Linework is an important part of a lot of different art forms. It’s a skill that really bleeds into other artistic practices as well. Learning how to confidently draw lines carries over to things like making confident paint strokes. I REALLY struggled with linework when I first got interested in art and, like most things in art, I’m still working on improving it. My biggest problem was my anxiety. I’d feel a lot of sudden pressure before making a mark and would mess up my lines because of that. I could “ghost” the lines decently and practice the motions of the line prior to making it with no problem. When I actually needed to make the line I would feel a lurch of anxiety and overthink it. I found that enough practice helped me get over this effect which made a big difference for me. Linework is something that I come back to and practice regularly. It’s a nice fundamental of art because you make a progress in it by just doing creative things you enjoy. That being said, it’s really important to be vigilante about monitoring it and make sure you aren’t slipping into bad habits. For this reason I like doing exercises that are focused on linework and the fundamentals of art that can be practised alongside it like perspective.
One of my favourite resources for working on this is Draw A Box. Draw A Box is a pretty intensive program, I fell off my first few attempts at starting it. It’s something that I try to come back to readily now. I’ve found that their advice has really helped me take large steps in my artistic abilities. The first few exercises focus largely on just drawing straight lines. It teaches a lot of really useful techniques like drawing confidently from your shoulder and arm instead of wrists and fingers. These exercises are largely focused on things like drawing a line over a ruler-made line, drawing a line between two points after ghosting it, and eventually drawing 2D planes. These exercises have a really nice through line to them. They slowly build up to the perspective exercises while never really abandoning a past skill. Things like the 2D square planes are still basically just exercises in drawing straight lines between points. There’s a few things that disrupt this mold a bit, the ellipse exercises diverge from this gradual process because of them being round ellipses not containing straight lines. Draw A Box still connects them to the past exercises by using the previously drawn 2D planes as “frames” for ellipses. This will help tie into future exercises involving cylinders and helps give students an idea of how ellipses behave in perspective.
During the summer of 2020 I got to the most dreaded part of this program (and the thing probably that gives it its name). This part of the program is called The 250 Box Challenge. There really isn’t much I can say to describe it that the title itself doesn’t say. During the summer I’d try to draw about 10 boxes a day. I was locked down for the summer which made for a pretty perfect environment for this challenge. I spent a ton of time either drawing boxes or wandering around outside, but it was a pretty enjoyable summer all things considered. I thought that this was a really useful exercise, despite the challenge it presented. It was really great for getting me a ton of practice with shapes that are really important for drawing construction. It helped me a lot with perspective as well. If you look at the exercises above you can see coloured lines extending from the lines that make up the boxes. These lines let me check how the box lines converge and assess myself. There were a few times were I extended them in the wrong way (I really found that boxes can create an optical illusion where they flip orientation depending on how I looked at them). It worked as a really good form of assessment, you might be able to see some arrows where I marked lines that went off course. Another form of assessment I had was critique from a friend who was doing the exercise at the same time as me. It was pretty difficult to critique each other because most of the time the lines told everything they needed to. It was good practice for getting peer-critique at least (something that I’m really bad at seeking out). It was really helpful to get motivation from someone else doing the exercises as well.
After that summer of boxes I actually dropped the program for a bit. It wasn’t because of a lack of motivation or burn out luckily, I just wanted to focus more on figure drawing for a bit and practice that for a while. I’ve been a bit of an actual art lull recently, mostly kicked off by the chaos of moving and working over the last summer. I’ve been slowly getting back into a rhythm of art again which has been quite nice for me. I decided to pick up Draw A Box and have been doing some gesture drawings to practice figure (something I’ll discuss in the next post). I still find creative drawings really scary and a lot harder to motivate myself to do. I find that just turning my brain off and doodling is good way to practice that while still relaxing and enjoying myself. I tend to motivate myself with new materials a lot too. I’ve been really wanting to play with some India ink so I got some recently. It lead to me making a piece of art that I’m really happy with, but didn’t really plan beforehand.
Getting back into Draw A Box relates to my initial goal of painting some plants in watercolour too. The next few exercises are focused on organic form and texture, but they build up to exercises on construction. I’m really looking forwards to these exercises but definitely feel a lot of nerves around them too? I’m not entirely sure where the fear comes from, I’m not afraid of messing up and I kind of expect to. I think there’s a fear of failure that’s a lot more intense than failure itself. I’m not entirely sure if it’s been conditioned into me from things like school or the way my ADHD works. I often get extremely invested in tasks which can make it sting more when they aren’t exactly what I want. I put off the texture exercise a lot. I had actually halfway completed it prior to getting to this week but had dropped it before doing the “texture gradient” part. It took me a while to do the first part too. I had bought an orange to use as a texture reference. By the time I did the exercise it had gotten really dry and old. I was proud to get it done though. I finished the texture exercise this week and will be trying to move ahead in the program. There’s still a form dissection exercise before the construction stuff, but I think that should still be kind of fun (as long as I can remind myself that drawing is something I enjoy).
I thought it would be fun to give myself a reference point for my construction abilities before and after the future construction exercise. I drew one of my plants as a study and tried to be as accurate as possible. I focused on drawing the things closest to me first so I wouldn’t have to deal with overlapping lines too much. I’m really happy with the end result of this exercise. There were a lot of lines that I really messed up, but once the whole picture was done they were pretty hard to notice. Nice to have this plant line-work too. If I get too interested in other things I might just come back to it and paint it to mentally check off my initial goal. Feels a little like cheating, but there’s no rules here. As long as I’m actively doing art I think I’m pretty content. I’ve included the India ink drawing I did down below.
