I feel like I’ll be doing a fair amount of these exercises in the coming weeks. I find that creative art can be really hard to schedule and use a lot of mental, physical, and emotional energy. With some busy school weeks coming up (and me just finishing up a few of them), I think that I might end up focusing on art practices that are more casual and easier to pick up and put down again. I’ve been really interested in getting back into the DrawABox program. The last few texture exercises I was doing were really difficult and to be honest kind of demotivating. I’ve taken more time to read the lessons though and it’s helped me internalize that these exercises are intentionally really difficult and there isn’t an expectation to be good or confident in them. Definitely feels like a small thing that I should have internalized independently, but you’ve got to do what you’ve got to do I guess. I think it helped so I’ll just go with that. I might come back to the article as needed for motivation.

I was doing some warmups to try to get into the next exercises and found myself getting sidetracked trying to iron out some flaws in a specific exercise. This isn’t what I intended going into this drawing practice, but I found myself pretty motivated to keep working on it. I started with a drawing of a cube which was a pretty good mood booster. It turned out a lot better than I expected. I was unhappy with my first arrow because of it’s shaky lines. It’s an exercise to practice thinking in a 3D space, but I still thought that shaky lines would be a good thing to start working on. Ultimately it was a really good way of finding something I needed work on and putting some effort into it. It lead to some other good opportunities to practice too. Like working on cross-hatching and comparing it to a charcoal value gradient.

I found that writing notes directly on the page as I did the exercise was a really good way of processing my thoughts. It allows for more detail than the usual gut-instinct good or bad labeling. It can be a bit time consuming to write out thoughts and ideas, but I think it should help me to process my thoughts better. Accurate self-critique is something that I definitely need to pay attention to as well since I’m not really getting critique from other people.

Later on in the evening I watched through the video on the next lesson (the page for this lesson is also available here). It took me a fair amount of time to watch. It’s a 40min video and I watched it at 1.5x speed, but still paused it from time to time as I got sidetracked by other things. I might try to work on this exercise further tonight and will hopefully include it in my next update.