uncomfortable

The Drawabox Community Platform has released!

TL;DR:

• New community platform is out
• Your pledge now gives you 'credits' within the new system
• You can login to the new system with Patreon as well as a few other options if you don't want to create yet another account
• Credits can be carried over by a month and expire after 2 months
• Different tiers have a different maximum number of credits that can be held at any given time
• Your current progress through the lessons can be imported from Reddit to get your due achievement badges
• January's homework critiques, by necessity, basically became freebies
• Credits are cookies. You're feeding me cookies and getting critiques in return.

And... admittedly, it's been a rocky release. I launched it early this morning after pulling an all nighter (ended up getting to bed at about 10:30am), and there were a lot of immediate issues that needed to be resolved. Throwing a bunch of users at the system definitely brought a lot of bugs to the surface, and the amazing, supportive, understanding nature of our community (especially those on Discord) really helped to get those issues resolved quickly.

I don't doubt that there are still a lot more issues lurking - both minor and more significant - and I will continue to pin them down and fix them in the coming days and weeks.

For now, let's talk about what this new community platform entails, specifically for my supporters here on Patreon.

• First off, homework critiques will no longer be done on reddit - meaning a reddit account is no longer necessary. In fact, you don't need to make any new accounts if you don't want to, as you can log into the Drawabox website with your Patreon account!
• For those of you who use Patreon as a way to get me and my teaching assistants to review your work, the way your support here translates into the feedback has changed. Instead of being pledged during a particular month making you eligible for critiques during that month, your pledge now generates "credits" that can be spent on critiques.
• The number of credits you receive per month depends on your tier, as does the maximum number of credits you can hold onto at any given time. Credits carry over from one month to the next, but expire after 2 months. This is to ensure that we can still keep the prices as low as they are and avoid being overwhelmed.
• Lessons 1, 2, the box challenge, cylinder challenge and wheel challenge cost 1 credit each, while all other lessons cost 2 credits. This means that a $5 tier supporter can now make it through the whole course without ever increasing their pledge, as long as they are willing to wait longer than others in between submissions.
• Pledging at the higher tiers awards one or two bonus credits if the supporter pledges at that tier from the start.
• There is still going to be a 14 day gap between submission of lessons.

In the process of transitioning to this new system of handling critiques, there are a couple of bonuses you guys are getting - partially in celebration of the change, and partially because it simplifies things for the community as a whole.

First and foremost, up until now we've generally worked under the assumption that one would pledge, receive their critique, then pay on the first of the following month. With this new system, I've finally been able to enable Patreon's charge-up-front feature. What this means however is that every time you get charged, you get your credits - so while those of you who received homework critiques during January are technically being charged now, you're going to be receiving credits for that payment. To put it simply, January's homework critiques ended up being freebies. It's definitely a bit of a pain for me to relinquish a month's worth of labour, but all in all it would be much more troublesome to try and balance those ledgers.

Secondly, I mentioned above that those who pledge at a higher tier when first becoming patreon supporters get bonus credit(s) when doing so. In celebration of this big change, your first patreon charge within this new system will include the bonus credit(s) if that is a feature of your tier. So for $7-$15, you get one extra credit, and for the $20 tier you get two, on top of the monthly credits you're supposed to be receiving.

Now this whole explanation is getting pretty long in the tooth. There's a lot more to say (the biggest features are really built around the free, non-patreon community and trying to improve conditions for them), but for now the last thing I want to explain is this:

I completed lessons within the Reddit system - how do I transfer my progress over?

Once you've logged in, you'll be able to go into your account settings (through the user menu in the top right), a little ways down the page you'll come across a spot where you can link to certain. If you've logged in with Patreon, then that'll already be connected there (if not, you'll need to connect that in order to get access to your credits).

When you connect to your Reddit account, it will identify your username and find your progress, then load it into the new system. You'll get all the appropriate achievement badges and will have the lessons marked as complete so you can submit homework for the next one without issue.

That should about cover all the things pertinent to you guys. Like I said at the beginning, the system is still bound to have a lot of bugs, so if you feel anything is out of place, or that you haven't received credits to which you are entitled, feel free to message me on Patreon and I'll get it sorted out.

At the end of the day, this is a super ambitious project, and I'm just one concept-artist-turned-drawing-instructor playing as though he's a web developer. The issues will be ironed out before long, and once they are, I think we'll have a pretty great platform on our hands.

Unfortunate Delays, and a short pause on lesson 2-7 critiques

Hey folks. As many of you know, the last several months have been spent developing a community platform for the Drawabox website that would move all homework submissions (both free and for private/official critiques) onto the website itself, with proper integration with patreon to simplify a lot of the process that over the last many years has largely been done in a somewhat haphazard fashion through Reddit.

This was intended to be released on New Years Day (being on the first of the month is relevant to the patreon integration and the transition being as painless as possible).

I've put a great deal of effort - working through the holiday season and all - to keep on track with this, but unfortunately I received a call earlier today that requires everything be put on hold. My grandfather has passed away, and as I have to fly out immediately to be there for my family, I will not be able to get the last pieces together by my January 1st deadline. I will be pushing the community platform release back to February 1st.

I know many of you have been waiting patiently for this considerable update, and there are some of you who have delayed your own projects to properly coincide with some of the lesson updates I was planning on releasing alongside it all. For all of that, I apologize.

While I am out of town - both for the funeral and to help out as much as I can - I will be, for the first time in five and a half years, be closing homework submissions for lessons 2 and above for about two weeks. They will reopen on January 10th 2020.

Lesson 1 and Box Challenge submissions will still be accepted as they are handled by my teaching assistants - they may be a little more delayed than usual.

July Announcements

To get us started, Happy Canada Day for those of you celebrating it, and an early Happy Fourth of July to those of you in the United States.

There's a few bits of Drawabox news I wanted to report, including some changes to the responsibilities of our wonderful teaching assistants, the next big steps of development on the Drawabox website and community, and some updates on the progress of our forays into selling pens.

Teaching Assistants and Critiques

June was a pretty big month for us, and we saw a 35% increase in homework submissions, likely due to a combination of Drawabox's continuous growth and the surge of people on their summer vacations looking to spend that time as productively as possible.

Back in the day, this kind of increase would not have been easy to manage, and I'd have been forced to tweak prices to get the demand down to a reasonable level - now with our teaching assistants, I'm glad to say that is no longer the case! That said, there has been one final change that we've been looking to implement in order to make Drawabox's cheap, accessible and high quality critiques sustainable into the future.

Some of you likely remember that when the teaching assistants were first added back in February, they were tasked with the Lesson 1 and Box Challenge submissions, though those pledged to a higher tier could still have their work critiqued by me personally. At he beginning of June, in response to the big wave of submissions, I changed the wording of the tiers to remove this little loophole - basically stating that all "early lessons" would be critiqued by teaching assistants under my supervision and guidance. For now, that's still lesson 1 and the box challenge, but as the TAs continue to build up their level of experience, I will be eventually expanding their responsibilities. One day I hope for Drawabox to become an online school with many competent instructors able to provide students with strong foundational training at the same kind of low price you guys enjoy now. I also want it to become a springboard for TAs to become instructors in their own right, expanding into their own particular areas of expertise and even writing their own lessons.

What's important here is that I changed the wording at the beginning of June, but have continued to do those early critiques myself - it was basically a buffer period to eliminate any unnecessary surprises. This new policy change will go into effect officially today.

Every critique written by a teaching assistant is essentially going to say the same thing I would, and after the review has been given, I always read through them myself to make sure nothing's been missed. On occasion I'll drop in with an extra point of advice to offer, but this is rarely necessary, and instead I just assign the completion badge on reddit and move on. This basically just allows us to serve a lot more people without me becoming overwhelmed.

Community Platform on the Drawabox Website

Most of you probably realize that though Drawabox takes a lot of time, it's not my full time job. I work at a studio that produces games and VR safety training, doing anything from illustration and concept art to UI design, game programming, web development, and much more. I'm very pleased to say that July is the first month that I'm going to be shifting to a lighter work schedule so I can spend more time on Drawabox (and other projects, like my web comic, Orc and Gnome's Mild Adventures).

This, in combination with the TAs being able to take on a bigger portion of the critique work, is freeing me up to start working on the next part of the big website update. I'm sure you've all been enjoying the big rebuild I launched back in December. That was only phase 1! The second phase is going to be a dedicated community platform built right into the website.

Right now the community exists across our subreddit, /r/ArtFundamentals (where all the official patreon-only critiques occur, along with students reviewing each others' work) and on our discord server. The discord server will continue existing as it has, but I've grown more and more frustrated with Reddit's inability to meet our particular requirements as a community. Reddit itself is fine (I mean, I have opinions about the whole redesign, but that's besides the point) but it's just not serving our community as well as it could.

By building a place for community members to post their homework (either to the community or for critique from me and the TAs), we'll be able to reduce the level of confusion that comes from being spread out across so many different services. We'll be able to integrate more cleanly with Patreon, award proper achievement badges for completing lessons, and perhaps most importantly, do more to ensure that those community-homework-submissions have a better chance of receiving attention and response. While we can never guarantee that people offering their time to review each others' work will be able to look at everyone's submission, there are certainly things we can do to help.

So, I'm very excited to start working on that. It's definitely going to be a ways away - months to be sure - but until now I've only been able to roughly plan out how I wanted to attack the problem, without the actual time to invest into getting started.

Drawabox Pens!

At the beginning of June, we launched a test solution for the fact that a lot of people struggle with getting their hands on good quality fineliners with which to complete the lessons. Aside from a few small pockets of the world, they're generally way overpriced, and usually sold in packs with 'assorted sizes'. Given that we encourage students to work with 0.5mm tips, this becomes a problem.

So we contacted a few suppliers, tested out samples, and ordered a batch of 2000 to sell to the community, and the response was fantastic. We were able to sell them in packs of 10 (all the same tip size) at $16.50 USD each, and we were out of stock within two weeks. The overall response we've gotten has been very positive - people seem to be quite happy with the quality and the price.

Needless to say, we sent out for more. We're just about ready to start selling again, so expect an announcement on the subreddit or on our twitter in the next day or so. As we move forwards, we're going to try and order larger batches and do so earlier so we can reduce restocking time, or eliminate it entirely.

That's all for the announcements! I hope you all have a great month.

Donkey Construction Demo

Did one of my full demonstrations for a student today. This time, a donkey!

A New Year, A New Change to Drawabox's Critique Tiers

For those of you who don't have time to read this whole post, here's a summary of the changes:

• The new critique tier pricing outlined below will apply to all new pledges as of February 1st. Those who had pledged prior to that date will be subject to the new pricing as of March 1st, allowing for a smoother transition. I repeat: If you're already pledged, the price changes will not affect you until March 1st.
• Critique tiers are changing to $5/month for Lessons 1+2 and the Box Challenge, $10/month for Lessons 3-7 and all other challenges.
• Lesson 1 and Box Challenge critiques will be handled by teaching assistants to help reduce my workload, but if you insist on having those early lessons critiqued by me, $7+/month pledges will be guaranteed to have their work reviewed by me personally.
• Multiple submissions in a given month are still allowed, but you must wait at least 2 weeks between submissions (not including cases where you've been asked to redo part of a lesson you've already submitted).

---

To start, I want to say how glad I am at the response to the update to the website. Over the months it took, I wasn't ever entirely certain that investing that time and effort was entirely worth it, but the inundation of appreciation validated every little bit of it. The videos definitely need to be updated with better audio and production value, but getting the content out by December 25th was my priority.

Anyway! With all these changes has come a pretty significant inundation of work. Prior to this month, I was getting around 2 submissions per day on average. Through this month, I've been getting closer to 4 per day (about 4.3/day since the 15th), with peaks as high as 8 submissions in a day. Basically what I mean to say is that the jump in growth has been considerable, but the way things are now isn't really doesn't scale well as the community grows.

Adding to the growth is also the fact that students frequently submit multiple times a month. This is allowed, but somewhat restricted and has never really had clear terms on what those limitations are to be. I've basically been telling students when I've felt they were submitting too often to hold onto their work until the next month.

The intent I've always had is to gradually increase prices to deal with demand, but it's not something I'm eager to do, because it's a bandaid solution. I am after all just one man, and there are only so many hours in the day (especially while I'm still balancing a full time job, drawing a web comic, etc). About a year ago, I shuffled the patreon tiers around a bit and it did give me some relief, but I think we need to find a different solution.

So here's what's going to happen, as of February 1st:

• In the interest of improving Drawabox's scalability, I've chosen a few of my students (most of whom serve as admins/mods on the discord server) to serve as teaching assistants, and handle critiques for Lesson 1 and the 250 Box Challenge. Each of them are further along with the lessons, and they have been instructed in what to look for in those submissions in order to give a helpful critique. One day I would like to extend TAs to more of the lessons, but for now they are limited ONLY to Lesson 1 and the 250 Box Challenge.
• They are going to be paid per critique - while some have offered to work for free, I have never been comfortable with offering anything short of fair compensation when it comes to labour that generates revenue.
• The patreon tiers will be adjusted, both to allow for the critique pricing to be fair to these teaching assistants, as well as to balance the time I spend in some of the later critiques against the prices of those tiers.
• To clarify the multiple-submissions-per-month issue, the tier prices are based on what I consider to be fair for the amount of time I put into one critique of that tier (sort of - I usually lowball myself and end up putting in vastly more time, but it's a start). At the same time, I will continue to allow multiple submissions in a month, but submissions must be made 2 weeks apart (not including cases where I ask students to resubmit parts of a lesson).

As for the prices, these will be the new tiers:

• Tier 1: $5/month, includes Lesson 1, 2 and the 250 Box Challenge.
• If you insist on having your lesson 1 and box challenges critiqued by me specifically, then those at the $7/month tier will always get feedback from me. Keep in mind that lesson 1 and the 250 box challenge are highly structured and the critiques you receive from a TA or from me won't be particularly different. Also, any submission critiqued by a TA will be reviewed by me before I assign the completion badge on reddit, so in the odd chance something was missed, I will catch it.
• Tier 2: $10/month, includes Lesson 3-7 and all other challenges.

In order to make the transition as smooth as possible, if you pledged at the $3 tier in January, you will continue to be eligible for Tier 1 through all of February. New pledges will be subject to the new tiers after February 1st, and pledges made before that will be subject to them starting March 1st.

If you have any questions or concerns, feel free to post them below. My long term hope is that I can develop Drawabox to be less reliant on me specifically, with a variety of trusted teachers available at different price points, each given the opportunity to build up their own reputations as they further their careers, while also giving students access to cheaper, reliable instruction that falls well below the hundreds of dollars one might spend on other online courses.

The Drawabox website has been rebuilt

Merry Christmas! As my gift to you, I've just completed a full rebuild of the Drawabox website. This includes superficial layout changes, as well as the content being organized into separate pages in order to be more easily digested - and most importantly, it also includes a full revision of all lesson content up to lesson 7, a new challenge, and 19 new videos.

I've been working something like 16 hour days for the past month at least, especially as the deadline quickly approached, but I managed to make it just in time. As such, I am completely wiped out, so I'll leave this short.

I hope you all enjoy the holiday season. I'm going to go nap for about two weeks.

Wolf Construction Demonstration

Just finished doing this demonstration for a student, figured it'd be helpful for everyone else as well.

Tiger Head Construction

Just finished doing a tiger head construction demo for a student. Figured you guys might benefit from it as well.

One of the most important things about head construction - and this goes for human heads as well - is seeing the various parts of the face like pieces of a three dimensional puzzle that wedge together. Related to that, is understanding that the face is made up of many planes, meaning that there are many edges where these planes meet.

When we look at a face, it's easy not to notice all of these planes and puzzle pieces, because it all looks smooth and polished - but they're there, and they're the key to constructing a face that looks believable and that catches the light in a realistic fashion.

Louse Demo

Lice are indeed gross, but it was a good opportunity to demonstrate how to apply construction to organic subject matter, and what kind of things to look out for.

A Change for those Seeking Critiques

Don't worry, Drawabox isn't closing, and I'm still doing critiques. But for the sake of my sanity as well as my growth as an artist, some aspects of how the patreon tiers are organized are changing. You can skip my explanation if you like, the changes themselves listed in bold a little ways down.

My time working on Drawabox and /r/ArtFundamentals has been something pretty special. It's been a ton of work, but being able to help so many people find their footing with an otherwise guarded and mystifying skill has really added a great deal of value to my life. I started in August 2014, just posting informal hand-written lessons and offering advice to those who completed the suggested work - from there it grew like a snowball tumbling down a hill, and became an avalanche.

In October 2016, after two years of doing critiques for free, I hit my limit and had to put up a fairly meagre pay wall to limit the amount of work I was taking on. At the same time, I took the subreddit which had largely been a conversation with me alone and turned it into a proper, thriving community of artists - beginners and established alike - to help each other using my resources, and under my supervision.

I've come to a similar point. The workload as it stands (at least on its own) is manageable, but I simply can't continue to devote all of my time to it anymore. Alongside my full time job (which itself has crunch periods which at their worst saw me at work for 26 consecutive days, from 10-16 hours per day, over the summer), I try my best to balance other personal projects - one-off illustrations, game development, and most recently a new web comic. These personal projects are what I live for, and in order to accomplish anything meaningful with them, I need to reorganize the amount of time I spend on the most time consuming part of Drawabox.

Furthermore, I find the impact I have by adding new lesson content (like the 20+ new videos I added between Christmas and New Years), new challenges and other far reaching material is of far greater importance than the individual critiques. I'd like to make more where it is needed, and I'm particularly keen on creating an entirely new lesson set focusing on design - not graphic design, but the kind that I do at my full time job. The design of objects, characters, environments, etc. with a focus on the use of form language and proportion.

Lastly, some lessons simply take a lot more time and effort to critique than others. Where lessons 1 and 2 maybe take 10 minutes each on average, lessons 3-7 can take me an average of 30 minutes each - with some going as far as a full hour or more. Lump in the more recent increase in students who cancel before fulfilling pledges despite receiving critiques (remember that due to Patreon's weirdness, I've always allowed students to receive critiques before actually paying, meaning you receive the services first and pay at the beginning of the following month), and those who submit homework far more frequently than one would consider to be fair (due to the overhead in tracking who's submitted how many times, I allow students to determine for themselves how many submissions in a given month is fair).

Of course, I always try and lean my pricing towards being accessible - the resulting hourly rate is always significantly lower than what I'd charge for freelance illustration, because my goal is still to help those who may not be able to pay for classes that run several hundred dollars, but are still interested in determining if drawing is something they'd like to pursue.

Anyway, here are the changes, starting today (March 1st 2018):

$3+ Pledges will receive critiques for lessons 1 and 2, as well as the box and cylinder challenges. These lessons are the most impactful of the set and build up a solid base. They're also usually the least time consuming for me to critique.

$7+ Pledges will receive critiques for lessons 3 and 4, as well as the texture challenge. I wasn't initially going to create an intermediary tier (as these lessons take as long to critique as those in the next tier), but upon discussion with my patrons on discord, I decided that would be the best road to take.

$10+ Pledges will receive critiques for lessons 5-7, as well as the treasure chest challenge.

I leave how many times you submit work within a given month up to you, as not all submissions are the same. Sometimes they're simply extremely well done, and take me very little time to critique. Sometimes there's a lot to discuss, and require me to draw demos or write notes directly on your work. Other times submissions are a resubmission of work I asked you to redo, and if they're done correctly, won't take me much time at all.

At the end of the day, I am changing things with the goal of reducing my workload. While this is does mean I fully expect many of you will cancel your pledges because this barrier has been raised above your means, that's the downside to me not having enough hours in the day.

For those of you who do end up having to cancel, remember that drawabox is a large community. It's not just the subreddit - the discord server is quite active and has a lot of people who are more than happy to help you identify where you need to improve on your work. My goal as far as adding new video content (especially in lessons 1 and 2) is so students can reference them directly when critiquing their peers.

I sincerely apologize for the inconvenience these changes may cause. One day, I will perfect my self-cloning technology and will be able to make a small army of instructors. For now though, they last only a couple days and tend to descend into a state of perpetual screeching.

Happy New Year! 7 more videos for you guys

So I made 7 more videos covering issues relating to lessons 3-5. Also, as I mentioned previously, I made the previously patreon-only videos (the no-audio video recordings of demos) accessible to everyone. It seems that everyone who spoke up in regards to the issue was very supportive of that change.

Here are the links to the new videos:

- The Leaves Exercise: https://youtu.be/hrjD6l-P1IM
- The Branches Exercise: https://youtu.be/B42OHBTIIAY
- Drawing a Hibiscus: https://youtu.be/pio-yyLw1po
- Drawing a Cactus: https://youtu.be/4gOOLNlSmZE
- Drawing a Scorpion: https://youtu.be/B_g4D2_lyL0
- Drawing an Otter: https://youtu.be/B2y-GKKT9sM
- Drawing an Animal Head: https://youtu.be/rMvT04OKBMQ 

Discord Weekly Design Challenge 005: Cat Merchant

 IT'S DEFINITELY NO LONGER FRIDAY. This week's challenge theme is... 

Merchant Kitty - Khajit has wares, if you have coin. Cats have been sitting on their cute little butts for too long - put them to work! Alternatively: cats performing any human job. No humanoids.

Also, I wanted to let you guys know that I'm going to ease up on posting the challenge themes/polls on most social media (patreon, facebook, reddit, etc.) as the response in those places is pretty minimal. The challenges will STILL TAKE PLACE, but I'll just keep my posts to the #weekly-challenge discord channel. This is largely because I do get the feeling that two posts a week is likely getting to be irritating to some people, and that's the last thing I want to be doing.

Well, I'm off to record some more videos - hoping to get a handful more out for lessons 3-5 by tomorrow.

Drawabox Weekly Challenge Theme 005 Poll

It's Tuesday again, and this time I didn't forget! Here are your fresh new weekly theme ideas for the discord server design challenge. Vote on the ones you like most - and remember, you can vote for more than one. I'll post the results on Friday.

There are a few runner ups from last week as always, but here are the new ones:

+ Merchant Kitty - Khajit has wears, if you have coin. Cats have been sitting on their cute little butts for too long - put them to work! Alternatively: cats performing any human job. No humanoids.
+ Leggy Beast - Create a bestiary page for an animal with an odd number of limbs. 1, 3, 5... Must derive at least 60% of its design from an existing animal.
+ Roast Beast - Design a new animal, then show us what it'll look like cooked and ready to eat! Remember your plating skills folks - presentation is everything!
+ Futuristic Workspace - Take your current workspace (where you do your work - which doesn't have to be drawing!) then throw it forward 50 years. What will it look like in the future?

Don't forget - I do take suggestions for future themes from patrons. The "Leggy Beast" was largely a suggestion from Jasper, though I tweaked it slightly to make it more targeted. So feel free to throw out your ideas. I can usually make a decent theme out of most things!

17 New Videos for the Early Lessons!

Yule Tidings, Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays! In honour of the holiday season, I spent the last couple days recording a whopping 17 new videos - an intro video detailing how to approach the lessons, one for every exercise in lessons 1 and 2, and a new version of 'how to draw a box'.

 You can find all the videos on this playlist.  They're also linked directly from each exercise's instructions in the lessons themselves. 

While lessons 3-7 did have more video content, the most important lessons (the basics) were sorely lacking in it. Hopefully this should make things easier for those of you who struggle with absorbing information in a purely textual format. The videos still should be watched alongside reading the lessons, but I'm hoping that this will help you guys catch certain instructions that you might otherwise miss or forget by having them repeated in different formats.

Lastly, I'm hoping to create a handful of more videos for lessons 3-7, so keep an eye out for those.

This is actually a change that involves my patrons specifically. When I first started this patreon, I made a handful of no-audio recordings of me working through the demos for lessons 3-7. I made these available for patrons only, largely as a symbolic thank you gesture.

Some of the new videos I'll be making will be replacing those I feel aren't up to scratch - but I'll be making them available to everyone for free. At the same time, I'd like to take the existing patron-only demos that are available and open them up to everyone as well.

I've never felt entirely comfortable with the pay-walled video content, as it's been an attempt at conforming to the standard patreon way of doing things (you give me money, i give you stuff). While that makes perfect sense for my critiques (as each one eats up some of my time), the videos simply exist as content that has already been made. Just like the lessons, I don't feel that they should be held back.

That said, while $3+ patrons have access to critiques and all, the videos are the only additional benefit the $1 patrons receive. Making them freely available to everyone would remove the only actual reward that tier receives. So, before I go and make this change, I'd like to hear if any of you would be bothered by this change, or if you guys also see this patreon as more of a continuous-donation-drive to keep the website alive and healthy.

Discord Weekly Design Challenge 004: Alien Red Light District or Fantasy Market Stall

The results are in! This week's theme is.. a tie! So we're going to two this week, and both are environment design prompts.

Theme 1: Alien Red Light District. Picture the seediest corner of an alien world, and design it. Think about architecture, atmosphere, lighting. Humanoids are fine, but no humans. Doesn't have to be high-tech! Think about more than just the exposed skin - consider how they're going to be marketed (billboards, holograms, large displays, etc), what the clientele would look like, and even how well maintained it would all be.

Theme 2: Fantasy Market Stall. Choose a merchant you might find in a fantasy RPG, then design their stall. What are they selling? Fruits, weapons, armour, potions, exotic animals... hotdogs? How are they arranging their goods to catch the eyes of those passing by? Who are those potential customers? Is it a high-class market in a rich part of town, or is it just a homeless child selling scraps in the slums to make ends meet?

Remember that *everyone* is welcome to participate regardless of skill level. You can check out a gallery of the submissions for previous themes here: https://imgur.com/a/nshD6 and can join the fun over on the discord server weekly-challenge channel here: https://discord.gg/hTPY5hb 

It's not about impressing anyone - it's about getting used to identifying a problem (usually represented by a brief or theme) and solve it using your design. It's not a drawing exercise, but one in asking yourself questions about whatever it is you're trying to design.

Drawabox Weekly Challenge Theme 004 Poll

Sorry for the delay! Got a couple of suggestions from patreon supporters this week, and mixed in a few of the runner ups from last week and a couple more new ones. Poll closes on Friday, at which point the week's theme will be announced.

Don't forget that all of the previous themes are still fair game, and you're welcome to share what you've worked on over at #weekly-challenge on the discord server (https://discord.gg/hTPY5hb).

Discord Weekly Design Challenge 003: Bottle it Up!

It's *still* Friday, so I'm not late. Here's next week's discord weekly challenge theme (join us over at #weekly-challenge https://discord.gg/hTPY5hb!).

Bottle it Up! You've found the elixir of life - now design a bottle worthy to contain it!

This is our first non-character challenge. You're going to be using a lot of cylindrical principles, like building around the minor axis, so be sure to take a look at the 250 cylinder challenge (https://drawabox.com/lesson/250cylinders).

I want you guys to get in the habit of generating a lot of silhouettes (brush pens can be great for this if you're working traditionally, and digital media works well for this too). Iterate, iterate, iterate. Always.

And use reference! Bottles come in all shapes and sizes, and back in the day they didn't know how to give the glass bottles they blew flat bases - so they used rope to create a base for the rounded vessels. Things like that can inform your design decisions and help you create interesting results.

Also, if you're painting glass, familiarize yourself with the concept of 'rim light' and the fresnel effect.

Some examples to mull over:

https://i.imgur.com/E3zbbFA.jpg 

https://i.imgur.com/CCG7n3K.jpg 

And remember! Patrons are welcome to post suggestions for next week's theme poll.

Drawabox Weekly Challenge Theme 003 Poll

Like last week, here's the poll for the next weekly challenge theme. Didn't get any recommendations from you guys this time around, but I had some fun coming up with my own.

In case you're confused by this, we're picking a different theme to draw/design together on the weekly-challenge channel on the drawabox discord server. First week was "Fantasify Yourself" and currently we're doing "Design a Deity".

Discord Weekly Design Challenge 002: Design a Deity

So it's Friday again, which means NEW WEEKLY CHALLENGE THEME on the #weekly-challenge (https://discord.gg/hTPY5hb) discord channel! This week we're doing:

Design a Deity! Pick a culture (historical or modern) and decide what your deity will govern. Then design your character to reflect these choices. USE REFERENCE! A good first step is to build a mood board (PureRef (http://pureref.com) is a great free tool for that).

Don't fall into the trap of thinking that drawing from your imagination means relying only on the ideas you can come up with. One's imagination is built up around all of the things they've been exposed to, and the things they've studied. Using reference to inform your design choices is a major part of developing your 'visual library'.

While designing, try and lay out questions and problems that your design will ultimately answer and solve. Design *is* problem solving, so understanding the problems themselves is integral to developing a successful design. Ask yourself the who's, how's, why's, where's and when's. And most importantly, the what-ifs.

Lastly, don't forget to iterate. Design is very much a numbers game. Try to start out by churning out as many interesting silhouettes as you can. The silhouette is the first part of a character that is processed by the eye, so it needs to be interesting and recognizable. And don't stick to your first idea - churn those doodles out, then go back over them later to find the good ones. And of course: most of them will be garbage. Here's two examples of this process:

Grinding out all of that garbage (https://i.imgur.com/duPcWaO.jpg) 

Iteration, iteration, iteration! (https://i.imgur.com/02xTCo2.png)

More iteration, damnit! ( https://i.imgur.com/Y6vHvUc.png )

As always, everyone is welcome to participate, regardless of skill level. Beginners are all too often afraid of putting themselves out there and trying things they've no experience with. There is absolutely no harm in trying. Failure is an integral part of the learning process (http://drawabox.com/comic/4), so you'd better start *now*.

Don't forget! Patrons are welcome to suggest ideas for the next week's theme. Suggestions received by Tuesday (December 12th) will be added to a poll where the public will vote on the idea they like best. On Friday (December 15th) I'll post the winning theme.

Drawabox Weekly Challenge Theme 002 Poll

I think I'm probably a little late on this, but I'm still getting the hang of this. Here are the potential choices for the coming week's challenge theme. The winner poll will close on Friday, and the winner will be announced. The runner-ups who receive any significant attention will my carried over to the following week's poll.

Weekly Themed Challenge 001: Fantasify Yourself!

As I mentioned in an earlier post, we're doing weekly themed challenges now on the discord (in #weekly-challenge: https://discord.gg/hTPY5hb.

This week's theme is "Fantasify Yourself," which I stole directly from a conceptart.org Character of the Week challenge I participated in back in 2011.

The idea is that you choose a fantasy race and class (think D&D, but you're not restricted to it) that fits your personality, and draw yourself as that character. When I participated in the challenge, I created the attached gnome alchemist.

Also, if you guys have ideas for next week's theme, post them here and as long as they're reasonable, I will add them to the poll. Everyone is welcome to vote, but submitting ideas is a perk for being a patron!

I'll collect ideas for 4 days, then run a poll for the following 3. If your idea is late, don't worry - we'll just add it to the list for the next one.

Weekly Themed Challenge

So! Many of you know of the discord server for drawabox. I've wanted to do this for a few weeks, but didn't get around to thinking through the logistics of it til now: Weekly challenges!

They will be largely design-focused, and will run from Friday to Friday, with the first one starting today. I've already got a theme, but I'll post about that separately.

Everyone of all skill levels is welcome to join - it's a great way to loosen up from doing the drawabox drills, and to receive helpful advice from the community on how to think through the design process.

In addition to this, I'm going to put up a poll for the following week's topics - everyone will be free to vote on them, but all my patrons will be welcome to contribute ideas. Assuming they're reasonable, I'll add them onto the poll as I receive them. I was hoping there would be a built-in option for this, but alas there is not.

As this challenge is tied to the discord, all challenge-related business and discussion will be held here: https://discord.gg/hTPY5hb

And don't forget! If you're a patron, you can connect your discord account with your patreon account through the patreon settings > accounts page. This will give you a custom role on the chat, which will show that you are one of the many who help keep drawabox going.

Uncomfortable's Unsolicited Advice 04: Nothing Can Defeat Failure

The fear of failure is the greatest challenge anyone faces. Not just in learning how to draw, but rather in every facet of our lives. Many people are accustomed to feeling that failure is something terrible, to be abhorred and reviled. That's simply not true.

Failure is an inevitable, natural and necessary part of learning a skill. It shows us where our weaknesses and where we can improve. Without it, we become stuck.

To fail is to be alive - so if you're not failing, you're probably doing something wrong.

Drawabox Discord

So people have been asking this for a while, and eventually one patron by the name of Jasper decided to take things into his own hands and make his own. It's been done in the past to varying degrees of success, but I was very pleased with how it was handled and pretty quickly offered to make it official. So, I invite you all to join the brand spankin' new official discord for Drawabox!

Here's the invite: https://discord.gg/rJz2GFG

If you're unaware of what Discord is, it's a free chat service. It's accessible both in-browser as well as through dedicated apps for Windows, OSX, iOS and Android.

If you're interested in meeting other people from the community, or seeking more immediate feedback on your work from other folks struggling through the same exercises and lessons, then you're more than welcome to join. Patrons will automatically be awarded roles/flairs based on their pledge (if their discord is linked to their patreon account), so we can all celebrate those who help keep the community alive.

One other thing I want to mention - if anyone is encountering any spammy behaviour from the discord app itself (for example, getting hammered by messages on your phone or wherever else), let me know as soon as you can. The discord thing is still a little new to me, and while I'm pretty sure I've ironed out any issues there might be, there's as good a chance that I have not.

Common Pitfalls

Some notes I put together while critiquing a student's homework today. Figured it might be valuable to the rest of you as well.

Homework Critique Delays

Just wanted to give you guys a heads up that homework critiques will be somewhat more sporadic for the next couple weeks, with the them being more delayed mid-week. Rough deadlines at work are requiring me to work 12-13 hour days from Tuesday to Thursday, so I've pretty much accepted that I won't be able to get to very many (or any) submissions during those periods.

As always, I still record submissions on the homework spreadsheet (https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1vV-YBqGJ1YbkcWaA2wPAgWU24vazfyd6A7l9vzTUJgM/edit?usp=sharing). Any new submissions will generally be added there within 24 hours, in case you want to double check that yours has been acknowledged.

Uncomfortable's Unsolicited Advice: There are Always Dragons

Drawing is full of challenges. At every turn, there's something new that is bound to frighten us, or make us hesitate. Something that really makes us realize how new we are to all of this, and how sometimes months, or even years of practice can feel like not-all-that-much.

It's something we all encounter, pretty much all of the time. But there's a secret we don't always realize - these dragons can't hurt us. There is absolutely nothing stopping us from summoning all our courage and charging ahead. Yeah, we'll make mistakes. We'll stumble, we'll trip, we'll get chewed up by hundreds of razor-sharp teeth and burned to a crisp.

But hey, we've got infinite lives.

The Creative Side of Things

Hey folks - long time no talk. I've certainly been swamped at work, but I've managed to keep the homework submissions from overwhelming me during the rougher patches, and hopefully I've been able to give some more direct help to those among you who've taken advantage of them.

What I wanted to talk about today is something I don't really touch on. As a rule, drawabox has always been meant to be the sort of resource that acts as a balance against the high school and college art classes that emphasize formlessness and eschew structure in favour of finding your own way. The expectation has always been for my students to come up to bat already prepared with their own motivations, their own reasons for embarking on this box filled journey.

As a result, we've never really talked about creativity in general. Where it comes from, how to pour fuel on that fire, and so on. That said, I'm a big believer in doing what you're good at, and not spreading yourself too thin when offering services like mine. So instead of expanding from my focus of teaching the fundamental skills of drawing, I'm going to introduce you to someone who can help spark that flame in you far better than I ever could.

Meet Thomas James, aka Good Job Tommy .

He's a respected illustrator as well as the creative director of two well known illustration related websites - Illustration Age  and Illustration Friday. More recently, he's started this project where he shares his insights into the act of creating in the form of process videos, live streams, workshops, interviews, podcasts and more. He doesn't just explore illustration - he digs his fingers into animation, design, music. It's a great, well-rounded range of content that speaks to the creativity and inspiration in all of us.

So for those of you whose souls have been crushed under the weight of exercises and drills, remember that the technical stuff is only a part of what it means to be an artist. Don't let yourself forget why you wanted to learn to draw in the first place. Take some time to indulge in the things you find fun, time to draw whatever it is that you enjoy. And if you get the chance, try to expand those borders of your creativity and explore new media and forms of expression.

Drawing Boxes: Getting More Advanced

So along with covering the same principles I mention in my how to draw a box video, I introduce you guys to a somewhat more rigorous method of developing your sense of 3D space.

My Experiences Working in the Game Industry

So I recently had the pleasure of launching my first title - that is, if you ignore the educational games aimed at toddlers that I worked in in my last job. Which we will ignore. Because "Baby Ha-ha Learns About the Seasons" will not go down as my first shipped title.

In honour of this momentous occasion, I decided to write about my experiences working for a small indie studio, and what kind of challenges and pleasures come with it. I get a little abstract and talk about how to think about one's motivations when deciding whether or not to enter this industry.

In all honesty though, this was really just an excuse for me to share a lot of the artwork I created for the game that did not make it to the final cut (a challenge I also mention). I've peppered the article with several such images for your enjoyment!