A few attempts with figures. blue is blob forms, red is roughs of the cubes in perspective, black is line art top row i forgot to use different layers, and the very last image i forgot to switch layers on the line art I started out pretty off, but i feel like i got better half way through. Lots to practice though... The roughs in red took me a while to figure out sometimes.

Level 2 projects. One is from direct observation of people at my daughter's softball game. The other is from a reference photo of two footballers pretending to play darts. Is it just me or does the guy on the left look a lot like Stan?

Some attempts at blobs to boxes. Please excuse the messy lines. I ended up erasing a lot of the blobs while correcting the boxes. Working from both imagination and reference (on second thought real human figure references would've been better than animation), it was challenging but fun - especially ones with quite extreme perspective. One thing I've realized in the process is that I still have much difficulty rotating boxes freely in my mind. Most of the time, I rely on real-life boxes for guidance. (Also, I did use a ruler at the end to check perspective and make corrections).

The first one is from imagination and I highly doubt if any of these positions are humanely attainable;) The second image is my interpretation of the reference images from the rhythm assignment. I had fun doing this assignment as I love drawing figures and visualising the convergence of boxes became a bit easier for me after doing this exercise. I struggled the most to keep the sizes of my boxes consistent. Would love some feedback.

Here are my submissions for critique for levels 1 and 2! And an additional "oops I got carried away" level 2. Before I realized you asked for human torsos with correct proportions, I imagined a bunny creature with crazy huge ears twirling about.  I feel like my boxes are pretty rigid because I'm having a hard time bending them in my mind. I focused really hard on making sure the convergence was correct on each box. I also feel like 80% of the boxes ended up the size and shape I wanted, but 20% ended up too small or too long. Maybe I wasn't imagining the shape before I drew those failures.  I found it made the most sense in my brain when I pictured the closest edge and plane for each box, and drew that part first! Overall fun project that I plan on repeating a lot more to help me develop thinking in 3D!

Blob to box, level 1?

Level 1 for Hand 1. The perspective of the biggest box is off. Also, I had the hardest time figuring out how to connect the boxes at the joints. It felt impossible to match a box's bottom plane to the top plane of the box connected below - without breaking perspective. So I just left spaces between boxes so they appear disconnected. Anyone have the answer to this problem? Hopefully the demo video helps...

Here's a burning question: Does simply practicing more boxes help you draw them accurately enough? (Like Stan said, I understand we're not aiming for 100% accuracy in free-hand drawing) What if you keep drawing them wrong? I feel like making the same mistakes over and over again won’t lead to improvement. You have to fix your boxes afterwards. For example, vanishing points can't be randomly placed. The horizon line should be perpendicular to the Y axis (Marshall talks about this in the Draftsmen episode on perspective). But the problem is, it’s time-consuming to find those far-off vanishing points to ensure they’re positioned correctly. I feel like it’s unproductive to be correcting every box you draw this way (like the attached photo). Then again, you can’t improve without knowing what’s wrong, right? So how do you practice more efficiently? Anyone with some advice, please help. I'm tired of drawing ugly boxes and spending hours correcting them look convincing.

My first assigment done (almost) on time, every critiques are welcome (including how to do better scans, with clear lines, but without this smudges) :)

How do you manage to find the right width/depth/height in your cube ? I'm always struggeling after having drawn the first cube and when I'm trying to put the head in the cube. Do you measure or is it try and error (eraser) or something else ?

Level 1 boxes - started to get a hang of it, I think. At first I had hard time finding the correct Z-axis, somehow I was confusing the top and bottom planes of the box. After twenty boxes I did figure that one out, but now I'm having a proportional problem with the width of the front and side planes. I tend to make everything too wide, I wanted to try level 2 as well, though I'm feeling a bit insecure with just drawing a box correctly in perspective. Yes, the same proportional issues occur here as well, but that's not a big concern. The real challenge with each of these was the placement and size of the eyes. I don't know why, seeing the shape of the eyesocket and sizing an eyeball in it, and to measure the browline to the right height from the eye is just very difficult. Is it a depth-thing? Maybe I should proceed to drawing boxes over skulls.

Lv1 and Lv2 ‘Perspective Heeeds’ submission 😁. Lv1 boxes looked pretty good until I started Lv2 - had to spend much more time refining the box angles and proportions to get the portrait structures ‘accurate’. Also discovered that picture 17 needs 3-point perspective (pretty sure) which I missed on Lv1 #17 box. Repeated image 6 as a 5 tone shading version as we did over a year ago during one of the intro assignments. Lines and structure are similar but with shading it looks like a different person. Anyway, my main learning - the box is the key….but….how do you move past this methodology to get good at just drawing direct without the box, then planes, as intermediate steps before a proper anatomical rendering, either from reference or imagination? It feels like drawing more intuitively would be a very different type of practice, almost a different path…whereas getting good at the box could make you reliant on it forever…?

Here is my attempt at #11, which was surprisingly tricky. I'm still unsure how much of the top plane should show. It feels like my top plane should be larger. I think it's all that hair that makes it confusing. It'd be much easier if the head was bald... I also made this Level 2. Here's some of the mistakes I found: 1) Y axes should be more tiled down like in my Level 1 box 2) This is a major one. I don't know how it happened, but a lot of the perspective is off. The perspective lines at the bottom are pretty parallel. Also, the lines around the eyes are tilting upward - when in the reference, they're actually sloping down slightly. I think it's because of this that something about my portrait looked off...By the time I realized what was wrong, it was too late and I just had to run with what I had. Now that I've done the assignment, I have so much respect for people who draw faces free-hand with few construction lines! How do you get there? Is it simply more practice with boxes until it becomes intuition? Can't wrap my mind around it. Even with the help of a ruler, trying to get the perspective right was extremely challenging.

This is a nice warm up, and this is my first attempt at drawing witha ballpoint pen. Turns out it's quite a flexible tool! And I don't usually use the eraser with my pencils, so I don't miss it😅😅

Thank you, Stan! This exercise was super helpful. It answered a lot of my questions from drawing boxes at random in the past - the most important being, "how steep this line should be so that it converges with the others on the horizon line?" There's still a lot of questions, and of course tons of practice to do until some day (hopefully) I can do this intuitively without too much effort. But with more learning, the pieces of intimidating perspective seem to be falling into place :) I'm thinking of challenging myself to practice with both vanishing points off the page...It might be a good deal more difficult 😬 P.S. Happy New Year everyone! Here's to hoping that in 2024, we all improve our perspective (in both sense of the word lol) ♥

I drew the same imaginary kitchen three times. The first time I and an average adult eye level centered. The second I stayed the same eye level but moved to the far left of the room. The third one I went back to the center but made the eye level above the room. I really struggled with getting the proportions correct for the horizontals and verticals. I tried to ask myself where the foreshortening would be the most pronounced. This helped with some but I could not always reconcile the results. Posted is a mash up of all three and then each individually.

(Repost from Lv.2) Here’s my one-point perspective room drawn from imagination. While brainstorming, a two-story study with a balcony came to mind. So I attempted it, even though in real life it would require three-point perspective. It took me a lot of thinking and revising to produce this. I learned a lot along the way, but there’s still many unresolved questions: 1. I struggled to figure out the relative position of objects. For example, given that we’re looking at the room from the left side, where should the balcony be - relative to the stuff behind it (corridor and the window at the end of the room)? Maybe it should shift more to the right since our viewpoint is on the left? More generally, I wonder how you know where to place things from a certain viewpoint..prbly lots of observation and practice. 2. Also, it was challenging to estimate objects’ relative size. Objects in the distance appear small, but how much smaller should I make them? Take the desk and chair in the corridor. My intuition tells me that I drew them too small. Any tips on getting the relative size right in perspective drawing? 3. Again, given our viewpoint from the left, should the railings of the middle balcony be closer to each other as they move to the right? Any other feedback is welcome :) Thanks!

Here's my attempt, I wanted to push myself a bit by positioning the observer in the corner of an arcade room. It was fun! The right side of the room that's further away from the vanishing point was hard, my free-hand lines were bending a lot. I need to practice longer, straight lines more.

I did this 1-point perspective drawing before viewing the video and discovering ellipses are out of scope. I didn’t do a good job at the round table

Here's my level 2 assignment, I drew a simple typeface in 1-point perspective. Cheers!