitions, and where you want harder transitions. This of course is also all informed by looking at your reference, but you can't really do it effectively until you've gotten the first part down.

I believe you've gone into the second stage without investing enough time and practice into the first one. I think it would be a good idea for you to do the texture challenge in parallel with your other lessons (as it's going to be very time consuming if done correctly). It forces you to deal with the first stage for your every texture, and then allows you to come back down the list for the second one, ensuring that you've at least gotten some considerable amount of mileage first.

I think there's some good stuff in this submission, but a lot of it is buried by your desire to jump into texture far too early. For example, the construction of the plant on the bottom of page 8 is quite nice, though a bit small. The initial lay-in ellipses I'm seeing there seem to serve no purpose at all though. You've got some nice drawings on the two subsequent pages as well, but in general they're all REALLY small. You should be drawing bigger than that, in order to give yourself enough room to think through the spatial problems.

I'd like you to do five more pages of plant drawings, with no texture or detail whatsoever. Focus entirely on your construction. Also, I recommend that you rewatch that intro video first, and go through my demos once more.

Uncomfortable in the post "State of the Union - September vacation, and dealing with the overwhelming number of homework submissions"

2016-08-28 16:14

I really appreciate that (and the increase to your pledge!) - I genuinely am curious though, what is the Watts peer-review system like? I'm not familiar with it, and while you're likely right that it might be unfeasible for me alone, I might be able to pull things from that concept anyway.

Uncomfortable in the post "Lesson 14: Composition"

2016-08-28 16:12

Just keep in mind that things may be changing soon, in terms of the free critiques, due to the overwhelming amount of critiques I've done in the past year (1730+ since September 1st). September's going to be one of those months that I take a break from free critiques (I've been doing 2 months on, 1 month off for a little while now), but after that I'm likely going to change the overall structure so as to seriously decrease my overall workload.

As for that whole thing about one's mind being predisposed one way or the other... maybe, but honestly the way I see it, invest your time in the things you love, not necessarily the things you're good at. There are obstacles in every endeavour, and you never truly know what you're capable of until you've achieved it. As far as abstract/concrete ways of thinking, keep in mind that I myself am a programmer by trade, and I did that professionally for a few years before changing careers. I have an extremely analytical mind, and honestly it's served me as well in this field as it has in others. Simplifying the mind's manner of thinking into being largely abstract, or largely concrete will do you a disservice, and will put you into an extremely limiting box in the long run. Strive for what you want, don't worry about your chances of achieving it. It's a hobby after all - and a hobby can always transition into something more in the future, but you don't need to think about the viability of those goals any time soon.

Uncomfortable in the post "State of the Union - September vacation, and dealing with the overwhelming number of homework submissions"

2016-08-28 03:20

Thanks for the thoughts, and the kind words. The sponsorship program is definitely an interesting one. I don't know how much people would be swayed by that, although I think honestly I'd be more interested in a decrease in work over an increase in income. I'm just exhausted right now.

I've heard the suggestion about separating lessons 1/2 from the rest of the set, in terms of only limiting those, or only limiting the others, and so on. Those first two lessons definitely constitute the bulk of the submissions, but they're also a lot easier to critique. Conversely, the other lessons are more infrequent, but they tend to take waaaaay more effort to critique. At the end of the day, I'd say it's fairly balanced, and in the spirit of cutting down my workload, I'm a lot more interested in just reducing the workload across the board. I figure if now's the time to do it, tiptoeing around the issue would do me a bigger disservice than stepping it down now, then stepping it down again in the future.

Uncomfortable in the post "State of the Union - September vacation, and dealing with the overwhelming number of homework submissions"

2016-08-28 02:23

To be honest, I am pretty adamant about providing something for free on this subreddit, for a few reasons.

That said, I could always offer something less work intensive (like a weekly question thread or something), instead of actual free critiques across the board.

Uncomfortable in the post "State of the Union - September vacation, and dealing with the overwhelming number of homework submissions"

2016-08-28 01:55

Thanks so much for all the thought you put into this! My phone was off for a good chunk of the day, as I was in a sky-sausage, so I was kind of amazed to see all of your messages when I turned it back on.

I think of all your ideas, I think what struck me the most was the weekly question threads. This, in combination with something another student suggested in regards to doing a big group-critique in a video at the end of each week, could be a good idea. Instead of a group critique, I could take questions during a set period of time every week, and then publish a video answering as many of them as I can. This would huuuugely cut down on the amount of effort that goes into the free side of things, while also allowing me to create more video content that could in turn greatly benefit the people not interested in submitting work for critique.

Uncomfortable in the post "Lesson 14: Composition"

2016-08-28 01:36

The important thing to keep in mind is that you are not special, nor are you different from anyone else. The only thing that separates you from an artist you might admire, is the time and effort put into developing that ability. It's not something that you simply have.

When I started painting, my compositions were godawful. Whenever I tried to do black and white thumbnails, nine times out of ten it would be terrible. It wasn't until I started building up those underlying skills - building a sense for form, perspective, etc. that I was able to focus more on composition itself. Right now it's like trying to walk with heavy weights chained to your legs, one for every skill you have yet to develop, one for every concept you have yet to fully grasp. With practice, you start to first understand those things on a conscious level - then you start to understand them on a subconscious level, where you don't actually have to actively think about it. That's when your compositions will start to feel more natural, when complex scenes will be a little more within your grasp.

That is a long ways off, so in all likelihood, you'll be greating a lot of garbage til then. But there's nothing wrong with creating garbage, it's part of the process to become comfortable with failure.

As for your question, yes - lessons 1 and 2 are required, and honestly you'd be doing yourself a disservice if you didn't complete the dynamic sketching lessons as well. Is there a particular reason you don't want to complete them before jumping into this content?

Uncomfortable in the post "250 Cylinder Challenge"

2016-08-27 18:44

Looking pretty good. For the most part you're keeping a pretty good relationship between the two ends of the cylinder, maintaining a more subtle shift in degree (I assume that's what you mean by making one side flatter than the other). It behaves a lot like foreshortening, in that if you use foreshortening that is too dramatic, it'll read as being ridiculously large in scale.

Anyway, like I said, you're doing good. Keep it up, and consider this challenge complete.

Uncomfortable in the post "Lesson 7: Drawing Vehicles"

2016-08-27 16:24

Definitely moving in the right direction. That last taxi is quite striking. Your planes are also feeling more solid. Keep driving yourself to get the proportions of your initial boxes right, and to work in terms of strictly geometric and simple forms only for as long as possible (ignoring the fact that you're drawing an actual object, and focusing on it as just being more of a form intersections exercise where all the forms are arranged in a particular way).

I'll be marking this lesson as complete. I gather you might be interested in moving onto lesson 8 next, so I wanted to let you know that I have plans to rewrite all of the figure drawing content. I'm not at all satisfied with what I've got up there right now, and I really want to improve it. That said, it's on the backlog, and I intend to add intro videos and redo the demos for lessons 5-7 beforehand, so it may be a few weeks to even over a month before I can get there.

You're still free to start on those lessons if you wish, or you may want to take a break, or perhaps spend some time revising old material (and going through the new demos/videos) to solidify your grasp of what you've already covered. Taking some time to really digest what you've learned and reflect upon it could definitely be beneficial, since you've been tearing through this stuff pretty quickly.

Uncomfortable in the post "State of the Union - September vacation, and dealing with the overwhelming number of homework submissions"

2016-08-27 16:05

I actually did add something along those lines at the beginning of the year. At the top of lessons 1 and 2 (where I rarely ever see mistakes that other people haven't done before) you'll see a blue button that says "Self Critique Resources." It'll lead to a page listing all of the most common mistakes for that lesson and explanations of why they're incorrect, and what would be better.

Uncomfortable in the post "State of the Union - September vacation, and dealing with the overwhelming number of homework submissions"

2016-08-27 16:02

^shhh ^don't ^make ^me ^a ^liar

Uncomfortable in the post "Lesson 7: Drawing Vehicles"

2016-08-27 02:16

Your bus and truck are looking great. Very solid, very well constructed. Some of your other constructions are less good, and aside from the planes (which are utterly unfathomably stupid as a topic and I hate them and UGH i can never express how much I hate drawing planes) it really has a lot to do with how closely you keep track of your proportions, whether or not you draw your initial box properly, and whether or not you adhere to it.

Looking at the taxi, you've got a lot of arbitrary space on top of the taxi itself both in your proportion study and in your final drawing. I guess it's good that you were consistent, but the space in the proportion study doesn't serve any purpose. You should strive to construct the box so that it fits the overall form of something snugly in all dimensions. Think of it like packing something into a cardboard box. If there's extra room, it's going to move around and get damaged - you want to make sure that it's flush with all sides.

Now, if you start off with a box that is constructed incorrectly (say, near plane smaller than the far plane), it's inherently going to lead you down the wrong path. I mean, you're either going to be working the whole time to compensate for a fundamental problem, or you're going to adhere to the box and end up with a sort of reversed perspective. Really there's no way around this but to practice your boxes a lot, both so you can construct them better on your first try, and so you can identify the mistakes as soon as they occur.

The motorcycle definitely was a tough one, but you jumped in too loose to begin with. A tire is actually pretty complex as a form - it's not just a cylinder, but rather has several tiers - it's more of a cylinder with beveled edges. So, as a complex form, if you try and jump in to draw it without going through the various stages of construction, it's more than likely going to fall a bit flat. Then there's the internal section (the seat, the engine, etc.) which should have started out as solid boxes, subdivided and refined into more complex forms, rather than jumping into that complexity too early on. Keep in mind that by complexity, I really mean anything that isn't a very basic, simple geometric form. In certain cases an organic form can be considered the a simple form as well, but if you look at something like the motorbike seat, it's got a lot of specific deformations and clear planes to it that really need more support and scaffolding in order to properly flesh them out.

Now, with the planes (and this applies to that submarine as well) it's not always the best idea to fit the whole thing into a box. The lesson didn't cover this at all, so it's by no fault of your own. In this particular case, I would personally try to capture the fuselage inside of that initial box. The wings are inherently difficult to capture in terms of size, and the way that I learned it in my dynamic sketching class three years ago still doesn't sit that well with me, but I really can't think of a better way. It's all about eyeballing the proportions, and comparing them to other points on the image.

By reference points, I mean looking at the tip of a wing and drawing a perfectly horizontal or vertical line across your reference image to find some other landmark that it lines up with. What bugs me about this method is that there isn't always a landmark to compare against. In that case, I tend to err on the side of drawing a shorter wing, knowing that I can always extend it further later.

I spent a while this evening drawing out a demo on how I'd draw a plane, starting with the proportion study and how I go about using it. You'll notice that I don't treat the fuselage as a cylinder. I could but I find that this tends to throw the curvature off somewhat, and makes it feel a little less natural. In truth, the fuselage is somewhere between a geometric cylinder and an organic form. And so, I call it the great skysausage.

You can find the demo here: http://drawabox.com/viewimage/lesson7/skysausage.jpg

Now, with your truck and bus, I am pretty satisfied with your work. That said, I do feel like as you went through the rest, you started to adhere to the rules and concepts you'd learned from the lesson a little more loosely, which makes me want to reinforce them a little more.

I'd like you to do another four pages of vehicle drawings. Take your time, and focus on constructing the hell out of them. Oh, and another important thing - your linework is getting pretty sketchy. Reel yourself back, and apply that ghosting method. Think through each mark before you draw it, don't jump in shooting from the hip and then reinforcing lines by reflex when they don't come out right. And keep using that F pen, that's more similar in thickness to the pen that I use. Super Fine is probably too thin.

Uncomfortable in the post "State of the Union - September vacation, and dealing with the overwhelming number of homework submissions"

2016-08-27 00:27

Damn, that's a lot of ideas. I went through all of them, and for many, I went through the cycle of "ohhh that's interesting! there might be something there!" and then identifying certain problems they could pose.

Ultimately there's a few factors I always need to keep in mind, and they pertain to the more business side of things, as this is a small business for me (i'm no saint, I'm just a bad businessman):

So, I evaluate every idea against this sort of criteria. For example, my importance of offering a service for free is the bedrock of my reputation. I've improved as an instructor over the past couple years (considering that I started off as nothing, so there was nowhere to go but up), but I'd be laughed out of town if I tried to create a more traditional online school, or mentorship, or anything of that sort. So, this whole thing is built upon the good will of others, and I foster that by putting forward loads of my own. To forsake that now would be spitting upon the principles of this whole project, and that's some bad juju.

Now, that doesn't mean that I need to focus on delivering that free service to as many people as possible, especially considering the fact that the lessons themselves are, and always will be, freely available. Limiting the reach of my individual critiques would still be in line with the founding principles, while expanding that reach at the expense of quality would undermine my reputation and put the overall growth at risk.

At least, that's how I see things - I could very well be wrong. Traditionally expanding your reach and watering down the content is a great way to make a lot of people feel special on a superficial level, which is a great way to loosen purse strings too. Just not one I'm wholly comfortable with. Again, it goes back to the founding principles of the project.

One idea that did catch my eye was the weekly video review. I could see it applying at least in some ways to lessons 3-7, where I'd gather enough homework-fodder to establish a nice chunk of issues I could cover, grouping them off as "these people made this mistake, those people made that mistake" and so on. The primary issues would be that I honestly hate making videos (though this is something that's tough enough to avoid as it is, so it's really just me bellyaching), and that it would result in HUGE wait times for most people. The advantages of this method would be that it would result in more content (more ad revenue, improving my reputation just by having more stuff available, reaching out to more potential viewers, etc.), and that content would actually be better in that it would show clear examples of things to avoid and things to strive for while allowing me to present them in certain contexts. And, to be fair, writing and drawing a lesson takes for EVER. Time just runs through my fingers. Making a video is, at least often times, a much quicker process (also because I don't really edit them, clean up audio, and my production values are shiiiiit).

The thought of making videos very weekend makes me feel a bit queasy, but it does have a lot of merit. So, again - you've given me lots to think about. Thanks for taking the time!

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

2016-08-26 23:59

That's really thin. I'm guessing you're going off the numbered sizes (they don't actually correspond directly with the tip size in mm, so you should double check that). Either way, try and find one that's close to 0.5mm and stick to using it throughout the whole set. This will force you to learn more pressure control, while letting you achieve a greater variety of line weights with a single pen (allowing more nuance in a single stroke).

Uncomfortable in the post "State of the Union - September vacation, and dealing with the overwhelming number of homework submissions"

2016-08-26 22:45

That certainly is an interesting idea, and even if I didn't necessarily implement it in the main subreddit, it would probably be a welcome addition to the sister subreddit I mentioned. That said, I'll have to put a lot of thought into how exactly I would even consider breaking down such a rubric, and how I would weight the different exercises. There's some cases where I'd let a bunch of mistakes slide, and others where a single core issue would be enough to hold a student back. Even there, I for one person, say, drawing stiff ellipses, I might let them move forward expecting them to pull it together with additional practice, and I might be a bit more adamant about having another redo the section just based on the general feeling I get from the rest of their work.

But still, I don't think anyone would expect the same kind of result as a targeted critique. But for those reasons I might be a little wary of relying on that as a means to let students go through the first two lessons on this subreddit. It'd work great as a way to help others learn how to critique one another, though, in a less structured environment.

Uncomfortable in the post "Lesson 5: Drawing Animals"

2016-08-26 21:17

Definitely looking much better. Your constructions are feeling more solid - of course, your proportions do need some work, but that will come with practice. I'll mark this lesson as complete, so feel free to move onto the next one.

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

2016-08-26 20:57

Not bad, There is one significant hiccup I want to point out and hopefully correct, but generally you're doing well. Your arrows are very nice - they flow nicely and are quite fluid. Your form intersections are solid, though a little difficult to wrap my head around at times - using line weight to reinforce your overlaps, and perhaps shading one of the front-facing faces of each box with hatching would help to clarify things. Still, overall you seem to understand how to draw these forms together such that they feel cohesive and consistent.

There is certainly room for growth with your textures, but that is all I expect at this point. I see a lot of experimentation with how to tackle different kinds of textures, trying to get your head around how to depict all of these various different surface qualities. One thing I do want to recommend is to stay away from any sort of randomness. Squiggly/scribbly lines, chaotic marks, things like that - hold fast to the rule that while things may appear random, they virtually never are. If you look hard and deep enough at any texture created by nature, you will find a pattern, a flow, a rhythm. Sometimes it may be too difficult, and that's fine - your eyes are in the process of being trained to identify that sort of thing, and it will improve with practice and time.

The primary issue I wanted to raise was with your organic forms with contour curves. Right now, your ellipses are alright, but the curves themselves are not conveying the illusion of being wrapped around 3D forms. When you draw the curves alone, you fail to accelerate those curves as they reach the edge and hook them around. So, they feel like if they were to continue on, they'd fly off the surface of the form itself.

Read these notes, and watch the linked video here: Contour Curves Do Not Wrap Around Organic Forms. Also, try to overshoot your curves, as mentioned on that link. It can help to sort of provide a link between the contour ellipses and the contour curves - over time you can decrease the amount you overshoot, until eventually you don't need to do it at all.

For now, try to limit your organic forms to simple sausage forms with no branching or complexity. This will allow you to focus on the challenge at hand. I believe improving your use of contour curves, and your understanding of those organic volumes should help you improve on the organic intersections as well, which is really all about understanding how those forms interact with one another. You have to keep in mind how a given form will sag where its weight is not supported, and how it will wrap around whatever is supporting it.

I'd like you to do two more pages of organic forms with contour curves, and one more page of organic intersections.

Uncomfortable in the post "State of the Union - September vacation, and dealing with the overwhelming number of homework submissions"

2016-08-26 13:16

Haha, thanks! Both for the kind words and the interesting perspective!

Uncomfortable in the post "State of the Union - September vacation, and dealing with the overwhelming number of homework submissions"

2016-08-26 13:16

leaves that believe they are leaves

Whoaa...

I think what's overwhelming me really is a combination of the things you listed, but the focus is definitely the sheer volume. There's LOADS of lessons 1/2/boxes but those are relatively speaking easier to critique. I still have a tendency to write too much for those critiques, but at this point my fingers just dance across the keyboard (a typing speed of 120wpm+ is definitely an asset here). The more advanced lessons on the other hand take way longer to critique because rather than rehashing the exact same advice over and over, the problems tend to be much more specific, and aren't as easily explained outside of the context of the homework submission itself. The last point, wanting to work on my other projects and work on my own art (as I still have plenty of room for improvement), those points are really just extensions of being overwhelmed by the sheer quantity of work.

Ideally I'd want to spend more time on the things that would help the largest number of people - individual critiques are nice, but they literally help one person at a time. They do make for a great way to learn where people tend to stumble, so I can craft better lesson content for everyone, but I think I'd be much more interested in really clarifying the lessons to the point that they don't necessarily need additional critiques - that is, if you're able and willing to focus (which a lot of people, at least when beginning, have trouble with).

Uncomfortable in the post "State of the Union - September vacation, and dealing with the overwhelming number of homework submissions"

2016-08-25 22:56

That is definitely something for me to keep in mind. I'm actually not entirely sure how I feel about people completing the first couple lessons and then stopping. I know a lot of people do complete those first two lessons (whether they submit them for critique or not), and then just stop, but I strongly believe that it's still a great way to order one's skills and fill in some gaps. Missing out on the whole constructional method schpiel is unfortunate, but I'm not sure I necessarily want to look at those who stop at that point as being less committed. There are of course many, many ways of approaching the challenge of learning how to draw, and the different lesson sets are divided up this way in order to offer logical stopping points.

I mean, it'd be ridiculously silly to think of the figure drawing material in the same way. I have half a mind to just stuff those ones away somewhere until I have the chance to rewrite them, so I have nothing against people who go to lesson 7 and stop. But still, I guess that's not entirely comparable, as the constructional method espoused in lessons 3-7 is very important, and it does to a great degree summarize what I want drawabox to stand for. Technically speaking, a person to say "I have done drawabox" should mean that they've completed up to that point.

Ahhh, so much to think about.

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

2016-08-25 22:42

You're making some progress through this lesson, but overall I think there's a lot of room for improvement.

Anyway, I'm going to ask you to take another stab at this lesson. In addition to everything else I mentioned, I have one more important piece of advice - when scanning your work, scanners often have presets (usually b/w drawing, colour drawing, b/w photograph, colour photograph). Use one of the photograph presets, as the drawing ones will blast out a lot of the nuance of your linework, trying to raise the contrast and create stark black/white with nothing in between. The photograph presets will more accurately capture your work.

Uncomfortable in the post "Lesson 3: Drawing Plants"

2016-08-25 22:12

Not a bad idea, honestly. If it helps, I don't see why you shouldn't do it. I can't think of any reason it'd breed any of that there pestilence of villainy, but if you feel darkness creeping through your veins and an urge to drown babies in a murky swamp under a full moon, you may want to stop. Until then, have at it.

Uncomfortable in the post "Lesson 3: Drawing Plants"

2016-08-25 19:53

I think you've improved considerably over this set. You start off a little stiff, a little uncertain, but your confidence and your general sense of form and space has progressed a lot.

So your forms and constructions are coming along great, but I do have one thing I want to warn you away from - when texturing or detailing, try not to use hatching lines unless it's to purposely flatten something out. You have some examples of solid use of it (like when leaves twist and turn, you've applied some hatching to sections you want to denote as being the opposite side, this was quite effective). When using it as part of a texture however, it seems to come off more as you not being sure of what kind of detail or texture would fit in a particular place, but you know that you don't want to leave it empty.

The problem is that hatching is itself a texture (as any use of marks will suggest a certain surface quality), but it is virtually never a texture that fits, especially not in natural objects like plants. It's really a common fall-back that beginners tend to use, and it starts to become something of a bad habit. It will always have its positive uses (like when drawing animals, I'll always apply some straight hatching to the legs on the opposite side to separate them out and push them back), but rarely as actual texture or detail.

You do have some examples of solid texture usage here, too - on the sixth page, I especially like the texture on the leaves with the spots.

Anyway, keep that stuff in mind, and feel free to move onto the next lesson.

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

2016-08-25 19:44

Generally I'm seeing some pretty good grasp of form and spacial awareness. Many of your constructions come out quite well, especially the beetles. You seem to be understanding the whole idea of building things up from basic forms, while stressing the importance of recognizing even those building blocks as being three dimensional, rather than just loose approximations with no real weight.

When it comes to your texturing, you definitely do a lot of experimentation which is great. One of the larger issues that I tend to see comes from you drawing as though you're drawing with a pencil, or even a ballpoint pen. Felt tips are by nature quite different, and have certain limitations that should influence how you choose to draw with them. Rather than attempting to get them to do something they're not great at (creating marks with different levels of faintness - felt tips will go from 0 to full black immediately), try and work within their limitations. To create a sort of gradation with this kind of tool, you have to rely upon creating areas of alternating light and dark marks. At a slight distance, these marks blend together, creating the illusion of greys, whose darkness depends on the density or sparseness of the dark marks in that area. This is where texture comes in very handy, to be used as a tool for depicting transitions between light and dark.

Additionally, you should be more willing to fill dark areas in completely. Don't rely on hatching to quickly fill a space in when drawing from nature. This will merely produce some very high-contrast areas with lots of slivers of white amongst the dark marks. By filling it in complete, you end up with a fairly inert space that does not cause undue distractions to the viewer, allowing you to have greater control over what you wish to become your focal area. It can at times be difficult to fill areas in with a standard felt tip - a brush pen can come in quite handy in this case.

You can get more information about texture, the use of it to create transition, and some additional exercises if you're interested in the 25 texture challenge. Keep in mind that texture is not really that important to us right now, so don't let it draw your attention away from further developing your use of construction and your sense of space.

Lastly, just a question - what thickness of pen are you using? Your marks don't seem to go beyond a certain weight or thickness, so I'm wondering if you might be using a pen that is thinner than 0.5mm. I could very well be wrong, of course.

Anyway, I'm going to mark this lesson as complete. Feel free to move onto the next one.

Uncomfortable in the post "State of the Union - September vacation, and dealing with the overwhelming number of homework submissions"

2016-08-25 13:14

Whenever someone pledges, I get an email. Then when I am able, I send a message to them via the patreon messaging system to get their permission to list them on the drawabox.com thank you list (by their full name or an alias), and I ask them if they happen to have a reddit username.

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

2016-08-24 19:20

Your constructions are coming along pretty nicely, and they improve a fair bit over the set. I especially love the dragon fly at the end - most people do pretty poorly with dragon flies, grasshoppers, anything so very cylindrical and straight, but you've got a lot of nicely layering forms and segmentation and it all reads quite well as three dimensional forms.

As far as texture goes, that will take time to develop, and progress will be pretty slow. One thing I want to stress is that you've got some areas where you've filled sections with hatching lines, where it seems to me like you really meant to fill them in to be solid black. It's important in such situations to actually fill those sections in with black, and then to consider where you want your transitions between light and dark to be quick and hard, or soft and gradual. Gradual transitions are where you focus your texture-patterns, to create areas of alternating light/dark (which, if you know anything about pointilism, will cause the values to blend together when viewed at a difference, creating different levels of grey depending on the proportion an density of dark to light). Keeping your textures in these transition areas helps you to avoid over-rendering, and helps you maintain your focal areas. I've got more information about this sort of thing on the 25 texture challenge page.

Also, I wanted to mention that your scanner's presets right now aren't really doing your work any favours. You're probably using a 'drawing' preset (most scanners come with settings for b/w drawing, colour drawing, b/w photograph, colour photograph). The drawing presets really blast away a lot of the nuance and subtlety of linework, which tends to make it look considerably harsher than it actually is. Ideally you should be using the photograph presets to get a nice, gentler range of values.

Lastly, last weekend I updated the material for this lesson (and the weekend before that I updated the lesson 3 content). You should definitely go back and watch the intro videos for both lessons, and look through the new demos. They may help fill in some holes in your understanding that we may yet be somewhat unaware of.

Anyway, keep up the good work and feel free to move onto the next lesson when you're ready.

Uncomfortable in the post "250 Cylinder Challenge"

2016-08-24 19:13

Your cylinders are coming along well, so congratulations on completing this challenge. One thing I do want to stress - and frankly you improve on this as you go through the set, but it's still well worth mentioning - is the importance of aligning your ellipses to the minor axis of your cylinder.

I think one major factor in your having trouble with this is the fact that your minor axes don't penetrate all the way through your cylinders, they stop at the center point. This makes sense to a degree, since you've been very diligent about constructing each one from a box, and therefore you found your minor axis by connecting the central points of the two opposite planes. The downside is that since the line doesn't penetrate all the way through your ellipse, it can be very difficult at times to even notice when your ellipses aren't aligned correctly.

Another contributing factor is that you may be relying a little too much on the planes of the box when it comes to drawing and aligning your cylinder. Keep in mind that the box exists primarily to build the minor axis. Once that's done, the minor axis takes over in terms of alignment, and you may find in certain situations that the alignment achieved by using the minor axis does not align perfectly to the box. At this point, you should focus on the box existing as more of a loose suggestion for scale rather than trusting it for alignment.

Like I said, you improve on this as you go through the set, and many of your later cylinders and ellipses are markedly better. This is still a concern though, and definitely something you should be conscious and aware of at all times.

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

Uncomfortable in the post "State of the Union - September vacation, and dealing with the overwhelming number of homework submissions"

2016-08-24 14:26

Actually, you'd be surprised - I used to get a lot of sloppy work in the past, but these days the effort investment is pretty high across the board. People believe they are doing the best they can (even if they're not necessarily), so ignoring their submissions without a word would be extremely discouraging for them. My critiques in such a situation may be curt and direct (and sometimes a little rude) but giving them no response at all would be considerably worse.

The whole workload balance is interesting to think about. The vast majority of submissions are lesson 1, 2 and the box challenge as I mentioned before, but they're also easier to critique due to the fact that it's always the same mistakes. If one of those critiques takes from 5-10 minutes each, lessons 3-7 can take 15 minutes up to even an hour if I feel some sort of visual demo is necessary (though I'm far less willing to do those for free critiques). The problems that come up in those lessons tend to be far more difficult to explain, and much more specific to the individual student.

Each lesson critique presents its own challenges, which is why I'm much more interested in just reducing the quantity all across the board.

Uncomfortable in the post "State of the Union - September vacation, and dealing with the overwhelming number of homework submissions"

2016-08-24 14:19

I read your idea just as I was waking up, and it definitely seemed to hold some promise. There's definitely something there, though perhaps not in its current form. Each group would have to have a maximum number of students (otherwise I'd end up as swamped as I am now), and if I didn't cap off at a certain number of groups, there would eventually be ridiculous gaps between each time a particular group's chance came up. As it stands, at least being given a set month to get through as much as possible would be more... satisfying, I guess, than completing one day's work and then not getting your next set looked at for weeks.

As for your other question, as long as you accept the likelihood of your having to redo the lessons you finish in advance to reflect whatever you learned from my critique of the previous lesson, it wouldn't hurt. If you receive a critique with lots of areas to improve on and then submit work for the next lesson that you'd done prior to receiving that critique, then that'd be a waste of time for both of us.

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

2016-08-24 01:51

That was something that we did in the class I took with Peter Han, but lately I haven't really wanted to stress people to do that. If you want to, that's fine, but you don't need to feel compelled to do it. That said, be sure to ignore detail and texture altogether for the first half of your drawings.

Uncomfortable in the post "Lesson 3: Drawing Plants"

2016-08-24 00:59

Yup! There's plenty of opportunity to draw those things from reference in the second part of the lesson, so just focus on doing these two exercises from your imagination.

Uncomfortable in the post "State of the Union - September vacation, and dealing with the overwhelming number of homework submissions"

2016-08-24 00:24

Thanks for the input! The second point is actually something I did consider a while back, and went so far as to implement (sort of) for lessons 1 and 2 with the self-critique resources. I even set it up so that each point on there has a little link button which allows me to immediately copy a reddit-formatted link to that specific section.

It's decreased my work to a degree, but I have to constantly remind myself to actually use it. More than half the time even when I use those links I still write a novel alongside it e___e. I need to really force myself to write a lot less.

The idea of upping the filter a bit is definitely something I'll think on. You're right, the $1 barrier-to-entry goes against the values I want drawabox to stand for, but the idea of increasing the workload at the front is something that warrants consideration.

I love slack (we use it plenty at work) but I think adding another account, another app, another website would be a bit annoying for the users. Since we're on reddit already, another subreddit makes sense. Alternatively I could always build something into the drawabox site itself (woo bumping up those ad impressions) but in all likelihood I'd just stick to something that's familiar to the users.

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

2016-08-23 19:59

Scott Robertson's more closely tied to a more technical understanding of perspective. As far as perspective goes, mine is much more approximate, as I find that trying to think through all of the rules of perspective (plotting things out, being constantly aware of vanishing points, etc.) involves too much overhead cost. That said, I keep Scott's How to Draw book on hand all the time as an invaluable reference should I ever need to figure out the specifics to a specific perspective problem. Also, I think Scott's material is definitely worth going through in-depth once you've solidified your general sense of how things sit in space.

Uncomfortable in the post "Lesson 3: Drawing Plants"

2016-08-23 19:32

You're doing pretty well. The only thing that really caught my eye was that in the bottom left of the very last page, that cactus type plant. I might be wrong, but it looks to me like you're being a bit sloppy with the transitions between the forms, making them flow into each other a little too much instead of having clear intersections between independent forms. This is especially noticeable in the one that is closest to the foreground of the bunch.

The cactus on the bottom left of the page before it is considerably better.

Uncomfortable in the post "250 Box Challenge"

2016-08-23 19:29

Pretty nice work. I noticed a few (like 237 for example) where you didn't catch your far planes being larger than your near planes, but generally your corrections are solid. One thing I want to stress though is the importance of ensuring that your lines meet at clean corners, rather than stopping short or being misaligned. This is of course just a matter of practicing the ghosting method more. From what I'm seeing it's possible that you're skipping the first step, and not placing small points at the start and end of an intended line. Make sure you spend enough time on all three stages of the ghosting method to ensure that your lines come out as clean and straight as they can.

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