That would indeed constitute grinding, as discussed back in Lesson 0. Keep in mind that the point is not to have you do it well right now. Exercises aren't about short term pay-offs, they're about long-term gains.

It's an accumulation of little mistakes in lining everything else up correctly (to the end points of other edges, to the VPs, etc.) that ultimately will manifest most obviously when having to solve the final piece of the puzzle that brings it all together. I talk about this in the video at around the 9:00 mark.

This section from the written material of the lesson may help with that: drawabox.com/lesson/0/2/ready

Just a heads up - every time you use the comments on my videos to write your own personal notes, I do get emailed a notification for the new comment. So if you could find somewhere else to save your notes, that would be nice.

@@Uncomfortable Oop my bad, sorry about that.

We recommend students ideally aim to draw through their ellipses two full times, and at most three times. More than that and it gets easy to lose track of the ellipse you intended to create in the first place. This section of the notes goes over this in more detail: drawabox.com/lesson/1/16/drawingthrough

A textured surface and a smooth surface are, by definition, opposite ends of the spectrum. A perfectly smooth surface wouldn't have any textural forms protruding from the surface to cast shadows - and such a surface does end up getting very reflective as a result, although we're not really getting into that here. The key point to keep in mind is that smooth = no texture. That said, there are surfaces that have very tiny textures along their surface, and meat is one of them. It's made up of fibres, so if you were to zoom into it, you'd see little textural forms layering on top of one another, casting little shadows. While you're right that the choices in this demo weren't really taking textural forms/cast shadows into consideration, technically you can zoom in close enough and still have a useful texture to draw, without regarding local surface colour. Overall though, you can take everything discussed regarding the texture analysis exercise, and treat it as though it supercedes anything discussed here. Furthermore, these reminders from the texture section of Lesson 2 go over how we should be thinking about the textures we're drawing, and the marks we put down to convey them: drawabox.com/lesson/2/2/reminders

@@Uncomfortable Thanks for taking the time to respond. Even though "smooth = no texture" feels like it contradicts "everything has a texture" from the texture analysis page, I do think I understand what you're saying and this is helpful. Thank you.

Honestly if you're following the course itself, you're gonna be drawing a great deal with fineliners - so I don't specifically think that using fineliners in your 50% rule is necessarily going to have additional benefits. That doesn't necessarily mean you shouldn't, but just based on the various goals of the 50% rule, I think that continuing to play with different media, and giving yourself the freedom to draw whatever you're interested in, in whatever way you want, is going to be the best bet. As to your other question, no, not at all. It may make sense if we reverse the question - what specific value does drawing without planning marks/construction/scaffolding/etc add? Well, it makes the performance of drawing a lot more engaging to watch (and those artists who have pushed that kind of drawing into the forefront, primarily Kim Jung Gi, although over the last few years Peter Han and others as well are doing it as a performance). How they got there was by doing a *lot* of drawing with scaffolding/planning/etc. in order to train their spatial reasoning skills (much as we do in this course, doing everything hyper-intentionally so as to rewire the way in which our brain understands 3D space, and how it conveys it on a flat page). In being meticulous in their practice, they *need* those tools less and less when drawing outside of their studies. This in itself has value - the less you're reaching for tools, the fewer steps between your ideas and their manifestation on the page, the easier it is to fall into (and avoid falling out of) a flow state, where we tend to be most creative and productive. This is critical especially for those of us in the concept art industry, where the whole job is to create fresh new designs. But generally we can reach a fairly optimal flow while still having some planning marks involved - they just tend to be looser and less specific, compared to the highly rigid construction you'll see in the later lessons of this course. That's where most stay, because there isn't actually added benefit to using less construction beyond that point - unless, again, your goal is to perform in front of people in which case some people are just more wowed by the complete absence of it. And that right there is likely the source of the question - students find performances like that really impressive, and so they fantasize about being able to do it themselves. But as far as the careers that involve drawing go, it's usually more about what you produce - the ideas you can convey, and how effectively you can execute them - that matter, not specifically how you went about achieving them. Your process matters, but only insofar as it impacts the result. And so, if you're producing something where the end result *has* to be as good as you can make it, there is absolutely no good reason to avoid tools that will benefit you - whether it's construction/planning marks, or reference. You should be using every tool in your arsenal if your goal is to produce work to the best of your current ability. I say *if*, because that isn't always what matters most - and so you always need to go back to considering what it is a piece needs to accomplish, and what will help you achieve that goal best.

In the context of the 50% rule, yes we would view it as an observational study. The main thing we want students doing is taking charge of *what* it is they're drawing - making those decisions themselves. If they ultimately make those decisions and find reference that matches what they're after (and if they can't find them, push forward on their own anyway), then that's fine. But if you're just drawing what you see as it is, then you're not really making those choices for yourself, and so you'd be missing out on much of what play offers.

@@Uncomfortable So, is the 50% rule meant to make us bring our imagination onto the paper?

@ Hold on I think I got it. The goal of the 50% rule is to get you used to failing and build a passion for art rather than improving. Is that it? Would trying to get better go against the 50% rule motivations?

@@ahuman32478 Not specifically. It is meant to help students disarm their fears by facing them head-on, and to help them worry less about unimportant short-term, superficial gains, so they can do the more difficult things necessary for long-term, meaningful gains.

@@ahuman32478 Ah shoot, I didn't see this second reply until after I responded to the first - yes, this is more accurate. And yes, trying to get better would defeat the purpose of the 50% rule, because you'd be adding additional requirements when all we're trying to get students to do is draw confidently, and boldly, and **without** having to get something more out of it.

Rewatch the first video regarding the box challenge, the "overview" one. It discusses the back corner, and based on your question reviewing it will be beneficial.

@ thanks. Will do.

There's actually two ways in which things shift in perspective - their overall scale gets smaller, but proportionally they get wider in one dimension. We discuss this in regards to cylinders in the ellipses section, but for this exercise it's actually more distracting to focus on the individual faces and how they change (especially due to the fact that we're not working with cubes, boxes that are necessarily the same size from neighbour to neighbour (that right side box appears to be longer than the center one). Instead, focus on the corners themselves, and the edges that connect them, and how they change. At its core, this exercise is about making use of the neighbouring information (when two edges are close together, the not-entirely-accurate-but-close-enough choice to consider them as being parallel on the page), and then how to look at the changes in the corner positions for the areas we have to estimate without such neighbours to rely upon. It is a complicated and difficult exercise - but go through the instructions and absorb what you can, without getting too hung up on what stumps you. Then, following the steps to the best of your ability, do the exercise, and get feedback on it in our community. The expectation is that most students will struggle a great deal with this exercise, but that in having gone through those struggles, will better understand the problems that we will be targeting going forward. The expectation is not for students to be able to knock this exercise out of the park right now, it's simply a tool to help contextualize what we do next.

Hahaha, that was definitely a good one. As for linking to videos on KZbin as opposed to embeds, we're not sure how that would impact our monetization, and given the limited resources we work with to provide what we do, those aren't really risks we can take as it could interfere with our ability to provide subsidized official critique, manage the community as a whole, and continue updating the lesson material to improve our video and demo content and apply adjustments based on what we learn about students' experiences by providing feedback that help make the lessons more effective.