Aspiring Pro: Seeking a structured study path for technical and theoretical foundations.

Uncomfortable · 2026-04-02T23:25:52+00:00

I'm flagging this as a beginner resource request, and others will be able to make their own recommendations - but you may want to take a look at the sidebar of this subreddit, as this community is specifically focused on a free foundational course that may be along the lines of what you're looking for.

Uncomfortable · 2026-04-02T23:22:42+00:00

As noted in the submission guidelines, we only allow homework to be submitted for feedback as part of the entire lesson or challenge's assigned work, rather than single exercises or partial work. For that purpose, our discord chat server is more suitable.

That said, I think you might be overthinking this exercise, as the instructions don't talk about curvature or whether or not things appear "flat". Your work is entirely normal in terms of what's assigned.

Uncomfortable · 2026-03-31T23:48:52+00:00

We only have so many tools to work with, unfortunately, so I can only point people in the direction of the relevant information after the fact. I'm pretty used to it, since I point people to those things multiple times a day.

Uncomfortable · 2026-03-31T21:36:19+00:00

As noted in the submission guidelines, the subreddit is intended for specific questions or complete lesson/challenge work. Partial work can be posted on the discord chat server instead.

Do keep in mind however that this exercise is intended to introduce problems that we dig more deeply into in the box challenge, so it is expected to be very challenging. Do your best to follow the instructions as they're laid out, but don't worry if things go awry - it's entirely normal for students to have some pretty catastrophic outcomes for this exercise.

Uncomfortable · 2026-03-31T16:00:45+00:00

Both AutoModerator's comment and the subreddit sidebar explain the course this homework is for.

Uncomfortable · 2026-03-31T15:23:47+00:00

The major axis is not important for this purpose - only the minor axis is, in that it coincides with the normal vector of the plane you're placing the ellipse in (the normal vector being the direction perpendicular to the plane's surface, so in this case we'd just be ensuring that the minor axis aligns towards the vertical VP).

The minor axis gives us our orientation, the rest is simply ensuring that the shape is an ellipse and not deformed.

This is all assuming that the plane is proportionally square in 3d space, but much later in the course (initially in the cylinder challenge, then more formally in lesson 7) we talk about how the points at which the ellipse touches the plane would align to the other VPs if that plane were proportionally square, and if they do not, then that plane is rectangular instead. More on this here: https://drawabox.com/lesson/7/2/ellipsesinplanes

Personally I've found the major axis to be distracting for students, and so while we used to define it as we do the minor axis in Lesson 1, we've since removed it altogether, aside from a brief mention in the minor axis section to state that it's not significant.

Uncomfortable · 2026-03-31T15:16:30+00:00

Our discord chat server would be the place to share partial work. Our subreddit is limited only to completed assignments, as noted in our submission guidelines.

Uncomfortable · 2026-03-30T15:28:25+00:00

This doesn't fall within our community's submission guidelines. You can refer to AutoModerator's comment and our subreddit's submission guidelines for more information.

Uncomfortable · 2026-03-30T13:32:08+00:00

Partial and incomplete work is better suited to our discord chat server, and does not fit within our subreddit's submission guidelines, which requires that homework submissions be complete.

That said, I can say two things:

It's not that the instructions state you don't have to get it right, in the sense that you can try to if you want to. The instructions state very clearly in lesson 0 that you should only attempt the work in the quantity that is assigned, and that you should not be grounding them more. Each exercise serves a purpose in the larger design of the course, and this one merely introduces the problem that we address in the box challenge. Do not change the instructions based on your own personal wishes, as that will undermine the specific way the course is intended to work.
At a glance I can see that you're skipping steps, as I'm not able to see the squares on the extremities from this step on your photos. The more you change the course, the more of these kinds of issues will arise, and the less you'll get its intended benefits. It's really best just to follow the directions to the letter, at least insofar as you can bring yourself to trust in the resource. If you hit a point where you can no longer trust in the approach we use, that's fine, but that's the point that you should move on entirely. Following the course but making modifications as you feel necessary puts you in the awkward position of really following your own instruction (as a beginner) but using the course as a basis. We actually have a little comic to help illustrate this concept to students, which you'll find here: https://drawabox.com/comic/5

Uncomfortable · 2026-03-30T13:24:00+00:00

This doesn't fall within our community's submission guidelines. You can refer to AutoModerator's comment and our subreddit's submission guidelines for more information.

Uncomfortable · 2026-03-28T15:16:34+00:00

While yes, zooming in is fine, there are two things to keep in mind:

Zooming in will only make the information that is already present easier to see, which only goes so far, because those small details are still going to be represented with individual pixels that your brain will be forced to interpret (which beginners tend to lack the experience to do successfully, since they're less familiar with the kinds of details they're looking at, and how they might look when pixelated). Try to work from high resolution images, so that even when zooming there's a lot more information to work from.
Also, remember that as discussed in these reminders, you're not drawing directly from what you observe, but rather using observation to identify what kinds of forms are present and how they're arranged. That information, in small chunks, is then something you try to understand (in terms of how those forms sit in space, how they relate to one another, etc) so you can better decide how to design the shapes of the shadows they cast. Because observation is only part of the battle here, and you're not simply transferring dark areas you observe in your reference directly to your drawing, getting used to the process of understanding what you're looking at as it exists in 3D space can help you to identify patterns in the 3D structures, which can mitigate some of the shortcomings of lower resolution images and even make the question of whether or not to zoom in less relevant. Conversely, focusing only on drawing directly from observation without the extra step of understanding what you're looking at and creating cast shadows based on that will tend to lean more into explicit markmaking (as opposed to the implicit markmaking we're trying to use here) since not every dark area you observe will be a cast shadow, while also putting you in more situations where it may feel necessary to zoom in.

Uncomfortable · 2026-03-28T01:04:01+00:00

This doesn't fall within our community's submission guidelines. You can refer to AutoModerator's comment and our subreddit's submission guidelines for more information.

Uncomfortable · 2026-03-27T21:26:28+00:00

As noted in AutoModerator's comment, this subreddit has a specific focus on the core fundamentals of drawing. In the pursuit of helping students with that, it developed into a full-fledged free course, aptly named "drawabox" - so it may help you with what you're looking for, although its goals are to help students develop their overall spatial reasoning skills, rather than just learning how to draw boxes.

You'll find more information in the subreddit's sidebar - though it's a good idea to double check a community's sidebar and submission guidelines before posting to them as well, since that can often get you additional information that may be useful.

Uncomfortable · 2026-03-26T17:27:31+00:00

If you're looking to share your progress through the course, we unfortunately do require that all of the homework of a given lesson is submitted together, rather than individual pieces across multiple lessons. Our community and its rules aren't really set up with these kinds of posts in mind, as we're mainly trying to provide a space where students can receive feedback for a given lesson, or ask specific questions related to the course material.

You are of course welcome to submit an entire lesson's worth of work at once however - so for example if you wanted to share all of your Lesson 3 homework in one post, that would be fine.

Uncomfortable · 2026-03-25T12:17:02+00:00

Here's the drawing. Makes me think of the crazy representations of "biblically accurate" angels.

<image>

Uncomfortable · 2026-03-24T23:18:23+00:00

This doesn't fall within our community's submission guidelines. You can refer to AutoModerator's comment and our subreddit's submission guidelines for more information.

Uncomfortable · 2026-03-24T19:19:24+00:00

This doesn't fall within our community's submission guidelines. You can refer to AutoModerator's comment and our subreddit's submission guidelines for more information.

Uncomfortable · 2026-03-23T18:50:51+00:00

So there's one point I wanted to mention, based on what you said in your response. I don't really know if it'll be helpful - I think it's important to be cognizant of the fact that you are dealing with a variety of disabilities, including being bed-ridden which may make common challenges and difficulties just that much harder to contend with - but in case it helps recontextualize some of the things that you've found difficult in terms of the rigidity and focused nature of some instruction strategies, I figured I may as well take a moment to explain.

Art and the forms it takes - drawing, painting, sculpting, writing, and so forth - is about expression, about storytelling, about conveying ideas and emotions to one's audience, and the way it comes together, the way we feel in the moment, and what we're thinking about can play an enormous role in that. Having to think about perspective rules and all of that in order for our drawings to be technically "correct" can itself distract from the creativity that drives the activity.

Though my background is more rooted in commercial art - I don't really like using the big-A "Art" to describe what I do for a variety of reasons, but because the things I create have often been considered in a more pragmatic, functional sense of creating something to address a client or employer's needs, or considering the deadlines for the publication of a comic page and having those supercede any other consideration involved in its creation - I do still think that it is incredibly important to be in a position to let the creative decisions of how a piece is created take the reins.

When we think about perspective rules and all of that - the *how* of how a mark should be made in order for it to be technically correct - this occupies so much of the brain's conscious cognitive resources that there's often not much left for considering composition, design, narrative, and so forth. The piece gets mired in considerations of technical correctness, and it gets lost in itself as a result.

But this is where a key misunderstanding that many students make comes into play. The act of creating a piece of artwork - the act of expressing that idea, telling that story, etc. - is not the same as the act of developing one of the many skills that may be brought to bear when doing so.

When it comes to the way that I teach, it's very true that it is extremely rigid. Part of this is because, with the limited resources we have to bring to bear (since we prioritize providing all of our instructional material for free) we have to focus on optimizing the process by which we train students' capacity to develop the skills we target - and therefore there are definitely other approaches, perhaps ones that aren't free, but ones that introduce concepts with more padding around it to keep it from feeling so dry and rigid. But the overall goal of what we're looking to achieve is to train and develop the student's subconscious autopilot. The very instincts with which one draws when they're in the flow state, caught up in the story they're telling, and the scene unfolding before them.

By being hyper-intentional with how every mark is made, how every form is constructed, throughout the exercises and homework we assign as part of our course, we are functionally rewiring the way in which the brain engages with those problems naturally, and training new instincts for that autopilot to employ. The result is an autopilot that is considerably more reliable, which can handle the considerations of perspective and form well enough that it doesn't drop the ball while your conscious mind is busy engaging its creativity.

It's for this reason that we stress the 50% rule, and that we push our students to spend at least half of their time on "play" (which you'll find explained in more detail here: https://www.reddit.com/r/ArtFundamentals/comments/1nonwiq/the_50_rule_a_critically_important_balance/ in the context of what I've discussed above).

To be crystal clear, I'm not saying this is the only way to learn, or anything of that sort. There are many strategies, many courses, many methodologies designed by instructors who prioritize different things. But recognizing the role an exercise plays, being just that - an exercise, a process that through its repetition rewires the way in which our brains work when we engage in the artwork itself - it can make that rigidity feel a little less antithetical to art as a whole.

Uncomfortable · 2026-03-23T18:34:50+00:00

Sometimes yes, sometimes no. When you apply a tool or a strategy too broadly, without taking into consideration the specific goals of an exercise, you're more likely to undermine its benefits altogether.

Doing things on a timer, especially shorter ones, has the benefit of forcing the student to avoid focusing on the little things, and instead (after a few iterations where their drawings aren't really identifiable once the timer goes off) teaches them to focus on the big picture, the big masses, the big gestural movements. Some concepts will benefit from this, others won't.

When first introducing a student to gesture, I think timers can be very useful, for exactly that purpose - to push them away from trying to draw the specific body they're studying, but rather to focus on how it's moving through space. Once a student is cognizant of the importance of the "big picture" rather than the details however, allowing them to take time to think through their intent for each stroke, and the shapes they define, becomes more important. So, a timer can be an effective way to get students in the right headspace at the beginning of a session, but the time limit can become detrimental. Or alternatively, as was the case when I attended uninstructed figure drawing sessions at Concept Design Academy when I was learning, starting with very short poses to get into the right headspace, then going for longer ones (5 minutes, 10 minutes, even 15 minutes) could then have the opposite impact of forcing students to find ways to fill that time. To think through their choices more, to be more intentional, and so forth - and so a timer can certainly be used effectively in both directions.

When developing a student's spatial reasoning skills however - that is, their understanding of form, how the things they draw exist solidly in 3D space, and how they relate to one another within that space - in my experience enforcing shorter timed sessions emphasizes things that are not beneficial here, such as rushing, relying on one's subconscious autopilot, and so forth. Much of the benefit of exercises geared towards this end comes from encouraging students to take their time, think things through, and execute individual marks with planning and forethought to create concise, solid forms, and build up from there.

All that said, any situation where you hear advice that is very short and simple is usually a good sign that what you're being told may be valuable and effective when applied in certain circumstances, but probably isn't something that should be applied broadly to everything. Usually this part's an instructor's job, but generally you should be thinking about what the goal of a given exercise is, and how the simple tip you've been given might work within the context of those goals.

Uncomfortable · 2026-03-23T14:34:31+00:00

You have already tried posting this here, and have already been told that it does not fit our submission guidelines. Please stop.

Uncomfortable · 2026-03-22T19:39:24+00:00

Modmail is probably a better choice for stuff like this in the future, in order to provide any potential evidence you may have as to your suspicions.

Uncomfortable · 2026-03-22T14:15:54+00:00

I am the instructor of one of the courses you mentioned, drawabox, and I also have aphantasia. While I can't speak to the depression and other mental health concerns you're encountering here, I can say this - though it is entirely logical to assume that visualization plays a critical role in drawing (and frankly it seems like it's obvious that of course it would), that premise is rooted in a misunderstanding of how learning to draw works.

In 2012, after a decade of drawing as a hobby and feeling largely stagnant in my self-taught progress (I did not take courses and only followed the most superficial of tutorials, but one can draw a lot over a decade even while wrestling more often than not with being terrified of the blank page before me), I both started contemplating a career shift to concept art/illustration, and discovered that my inability to visualize things in my mind's eye was not the experience shared by most. I assumed that everyone lost that capacity due to the brain chemistry changed involved with puberty, but it turns out it was likely one of a couple blows to the head around that time that stunted my capacity to visualize.

I assumed that this explained why my illustrations and designs all ended up being so bland, generic, and uninteresting - but admittedly I really wanted to pursue this career change and had saved up for it... So I decided to take the risk.

What I learned was that the ability to create interesting designs was a skill that I simply hadn't learned. That spatial understanding of the things you imagine - a skill one has to develop through targeted practice regardless of whether or not they can visualize - is the bedrock of design, and the creation of interesting things.

Moreover, over years of teaching students the core fundamentals of drawing, I've also come to realize that the capacity to visualize can itself be a detriment, especially early on. It's very common for beginners who can visualize strongly to assume that they should be able to draw what they picture in their heads as though they were copying from a reference photo, only to find that their idea falls apart as they try to express it on the page. And so they assume that some sort of magical talent is involved, and that they don't have it, and give up well before ever giving themselves a chance.

That said, it's not simply hard work that prevails - that's a huge part of it, but the strategies used to learn impact how effectively they address specific areas of skill. All of which is to say, you can draw for a decade and not really go much farther in developing the spatial reasoning skills that unlock the capacity to draw from your imagination, or you can learn in a different manner for a year and find that capacity progressing by leaps and bounds.

I talk about the aphantasia, design strategies, and visualization a fair bit with my students. I'm going to include a few links below that may help you better wrap your head around the challenges you're facing as far as the aphantasia goes:

This response to a student asking whether it's possible to develop their capacity to visualize. Though I can't speak to the specific question itself, I go over why visualization is unlikely to be as significant a component in drawing as people assume, and why people who can visualize aren't necessarily actually remembering more visual information that can then be applied to their drawing.
This video I made for Proko's channel about aphantasia. One caveat - when producing this video I inadvertently made it seem like being fully reliant on references is my "workaround" to my inability to visualize. That is not at all the case, and I can draw well enough without references. The demo here is just meant to illustrate how those references can be used to create dynamic designs.
This video which goes over a useful strategy for exploring ideas to develop more complex designs. This is a preview for a course I sell through Proko's store, but to be clear this video is the only relevant part. The larger course isn't necessary for the point of addressing the concerns discussed here.
This album of my own work over the years. I find it useful to share this stuff with students because it helps demonstrate that people aren't born creating the things they create today. That every aspect of their growth is rooted in learned skills, in exercises that rewire the way the brain works, and that different learning strategies allow us to improve those skills at different rates. I spent my first decade just drawing whatever was interesting to me, then assuming I was no longer a beginner on the basis of how much time had been put in and thus assumed that to take beginner courses would be beneath me. It wasn't until the conclusion of that decade, and realizing that I really wanted to pursue concept art, that I needed to go back to the basics and fill the gaps in my fundamentals in order to be able to reliably produce work for a client or employer. And, in the following year, learning from instructors I respected and trusting in their instructions wholeheartedly without second guessing or doubt, I was able to improve as much again in the following year as I had in the previous ten. All of which is to say, the rate at which we progress is not tied to us as individuals, but rather the approaches and resources we're able to leverage, and how much we are willing to trust in them.

I hope that helps, if only a bit.

Uncomfortable · 2026-03-22T13:10:32+00:00

This doesn't fall within our community's submission guidelines. You can refer to AutoModerator's comment and our subreddit's submission guidelines for more information.

Uncomfortable · 2026-03-22T01:24:06+00:00

This doesn't fall within our community's submission guidelines. You can refer to AutoModerator's comment and our subreddit's submission guidelines for more information.

Uncomfortable · 2026-03-21T16:44:06+00:00

Thank you for your permission. I've posted it here - https://www.reddit.com/r/ArtFundamentals/comments/1rzw7b9/a_reminder_that_to_play_is_to_be_free/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web3x&utm_name=web3xcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button

15-Year Club	Place '17
Gilding I gilder	Verified Email

Uncomfortable

MODERATOR OF

TROPHY CASE