I’ve had to watch both videos about 500 times but I think it’s beginning to sink in. I don’t know if it’s my old age fog but I found this quite challenging. Deciding if my arrows are above or below kind of puts my brain into the twilight zone! On about the fifth replay I finally got the joke about dying after seeing the two diagonal planes! 😂🤣😂. Old age?👵. Did I get this right? I hope so, because I’m headed to trying a blocky subject in the box next. Thanks again. I’m enjoying learning to see things in a new and artistic way. I might be getting the POINT!
Here is my assignment. I tried drawing through forms and did some perpendicularity practice but I think a lot more book stacking is on the horizon. Hopefully it will help with intuiting right angles because I’m not happy with those from imagination. :3
It might sound silly but I have always wanted to be able to draw arrows like this and have seen it as a key weakness of my drawing that I can’t do something so deceptively simple!
1000 arrows later, and I have put something together… Granted I haven’t watched the extra video on it yet, so when I do I will probably see everything I did wrong, but I have battled this arrow to death for the time being.
I have done and redone and redone the assignment, and I can now kind of visualise what I want to draw before I draw it, which was not possible at the beginning. I still put it down wrong to begin with but after about 3 redraws I finally get an arrow that works… kind of.
I tried not to draw boxes and fill them in for this - that may sound dumb but I wanted to try and think logically about whether something was close (and therefore bigger) or further away (and therefore smaller or not so visible). Unfortunately my instinct with converging lines (already made more difficult by all these diagonal lines) always seems to be wrong and converge in the wrong direction.
What you've drawn, and what you've written, give my high hopes for where you'll go.
Yeah — this is a basic skill that goes just a bit beyond basic, and you took it on.
Good show!
drawing out the boxes in the first picture definitely made things clearer for me starting this assignment, but when I do the ‘diagonal arrow’ I always seem to just do the ones left or right of the initial arrow but rotated, and then have to redraw them.
Ok @Marshall Vandruff I think I smell a trap, or maybe I’m just being dramatic 😱 . So, we have 9 basic views and we can draw these as boxes and even add their X, Y, Z axes. Then we have an arrow as an object, and can assign X, Y, Z and a bonus XZ (pic 2). Now, when we put the arrow in a box and draw it from one of the nine views, we can either prioritize Arrow X, Y, Z (pic 3) or maintain consistent X, Y, Z between boxes and arrows (pic 4). The consequence in picture 3 is that the arrow X, Y, Z (solid line colour examples) is different to the Box X, Y, Z (dashed line colour examples). The consequence in picture 4 is that you are constrained in ways you can tumble the arrow in order to keep the box/arrow co-ordinates consistent. So what’s my question….well, I guess that the axes of the object stay consistent no matter how we tumble them, and the axes of the environment stay consistent regardless of viewer position, but object and environment axes will usually be inconsistent and so we keep two sets of axes (or more if many objects) in mind when drawing…?
Well, you are being dramatic, but with such dramatically impressive drawings, you've earned a license for drama.
If you are able to keep in mind all the words in your post, you have better concentration than I do. To think that I thought I was making it simple! Thanks for dramatizing.
For now, you've earned the right to stop thinking. My recommendation is to shift to speed-drawing your choice of these. Lines without Language. Gut over Brain. Into your Impulses!
Struggled a lot with getting arrows to go into the background, or coming out of, but in the end I started getting the hang of it.
That said, I still can't do it without the scaffolding (the plane below). What am I doing wrong? Is this considered the exercise, or did I fail for not going at it blindly?
I'm finally understanding how people do those boxes around the sphere thing and the arrows were pretty fun to draw aswell!(also added a warmup page toom ust for funsies)
Hey Marshall,
I’ve been on an arrow‑drawing binge these past few days 😂.
I really appreciated playing around with all kinds of variations, for example:
- tweaking the arrow shapes,
- experimenting with increasingly dynamic angles,
plus a bunch of other sketches I haven’t shared here because they didn’t quite work out (including some shadow studies, etc.).
I had an absolute blast with this exercise—it felt like the perfect excuse to try out a ton of stuff 👀🤭.
Thanks so much!
ohh this one is really tough, for boxes I can do it from imagination albeit for 3/4 direction I have some lines wrong. But for arrows I really need to check the reference and often get confused about which side should the thickness pop out to intend the arrow's direction against the camera.
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