Stubborn as I am I decided to invent my own rotations, and set myself up for hours and hours of problems I tried to solve. It took a lot of thinking and errors. I'm not sure I got it right in the end. While doing this I discovered that for me, it's a lot easier imagining where opposite flat planes go, like sheets in space, rather than trying to connect the dots. Four dots made me overthink which produced a lot of silly erros, because it was a bit difficult to rotate each dot in space eather than the "top sheet" and the "bottom sheet" of the arrow. Maybe it's too much to keep track of?

Absolutely loved having a play with these!

Despite my belief that I've always had a pretty good natural sense of 3d form, I've been pretty terrible at this thus far. I've drawn my own guidelines (basically the original example in reverse) for these attempts. Probably unwise to do it without a grid but I think I've been just consistent enough. I'm struggling to intuit where the form should "puff out" or "push in". I think my 3rd attempt is the closest to being correct but I feel like I'm still far off. Any help is appreciated. I'm pulling my hair out over this.

Arrows / forms bend & twist.

starting with bending the arrow, about to start rolling and twisting it around

Just trying XD

At first I followed along to the demo and then I tried to really wrap my head around how it worked… The colors might be a bit hard to see, but take the red/purple in the left-most drawing for example. The way I understood it was: curving lines attach from the end points of the side plane of a box to the top plane of another box and then back to a side plane of another box on the opposite side. It’s a repeating pattern. If there were three more boxes after that, eventually the red/purple would become the blue/green. However when Marshall divided the boxes in half and used those half-way-points to “grace the curves”, I did struggle to understand why (for example, the purple) was drawn more convexly. Well, I guess it’s to “grace the curve”. But… I still can’t wrap my head around that entirely. For example, on the upper-most drawing where I drew the lines quite darkly, I didn’t curve them as convexly. I tried to follow more of an S-rhythm. It doesn’t look that wrong to me…? I don’t know, I guess I do understand what Marshall was demonstrating, but it’s the type of thing where I understand it for a moment and then it disappears… and then I understand it again and so on and so forth. I also drew a shape with lines moving along XYZ to relate to the previous lessons because it felt really similar. Well, I’m also attaching some very messy pen scribbles where I tried to figure it out whilst watching TV.

I decided to push myself further to go beyond the examples in the video and invent more arrows - and I must say, it was way more fun than expected! Although perhaps I went overboard with the top-right arrow haha because it looks a bit weird - either I've drawn it incorrectly, or it's just a really weird point of view.

Twisting forms is so much fun! In the twisting arrow demo, Marshall placed the three boxes far enough apart so that they don't overlap. I wanted to see what would happen if you foreshorten a similar setup so that they do overlap. I started ideating for this but then went a bit overboard! Still, it seems like a fun puzzle to return to some time.

This took a while to get but it is starting to make more sense. Logically I understand that there is a lot of foreshortening going on when we are going from seeing one side to the other when the twist happens but still, when I just look at it... it's really hard to wrap my head around what's going on and draw the intermediate line.

Here is my arrow design. I put them in box. I use a ellipse or half a ellipse in box, to do the bend. I also use perspective.

Very good explanation. I like the overall scientific approach with a dash of intuition. Quickly done. Twist and shout!

You explain everything so well Marshall, that I feel like I understood it right away. I was expecting to struggle a lot more then I did after all your warnings so was surprised to find out that it made immediate sense when I sat down to do it myself.