Assignment - Perfect Cubes From Your Mind's Eye
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I Teach Creatives
assignments 175 submissions
HELP!🆘🛟 I just did 90 cubes free hand no model just to warm-up and there is something wrong - I feel i dont know what I am doing (this assignment has me in a PANIC) can you guys tell me what is my main problem(s) so many thanks! this is for me a childhood nightmare back from hell!! so many thanks ❤️❤️❤️
LESSON NOTES
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You have a challenge ahead. You need to draw cubes without looking at cubes. Your friends should swear you copied them. Why do this? Drawing an accurate cube without reference gives you the most basic foundation for advanced perspective.
The Power of the Cube
Cubes provide three axes. These cover the world in all three dimensions. They use right angles strategically laid out to navigate every direction. The finale is the square faces. A square is the constant and true source of measure to eyeball proportions.
Up until now, we drew box forms without much concern for proportion. Now we want to perfect our foreshortening skills. We master proportion by seeing in simplified units. In perspective, we see in squares and cubes.
The Challenge of Proportion
It is easy to spot a square on a flat surface. Tip that flat surface in space and it becomes hard to discern. Foreshortened planes can surprise us. They lie in space. A tipped rectangle can easily look like a cube. Only the trained eye can control a true square in perspective.
Tricks to Check Your Proportions
Let's look at some tricks to build this serious skill.
- Extend lines: A small deviation gets big if it keeps extending. A two-degree error reveals itself the further you draw it. Extend a foreshortened square to see if it is truly square.
- Check the far plane: The hidden far side of a cube is less foreshortened. The less a plane foreshortens, the less it distorts. Look at it and adjust. Estimate first, then refine with that distant plane in sight.
- Draw through the box: This is a reliable way to check your proportions while sketching.
- Place circles: A square and a circle touch at four points. They stay fixed when you tip the drawing in space. Foreshortened circles become ellipses. These ellipses can give us the proportions of a foreshortened square.
- Find diagonal vanishing points: We want to imprint the 90-degree angle in perspective. Another good angle to know is 45 degrees. Only a square gives us perfect and easy-to-find 45-degree angle diagonals.
Training Your Mind's Eye
When drawing your cubes, rehearse the three-line systems. Remind yourself that each line goes in the same direction as its neighbors. Assess each square in perspective with a critical eye.
On every square, run lines from corner to corner. Run lines across horizontally and vertically to divide the faces into segments. Out loud, remind yourself where the 90-degree and 45-degree angles sit in perspective. This prepares you to see a protractor in space.
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ASSIGNMENTS![]()
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![Jeremy Johnson]()
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![Angelica]()
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![Mon Barker]()
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![Dooby]()
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![Ishaan Kumar]()
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![Pamela D]()
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![Spyridon Panagiotopoulos]()
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![Randy Pontillo]()
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![Jules Peppler]()
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![Leif]()
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![Dermot]()
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![Dermot]()
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![Huda Hijazy]()
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![Jyayasi (*Jay-o-she*)]()
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![Vitor Gardini]()
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![Lin]()
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![Michael Giff]()
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![Max Long]()
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![Marshall Vandruff]()
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![@writedrawface]()
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![Carlos Javier Roo Soto]()
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For this assignment, you'll be using the 100 cubes you've already drawn from the last Assignment - Control Depth on Paper with a Simple Box.
Look at your rough drawings and your reference. Notice the difference.
Using your reference, sketch each one lightly and roughly again (1-2 minutes). Do not try to get the positions exact. Just place the general proportions.
Then hide your reference.
Choose the longest receding line attached to the closest corner. Darken that line. That is your source line. All other lines on this cube will be that length or shorter. Figure them out.
- Trim planes and extend planes
- Think through the logic
- All planes are square
- Try to discern that when they tip away
- Draw through completely.
Deadline - submit by August 09, 2026 for a chance to be in the critique video!
HELP!🆘🛟 I just did 90 cubes free hand no model just to warm-up and there is something wrong - I feel i dont know what I am doing (this assignment has me in a PANIC) can you guys tell me what is my main problem(s) so many thanks! this is for me a childhood nightmare back from hell!! so many thanks ❤️❤️❤️
100 cubes in my little sketchbook. Six per page. But wait, since there is the underdrawing I count 200 cubes! Nice little trick to make us do even more without knowing. 👀
I didn't manage to get all 100 cubes, but I was pleasantly surprised that when I rotated my pages, the proportions became clearer (at least for most of them anyway).
A 100 more cubes. It’s a struggle but I did it. I do think I am getting better, slowly, but at times it felt like I was geting worse…
100 cubes, 50 shaded distal planes, 50 with ellipses. The green ellipses attempted without scaffolding once I thought I’d understood ellipse to plane relationships. Quite a few fail the cube test proportionally but correcting whilst drawing was a very good exercise to ‘see’. I wasn’t using reference so the ‘wide-angle’ cubes sometimes went a bit experimental and not sure they qualify as cubes but there were some successes too!
With Marshall’s cautionary recommendation to ‘master the cube’ before we move on, I tried to make a cubes mastery checklist based on this section of course…have I missed anything ?! (Did not include flaps/vanishing trace since that is more than cubes)
Couldn't get the full hundred in time, so I'll just post what I managed to get done.
I can't wait for the lesson on ellipses because a lot of these are wobbly and probably just incorrect. This wicked learning sure is wicked lol
This, along with the plane game, was a proper HIIT equivalent of drawing exercises. However, all these cubes later, I now have a better idea of what parameters to tackle while trying to draw one from a random angle and distance from the observer. It also helped me narrow down the issues that I face while drawing cubes, so I can work on eliminating them bit by bit.
Here are my redrawn 100 boxes. I kept the single line drawing in pen as thats the way I had started on the first set of drawings. It did actually help me to think about the line more and direction.
I did improve a bit on proportions, and comparing these latest attempts to the boxes just two months ago, there is indeed improvement, but after close to 100 hours combined on just boxes and cubes, not being able to get them consistently (even at the end I had failures as you can see) is starting to severely demoralize me. This submission is just the presentable 100 boxes. I have at least 6x more pages. From extremely bad early attempts, to salvageable attempts later on. But more on that in the next assignment, that I did not make in time. (Partial submission of first 10, will finish though and post during next week)
Life gets in the way sometimes but i found time to peck away at it, 40 cubes in total!
I focused so hard on the proportion side of things that some of the previous lessons fell to the wayside, i managed to catch, or, at least see it most of the time but sheesh some of my cubes are rough.
Way to go! We do what we can despite being busy.
Great Job on sectioning your cubes. These look really crisp and those ellipses are smooth too!
I feel you. This exercise took so much focus, at times I too started to forget some of the basics. I'm sure the mileage will pay dividends later on.
:)
I have done more than these but here are a bunch of cubes. I am curious how you think I did? I got bored of just drawing boxes at random rotations quickly so I tried experimenting with applying them to small scenes and objects. I did struggle with trying to keep proportions throughout scenes. I felt like I was guessing quite a bit on the proportions, and placements of objects. Also if my first cube was off by even a little bit it would make the whole thing look weird.
Here are some of my assignment attempts.
I only connected the 4 ellipse dots, I'm not sure how to
work out the ellipse angle. When the ellipse is tilted, the centre of
the ellipse moves away, are there reference points to determine it?
I'll be a while with cubes yet.
The Plane Game was interesting but I need to get more familiar with the planes.
Any feedback would be great, thanks.
Here are more attempts, but I think the drawings are getting worse.
Also, I assume because the ellipses are drawn as circles and not ellipses, the perspective is lost?
I didn't complete all of them since each cube took quite a bit of time. Although not all of them came out as planned, I feel like I'm learning a lot and getting better with every attempt..
Got 72 done out of 100 and I am dreaming of cubes now! Looking at the far plane and drawing through the box helped me the most.
I can't do 100 cubes, but probably I will add this exercise as a routine practice. I don't have sure if I did correctly, but I tried : )
Here are some cube gestures from memory (flashing myself with a Zolly reference for one second then drawing the cube), as well as a bunch from pure imagination/invention. I actually have a question this time @Marshall Vandruff . I understand we are learning cubes to do good ellipses and then difficult spheres. But the only way I can draw cubes from imagination is: invent spherical orientation → establish the cross contours, then wrapping ellipses → those ellipses give me a coherent 3-D orientation → extract the three perpendicular directions → construct the cube around that orientation. Because if I’m right the cube planes touch the sphere tips where the diagonals meet in the centre, while ellipses give me the four tangents and that helps me orient myself. Otherwise my tripod melts too much. Is there a downside to doing it this way?
I know I said I wouldn't stress out about this but... you would have to go back to my high school days and my endless struggles with math to find me so disheartened and frustrated. I literally leapt out of my chair and spiked my coffee cup into the floor during the carried horizon critique video and came dangerously close to doing it again with this assignment.
I just feel stuck. Ever time I pick up doodling and I start enjoy drawing I convince myself that I can learn to draw comics. Then I try to teach myself and I just get angrier and angrier till I'm met with a persistent sense of dread when sitting at my drafting table and... I give up. I'll take 6 months to a year off and start the whole loop over again. Its been like this since 2016 and it seems this class will be another notch in my seemingly endless belt of failure.
Thanks to those that donated their time with explanations and examples and sorry that I lack the talent, smarts and patience to put them to good use.
All these cubes are driving me mad! Michael, take a moment and review your options that you are faced with. You could take a break and start the whole loop over again. Or, you could choose to press forward. I don’t have anything submitted for this assignment and in all likelihood I won’t have a submission before today’s deadline, as my art focus has been spread out beyond perspective. Earlier, before seeing this thread, I referenced my Bridgman book and went to the Perspective of the Head section and doodled on a sheet of paper some of the images that I was seeing. I was wanting application for all these maddening cube assignments that we have had lately. I have attached that page here. I see in your response to Mr. Vandruff that you mentioned George Bridgman. My challenge to you is to break your loop cycle of the past by giving up and keep pressing forward. Go back to George Bridgman with the knowledge that you have gained from this perspective course and apply it to your drawings from Bridgman. Hopefully, you will notice an improvement from the past. Good luck!
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11d
Michael, there's another option here, but first...
If you've been doing this for ten years and it's resulted in such intense frustration, rather than merely taking a break, have you considered shifting strategy?
Some very successful artists got there by simply pursuing their project. Perhaps using the word "simply" is misleading. Pursuing your project takes a lot of complex commitment, but if you can "pick up doodling," and start to enjoy yourself, why not draw your comics? Why not let your frustrations lead to breakthroughs of "My page layouts are starting to work" and "I finally got this character to be funny!"?
Perspective, useful as it is, is an artificial aside, like learning music theory. A lack of it has not stopped some very successful songwriters, nor has a lack of perspective stopped some very successful cartoonists and comics creators.
I am sorry this has brought you so much pain. Comparing it to math memories, which I, too, knew from 7th grade humiliation meetings with parents and teacher, gives me a glimpse of what you've gone through. But I gave up on math as soon as I could get away with it, with no discernible loss.
I hope for your comics to be entertaining. Perhaps you will thrive in another class, less quantitative than Perspective. If so, I'd like to help so that your hard work feels less defeating, more invested.
An aside: Malcolm Gladwell's book DAVID & GOLIATH may have a chapter or two in it (the one about the advantage of disadvantages) that could inspire you. He offers role models who, unable to do one expected thing, found their strength in different and unexpected ways...
Taking a break to recharge (within limits) is always a good idea but what you described is all of us, though. No-one is internalizing all of the assignments properly, just gleaning bits and pieces to carry, hoping it will help illuminate the dark a little more. I also can’t see vanishing points off the page for absolute shit, nor can I visualize the HL without using fingers despite trying for a long time now. but the carrier horizon thing gave me a general idea at the back of my mind that somewhere up there or down there the HL is perpendicular to the Y line so two of the axes go in this direction. that’s all I took from that. I’m using crutches like spheres and right angles and my sense of wrongness to feel my way around because I can’t do VPs and I know it will bite me in a future assignment - but if the hw sucks, that’s fine. It’s not like Marshall will think less of it. And you WILL leave each assignment knowing a bit more than before.
I think your hand is moving faster than your brain has time to apply what you know and then you work yourself up convincing yourself that you can’t do it. I have to stop myself to do things consciously otherwise stuff flops. I’ve seen you give advice to others that you don’t apply when you rush so it’s in there and you know it, you’re just always drawing panicked. Instead of chasing the class I.e. an ideal of what the hw should be why not just submit 35 cubes that suck but where you slow down and think each through?
This was difficult at first, but I feel like I got the hang of it by the end. I went back and redrew most of the cubes and my head hurt the whole time. Despite that, I'm glad I did it because of the practice and learning from my previous errors.
Well done, fellow perspective soldier! :D
I especially like the wide angle cubes in the last pages <3.
This is probably the longest I've ever worked on an assignment lol. 100+ cubes DONE :D
I essentially drew them 2 times, too. First a rough guess, then corrected with the help of 3D if necessary or just polished. First normal 50mm focal length, then just a quick test for wide angle 10-20mm.
