Anyone tried Drawabox.com lessons？ How do you allocate practice time?

Hi everyone,

I'm a Self-studied beginner, and recently found Drawabox.com practice lessons really helpful ( great resources, thanks to ppl here who recommended it.）

But I'm a little bit confused where should I start? To dive in the lessons from Drawabox.com or spend more time on sketches practice here?

I mean Drawabox.com lessons seems to be really solid, should I finish the practice there before I start the figure sketches?

Or did I just think too much.....

Any advice will be appriciated.

p.s not a native Eng. speaker, sorry for any typo

I tried it, but it felt very repetitive and not very encouraging, the good thing is that the lessons are concrete and the tasks are well explained

it would be better to intersperse the two, you follow a dropbox lesson and a practice here

Hi, Thanks for your advice！

May I ask how many lessons have you tried? (Lesson0~Lesson7）

I just finished lesson0 and it seems like practice here will be more freely and fun, while drawabox lessons more likely like you said, repetitive and not very encouraging.

However in drawabox lessons , they mentioned " 50% rules" which more or less answer my question at the first place. I guess I will split my time 50／50 here and there.

• Windylamay edited this post on May 26, 2021 8:18am.

I did lessons 0 to 5. To overcome the "repetitive" part, make sure you keep your sketches around. At first the view of a growing stack of sketches will encourage you, but after a while, the difference between your starting sketches and your current sketches will become more and more visible. In the end, the repetitiveness will feel calming and relaxing.

It's a bit like pumping iron in a gym. It's boring and tideous at first, until you start to actually see how fast your muscles actually grow. Drawabox.com is just unforgivingly efficient in teaching structural drawing, and, actually, line quality, as in teaching to plan your lines before you mark them down.

About the time split, 50% sounds right. If I remember correctly, I had a long period, where I almost exclusively did Drawabox practices, then another time, where I followed mostly Stan Prokopenko's lessons on proko.com for getting my skills on figure drawing up. Line of action provides good tools to get your motifs and learn a bit of timing, but the actual lessons part seems a bit sparse.

Hi Aunt Herbert,

Your respond definitly clear up my confusion. It's nice to hear from someone who went through those courses. Thank you so much for sharing.

Dont thank me before you finished your boxes ;D

I'll come back and let you know lol

Started the drawabox this month, i finished lesson1, im halfway the 250 boxes and i started lesson 2 meanwhile.

Figure drawing is a different skill in my opinion, nothing to do with drawabox where you basically tackle 3d space and objects in it. Figure drawing it's that, drawing the human figure whilst not making it feel stiff (unlike when you study anatomy, there you focus on a different skill and knowledge).

The repetitiveness is a crucial point for the brain-muscle connection, and i'm noticing it while im improving in drawing through the boxes.

I think they follow the dynamic drawing from Peter Han method, and they extended it to be a full free course. Most elements are similar in the approach.

What i'm doing is following the drawabox but not keeping myself busy just with that to finish it faster. I prefer doing it slower, understanding better, not burning out by doing other things (figure drawing as often as i can, master studies, anatomy, color, composition etc.)

Hope it's helpful and good luck!

There is a crossover point between figure drawing and structural drawing. In the end, the human body is a special case of a 3-d body, too. I like Stan Prokopenko's image of drawing as learning to juggle a lot of different balls, which you can't do before throwing and catching each individual ball is part of your muscle memory.

Figure drawing courses usually start with a focus on proportions, the relation between the three "masses" (head, chest, hip) and the limbs. At first you note them down in a very abstract, shorthand form, as simple ovals, but over time the shorthand should evolve into more complex geometrical forms in space, that get closer to anatomical representation (Reilly-head, flattened egg, bucket).

I agree with you, I probably didn't explain well what i meant. Of course you re drawing from observing a 3d world, so there s no way you can improve in the visual representation of it without understanding this. What i meant is that by doing different practices you hone in a different set of skills, but of course this is my way of thinking. I can paint portraits but sculpting a face is a different thing and i need to practice in it to get better (just to compare two things that are usually considered separate skills).

In my actual state when i sketch my figure looks more alive than when i do a finished painting. I feel that figure drawing helps me in this more than other exercises, like the drawabox for example.