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I finally understood why the box forms are important! It’s also interesting to see how much my understanding differs from Vilppu’s approach, I need to look more closely at the tilt of the body parts. Drawing from imagination also feels different when using boxes.
Day 79:
These are looking good. Your work is feeling much more solid and dimensional. Your work is really paying off!
Thank you Paul for your kind words! I still have a lot of ups and downs in the quality of everything, but as you say. I also feel it pays off to practice constantly.
Today, I continued with the boxes, the directions are getting better without instruction, but there’s still a lot of work to do!
Day 80:
I decided to take a one or two day break from the challenge, not because I don’t have the time, but because my wrist hurts and occasionally feels weird while drawing since last week and I want to give my hand a little break. I will however do some research on anatomy instead
My dominant hand has still not recovered, but I did a left hand portrait to continue with the challenge
Day 82
Unfortunately my hand is still not okay, I’m getting impatient 🙁 I’ll appreciate it very much to draw again when my hand has fully recovered!
Hey ramona, thanks for commenting on my 100 day challenge. I don’t want to do the drawabox challenge yet, Im going to lump that in with perspective drawing. Anyway, I followed Proko’s free bean figure tutorial, and then happened across this critique video and they show you how to rationalise it way better and its easy too. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2tZ-21ztb8k Much better than Vilpu’s “youre just going to have to get over it” advice. I am immediately seeing a difference. Hope this helps you too
Ramona, great box studies. You were right to practice perspective boxes. At some point you can just eyeball a box at any angle. Perhaps more studies except use converging lines.
What you’re trying to do is the most advanced way to draw. It’s very difficult and few artists can do it masterfully, so stick with it and try not to get discouraged. I can see moving through your thread that you’re making real progress.
I think it’s useful to think about your eyeline in every drawing that you do. It will help make the converging sides of the boxes more convincing. For example no matter how a box is rotated or what angle it is in relative to the viewer, whether it is above of below the eyeline will determine how the lines converge.
As opposed to what I’m trying to do in my head approach, most of the time the box is used in a looser way. What you’re really trying to do is find the perpendicular sets of parallel lines. That’s part of the challenge.
Next, the question is “how do I build a leg, knee, arm, foot, etc out of a box.” That part is about anatomy. You need to start to create a mental map of where origins and insertions of muscles are, bony landmarks, etc and how that corresponds to a box.
This is how some sculptors like Richard Macdonald (former Vilppu student) who model in clay this same way as well. For example, the upper arm: the lateral face should get the insertion of deltoid and the origin of brachioradialis and extensor carpi radialis longus. Those latter muscles insert on the corner of the box of the wrist.
So it’s the actual boxing up of parts of the body but it’s also the mentally mapping those geometries to the human body, frame of a car, head of a bird, whatever.
Both are very difficult to do, so your apporach of just practicing and grinding away is correct. Also you can try placing the entire figure in a box so that it rests on the ground convincingly. That can sometimes help you think spatially about what’s inside the box and it can be really useful at getting the feet or any points of the body coming into contact with the ground to look correct. Also it helps you figure out where any point of the figure is in space because you can mentally check it’s x and y on the bottom of the box.
With continued practice, you’re going to do start to think of everything more 3-dimensionally and eventually it will become a second nature and you’ll wonder at how you ever thought of drawing as just flat lines on a page.
Back in the game (at least I hope so). It’s really a pity I had to pause this challenge for so long, but anyway I want to continue with the figure drawings, although it doesn’t count as a drawing for 100 days straight challenge anymore! But the recovery time was needed, the hand has now (almost) healed.
Thank you Alex and Joshua for your helpful posts! I’ll try to keep that in mind for further practice!
Just a quick sketch from imagination:
Day 83:
As you might see, my little handcident has resulted in lower quality, but I’m getting back on track and feel less pain every day.
It even feels a little bit fresher to draw.
Day 86:
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