Active Recall!

Today I continued with Draw a Box lesson 1. I will now draw a box.

When you look for drawing lessons you’ll pretty quickly see 2-point perspective mentioned. If you play around in Procreate you’ll see the perspective setting.

And if you’re like me, you think you’ll never ever touch it.

After today’s exercise, I have a basic understanding of how perspective guides might work. In any case, today’s lesson was to set up perspective points, connect dots, and build boxes.

And more and more boxes.

I drew some faces around the page to practice making a face look in the direction I want it to look. Mostly just following Sinix Design’s “Drawing Faces From Any Angle”.

And then I spent too much time chopping up the Procreate time lapse to make this animated grid.

Anyway, that’s that for today.

I’m starting to see the value in documenting the learning process. If I stick this out through the 30 days (which I’m pretty sure I’ll do) that will be a lot worth sharing.

If I stick it out for 30 weeks that’d be even more worth sharing. I’m less sure I’d stick it out that long but hey, one day at a time.

I started this post thinking I’d make some bad connections between drawing fundamentals and life. But even bad connections can take time to think of. Actually here are some quick ones:

• Draw a line: Begin with the end in mind. Otherwise it’s just like the cat in Alice in Wonderland.
  Alice: “Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?”
  Cat: “That depends a good deal on where you want to get to”
  Alice: “I don’t much care where—”
  Cat: “Then it doesn’t matter which way you go,”
• Draw a plane: Something about intersections and making connections
• Draw ellipses: Constraints can be good or something like that.

Anyway, instead of elaborating on those here are some thoughts going through some of the lessons from Draw a Box.

Draw a line (then draw more)

It doesn’t get more fundamental than drawing a line. It was also a point in the video to practice ‘ghosting’ the line. Where you don’t actually draw the line you just practice the motion a little bit.

Hey okay this does actually remind me of something: golf. Now, I haven’t played golf all that much, but my friends got pretty into par 3 courses for about a year. (Some of them kept playing beyond that, but I didn’t.)

I quickly learned to appreciate pros that can sink things from, say, 5-10 feet consistently. But you pretty much ghost the stroke you’re going to take. You do the motion and then you shimmy up like a quarter step so that the same motion strikes the ball this time.

Ghost that line and begin with the end in mind.

To draw an airplane, first draw a plane

Next up, planes. Welcome to the third dimension. The practice exercise continues on with ghosting.

This time you’re ghosting planes, which means it’ll be a bunch of lines. First you draw the dots for the plane and then you connect them with lines.

Draw a grid and fill it in with ellipses

The last exercise is drawing ellipses.

It’s a good reminder that how you do anything is how you do everything. These fundamental exercises will always be valuable because they can serve as warm ups down the road.

Anyway, you start by drawing your own lines and then drawing ellipses with at least two strokes around. The first rotation lays down the ellipses then the second one should go over the same path. It’s a way to practice being deliberate with your strokes.

(ALSO… just learned that ‘ellipses’ is plural for ‘ellipsis’. I thought they were just different ways to spell dot-dot-dot. If you have a dot-dot-dot it’s one ellipsis but  if you have two dot-dot-dots then it’s ellipses.)

That’s that.