09-30-2026, 06:32 PM
I'm very excited to announce I've finished the lesson 1 of Drawabox! As we say in French you could say "ça m'en touche une sans faire bouger l'autre" but my first attempt at Drawabox was in 2016 and I've tried it a few more times. I have a blurred memory of the first attempt, because I think I had then finished lesson 1 and started lesson 2, without doing the 250 boxes challenge.
But then my wrist got hurt and I had to stop drawing for almost one year. I had then started over many times in 10 years, but never finished lesson 1 again.
You can find one of those attempts at the beginning of my thread in 2024...
Drawabox lessons take a lot of time to read, watch and assimilate, and the homework is, for me, quite difficult. There are 15 pages of homework to do in lesson 1, and the whole course is only 7 lessons.
Each exercice is meant to train your brain to incorporate some new skills, and it focuses mostly on spatial reasonning.
It can look boring and technical and is supposed to be compensated by the 50% rules, where you spend as much time on training and on doing things for yourself...
But for me, it was a game changer that unlocked a lot of things after I got blocked in art school. I think the fact that the course creator has aphantasia, just like me, is not a coincidence. I had taken a lot of bad habbits (very messy sketching, a tendency to do random lines then correct, bushes of strokes), as I rely more on feeling than sight to draw. It had gotten to the point where, disliking my drawings, I would almost look away from the page, and my eyes don't naturally focus when I draw. I have to retrain them as well as my hand (which had bad accuracy, not helped with injuries) and this method is perfect for that, because with more complex things, my brain gets overwhelmed with the difficulty and won't consider line making or rewrite the way of doing things. Here it's gradual and focuses precisely on my weaknesses. So I'm not sure how good this method is for someone who is already accurate, but in my case it felt like something clicked and I realized what the act of drawing was instead of stupidely attacking my paper with my pencil.
Anyway, hurray for reaching that point because it was long and difficult!
I'm going to add a little review of the exercices so that this is more interesting to look at for someone who didn't do them:
1) is about markmaking: putting two points, then gesturing like you're drawing the line without touching paper, until you are confident and do it. All of the lines in the course have to be made like this. It helps to separate planning a stroke and executing it.
2) the funnel is one of several exercices about ellipses. You must keep the angle of the ellipse regular by using the funnel as a guide. The theory is about the use of the minor axis to build the ellipses.
3) the one point perspective exercice is the most difficult for me, because you have to draw all by hand and guess the angle of the edges in depth, so that they are in the right direction reaching for the VP, without using a ruler. Even using the ghosting method (the one described in 1) I find this super difficult.
4) in this one you learn to use existing edges as references to rotate boxes instead of going to the VP.
5) the last one is very satisfying to do, I think it's more explicit but you focus on guessing the end points of the parallel edges in depth in three dimensions, without using vanishing points while rotating the boxes randomly. You use a Y shape to draw the closest edges before doing the parts that are in depth.
But then my wrist got hurt and I had to stop drawing for almost one year. I had then started over many times in 10 years, but never finished lesson 1 again.
You can find one of those attempts at the beginning of my thread in 2024...
Drawabox lessons take a lot of time to read, watch and assimilate, and the homework is, for me, quite difficult. There are 15 pages of homework to do in lesson 1, and the whole course is only 7 lessons.
Each exercice is meant to train your brain to incorporate some new skills, and it focuses mostly on spatial reasonning.
It can look boring and technical and is supposed to be compensated by the 50% rules, where you spend as much time on training and on doing things for yourself...
But for me, it was a game changer that unlocked a lot of things after I got blocked in art school. I think the fact that the course creator has aphantasia, just like me, is not a coincidence. I had taken a lot of bad habbits (very messy sketching, a tendency to do random lines then correct, bushes of strokes), as I rely more on feeling than sight to draw. It had gotten to the point where, disliking my drawings, I would almost look away from the page, and my eyes don't naturally focus when I draw. I have to retrain them as well as my hand (which had bad accuracy, not helped with injuries) and this method is perfect for that, because with more complex things, my brain gets overwhelmed with the difficulty and won't consider line making or rewrite the way of doing things. Here it's gradual and focuses precisely on my weaknesses. So I'm not sure how good this method is for someone who is already accurate, but in my case it felt like something clicked and I realized what the act of drawing was instead of stupidely attacking my paper with my pencil.
Anyway, hurray for reaching that point because it was long and difficult!
I'm going to add a little review of the exercices so that this is more interesting to look at for someone who didn't do them:
1) is about markmaking: putting two points, then gesturing like you're drawing the line without touching paper, until you are confident and do it. All of the lines in the course have to be made like this. It helps to separate planning a stroke and executing it.
2) the funnel is one of several exercices about ellipses. You must keep the angle of the ellipse regular by using the funnel as a guide. The theory is about the use of the minor axis to build the ellipses.
3) the one point perspective exercice is the most difficult for me, because you have to draw all by hand and guess the angle of the edges in depth, so that they are in the right direction reaching for the VP, without using a ruler. Even using the ghosting method (the one described in 1) I find this super difficult.
4) in this one you learn to use existing edges as references to rotate boxes instead of going to the VP.
5) the last one is very satisfying to do, I think it's more explicit but you focus on guessing the end points of the parallel edges in depth in three dimensions, without using vanishing points while rotating the boxes randomly. You use a Y shape to draw the closest edges before doing the parts that are in depth.