0:00 Once you decide to take art seriously and dabble into it a little bit, you will notice that some words repeat. Fundamentals... Basic Forms... Construction... Boxes... Boxes? Oh I know how to do that one. Nice. One off the list. Y'know?, Lots of newbies think that drawing this is enough. But I'm a bit different you see? Unlike them, I know lines need to converge towards the same point. So yeah, I know how to draw boxes... Or Do I? This is a story that probably has unfolded hundreds of times, and will continue to do so. It is also how mine started back in last August and since then I’ve actually drawn
0:47 much more than a thousand boxes! Over the last few months, okay maybe around half a year now, I've become a box master and even started seeing my dreams through a minecraft filter. Throughout this journey I've made so many mistakes yet also discovered crucial information, methods, and practices that aided me in drawing this, this and this. So I wanted to compile everything I learned in a rather compressed format showing examples of my own mistakes and maybe save you even more of the months I wasted myself. Even though I did in fact draw a thousand boxes in the Drawabox manner, I did more basic practices before those, and tried my hand at this exercise from
1:34 Krenz Cushart. In this video too I will try to go in order of when I learned or practiced them. You can use these timestamps to move around topics. As we all know the most basic box you can draw is this one. It is in 1 point perspective. Here you just draw any rectangle/shape and make its corners meet at one single vanishing point on the horizon line. Instead of practicing 1 point perspective with cubes and the like, I’d suggest these irregular ? shapes. One point perspective is very simple and with cubes you end up just wasting time. I’ve found that with these the practice becomes active and actually gets you to be more comfortable with basic perspective. I had a big question mark when doing the cubes in 1 point perspective which
2:20 was “How do I measure the length of the side plane?” Unfortunately it remained unanswered for a long time! Since I couldn’t find an answer to that I got kind of stuck. I was only able to move forward with it when I abandoned the cubes and my questions regarding the side plane, and just did the irregular shapes instead. In two point perspective, as you might predict, there are 2 vanishing points on the horizon line. Here instead of starting with a plane, we start with a line. Then extend lines from both corners to each of the vanishing points. The side plane length was still a big question to me. I had decided to stop being dumb and look up some learning material. I found a method from this book and was ecstatic! I for some reason thought this could be used
3:06 to measure the side plane length, but it can only be used to duplicate a side plane that’s already in perspective. How you do it is simple: You draw a rectangular plane in perspective. Draw an X from the corners and find the center. Draw a line going through the center to the vanishing point. Draw a line extending from one corner to the center point of the opposite vertical border. Elongate it until it reaches the bottom line. Draw a paralel vertical line rooting from that point. Again, this only multiplies a plane that’s already in perspective. You can’t use it to measure the side plane length. You can only multiply a side plane that has already been measured. I was being dumb so I thought otherwise. I ended up drawing these and completely embarrassing myself! thankfully to a total of 0 people…
3:56 How you measure a cube in 2 point perspective, though, is by eyeballing circles! There’s a clear method laid out in the How To Draw book on how to draw ellipses but I never understood it and decided to ignore it. Due to ~directly ignoring it~ it took me so long to discover this information! However to this day I still have never used this method. I prefer to fit them inside rectangles. Usually drawing these inside the rectangles helps but you can also definitely make do without them, or add this diamond shape to make it even more easier! I’m going to make a distinction here about circles and ellipses. So, in 2d, a circle in perspective is technically an ellipse. However, I’m still going to be calling them circles whether they’re in perspective or not. This is because I want to make sure I’m
4:45 communicating that what we are drawing is supposed to be a circle and not just any ellipse. It’s just my personal preference in the wording. There’s one other way to practice drawing circles in perspective and working out your intuition for them. You can either start with any ellipse or any plane. If you start with the ellipse, basically we turn it to a circle in perspective by drawing a plane around it. Then you draw more circles on the same plane. Once you’re finished you use the rectangle multiplication method to check how well you’ve done. It’s the same if you start with the plane, you just keep fitting circles on it. One thing to keep in mind with these is that they’re kind of symmetrical. Obviously since they are vanishing they can’t be exactly symmetrical but the points they touch the borders of the plane are supposed to be on the same line that is
5:33 rooting from the vanishing point. If these are not “symmetrical” then it means you made a mistake. I probably saw this practice somewhere but I don’t remember exactly where. I had to rediscover it while making this script because most likely I didn’t read it to understand what it was for and just ignored it. I’m also not sure if it’s 100% correct so take it with a grain of salt. In three point perspective, there is one extra vanishing point that is not on the horizon line. So there should be no more blatantly paralel lines on your box unless they’re really close to each other. Here we start with a dot instead of a line. It is very basic honestly. You put a dot and from there draw lines going towards the 3 vanishing points. After that pick one
6:20 of the lines and also decide on a “border length” on it. Then you draw lines from that point towards the other 2 vanishing points and continue doing this until you get all 8 corners. Most of the practices regarding drawing or rotating boxes are done in 3 point perspective. But I was mostly interested in how to measure a cube! In 3 point perspective! I looked and looked and unfortunately all I found at the time was a very mathematical method that probably can’t be used in art. So I started looking for methods myself while also giving up on measuring cubes and just doing random floating boxes. Which is a practice from Drawabox! Drawabox is actually an art course teaching the fundamentals of drawing. But I was mainly concerned with the lessons regarding boxes. Once I learned how 3
7:09 point perspective works and how I’m supposed to use this Y Generator, I started doing 5 boxes a day. I really wanted to rush and be done with it but I believed that taking it slow would not only raise my chances of finishing it but also give it more time to fully sink into my brain. I did it on digital which is against the requirements and I also highly recommend doing it on paper. Not only is it easier and more fun, it is also just overall more rewarding. I don’t know if I was supposed to mark the vanishing points, I have a feeling I wasn’t, but I did it anyway. Also, even though I tried so hard to restrict myself with the undos and rotating or zooming the canvas, I still kept forgetting that I eventually just stopped caring. The main reason I did them digitally
7:56 despite how much I didn’t like it was that I was honestly self conscious about the amount of paper I’d be wasting on them. It’s not like they look cool either unlike the figure drawings. The recommended method to doing these is ghosting your lines then putting a dot where you think the lines should meet and finally drawing the actual lines. I sometimes used this method, and sometimes abandoned it. Usually, especially after the 500+, I’d do ghost lines to one of the vanishing points and start drawing the actual line whilst eyeing the other vanishing point to visualize where they’d meet. Or even worse I’d completely stop visualizing and instead of starting my line from the root I’d start it in the middle of nowhere, just a bit short enough
8:43 than I feel it needs be, then I’d draw the other line without visualizing too and fill in the empty space. This is a lazier method. I would recommend either the Drawabox method or the first one as they’re probably teaching you something instead of finding loopholes like I did. I think the first way someone would go about it would be to draw the outside planes first and then the insides. But I find that a bit hard and more prone to mistakes. So what I do is draw 2 of the outside planes and then draw the inside planes. After that I draw the rest. This helps conceal mistakes and is also easier because more often than not one of the outside planes is really distorted and hard to draw by itself.
9:28 Other than that eventually I started drawing treasure chests inside the boxes and I think this was the best part. It doesn’t have to be a chest, maybe a car or a stool, just something that can easily be proportionally resized to fit in different boxes. I got bored with the chest design I was using, I tried looking for other designs but all I got on Google was AI generated results from stock websites. So after a few tries at cars and stuff I gave up on drawing objects inside the boxes. Instead, I started drawing cylinders. But I had finished around 250 boxes before I moved onto them which is the recommended amount by Drawabox. They also mention to do at least half of them ? without the generator but I don’t like
10:13 making decisions so I ignored that. So, I kept drawing them, 5 a day, with cylinders inside, for I assume close to a hundred days because I now have around 500 of them. In total I drew 250 boxes with chests (1/5 of them) and 500 boxes with cylinders inside. Very clearly they don’t add up to a thousand. The rest I did on paper so it didn’t seem like I was lying about how doing them on paper was overall just better. (Also it felt wasteful to round down to 500 😸) I did these after the digital ones but I had tried it at the start too and the experience was about the same. (I also did nerd out about which pen/pencil to use but it’s boring so I’ll put it at the end.) At the end of this “challenge” I’m a bit conflicted. I can’t exactly
11:02 pinpoint an obvious improvement in my abilities but I feel that I’ve become more intuitive with where the lines need to end. I think 250 is a perfectly good amount and I’m also thinking that dragging it out might’ve made me forget about maybe how influential the first 250 were? I’d definitely recommend it simply due to how no effort it is. If you do it in one sitting it should take you a couple of hours or if you have only 10 minutes to spare each day it’d take about a month so there’s definitely nothing to lose by attempting it! And whether you want to fully follow Drawabox depends on how much you like it honestly. If you do follow and finish it there’s no doubt you will get better both with observational and with imaginative drawing but there are also million other ways to go about it.
11:53 However there’s one crucial point to take note of when it comes to Drawabox. So at the start I was searching basic questions related to box practices on Google. And just like any sensible person in these years I put “reddit” at the end of my searches. While doing this I bumped into a few posts that were along the lines of “Drawabox held my family of 4 hostage and made me quit drawing”. And I am not judging anyone because I too am not a big fan of reading but I think everyone especially newbies should take this part very literally. I would highly recommend the open treasure chests exercises too. I think it would teach you a lot more about form and positioning it in perspective that can be applied to basically anything. The reason I haven’t done it is because I just hate doing
12:39 any type of highly technical drawing on my tiny tiny tablet. I really want to attempt it some day. If you want to only do the boxes even if you don’t draw any objects inside them consider at least drawing cylinders because practicing drawing ellipses inside boxes really helps with drawing ellipses around the boxes. Drawing ellipses around the planes is a huge part of rotating boxes, which is very coincidentally the main objective of the next practice I attempted! I don’t know anything concrete about its origins but this one is something I know as the “Krenz Cushart Box Exercise” and its speciality lies in that the boxes are now cubes! You’ve probably seen it somewhere on the internet. And like a lot of the people attempting this exercise I also haven’t taken any of Krenz Cushart’s classes or
13:28 any other class explaining this exercise. I kept trying to find methods and rules to it with my feeble mind and nothing worked. It took me so long, mostly because I was being dumb, but I actually figured something out at the end and this is the reason I wanted to make this video. My conclusion with the Krenz Cushart Exercise was that there are 2 approaches you can take. One is simply memorizing it. Look at the reference and copy it so many times that it requires no more effort than breathing. I did not like this approach at ALL. Now I kept trying to come up with analogies to explain myself and one of them was how with boxes the goal was to become a chef so why would I be memorizing step-by-step recipes instead of learning cooking techniques. I
14:14 don’t know if that makes sense because I don’t know anything about higher culinary training. I also had some with alphabets but those kind of fell flat too. So what I’m trying to say is, I’m learning to draw boxes from various different angles so I don’t have to learn each object individually. Since it’s simplified to the most basic form it can have, I’d rather have methods that I can recreate to check when what I drew doesn’t look quite right, basically a way to measure my “correctness” that’s not just looking at an image. Similar to how we check the drawabox boxes, seeing if the lines converge towards the same point. But obviously it’s perfectly fine to take the memorization approach, it’s just that my needs were a bit different.
14:59 So to fulfill my needs I kept trying to figure out the hidden sauce. I tried finding each vanishing point on every single box, making up “rules” that didn’t adhere to logic, just doing anything and everything to find a way out. And at the time I was using this circle method which I had learned about from this video way before August, back in the spring, to rotate boxes for a body rotation exercise. I knew from my earlier attempt at the same box rotation method that simply using circles ended up with my box changing proportions continuously which is just so bad if you need the box as a guide for something else! I was being smart for once that day and started slicing my circles into 16 even parts! And how I did that is simple, I just rotated a square
15:46 by 22.5 degrees until I got a full circle. So you’d think the smart streak would continue and I’d see that this can be used for the Krenz Cushart exercise too, but, unfortunately a dumbass can only get lucky once. I didn’t think of this up until I was halfway into my feet studies. So like 90 days of using the sliced circles repeatedly. I hope there isn’t anything wrong with my brain because the amount of brain fog I have seems a bit too excessive to me. Now I’ll explain how to exactly use the sliced circles for the Krenz Cushart exercise, both in digital and on paper and also how to make almost perfect cube rotations to use for different projects and practices! In digital I’ve been using a template to practice with. It has a bit more
16:35 than the classic 16 boxes. I use it for extra repetition. But it’s all mirrored or just straight up the same. My explanations will revolve around the initial 16. You can pick which one to use depending on how much repetition you need. First step is to draw this box. There are no methods to it. The vanishing point is right in the center. And I recommend having the side plane size be in this 1/2 ratio with the back plane. You can experiment with them to see what you like but I’ve found that others end up looking weird. I think it’s all about the focal length or something? But unfortunately MagicPoser only has a matte box and the transparent boxes I managed to find on Sketchfab after grueling search don’t have
17:21 any options to play with the camera settings. So I can only show it with my faulty drawings. Though, I came across this video and apparently this app has transparent boxes and other organic shapes with camera settings. So if you’re interested in that you can check it out. There weren’t many resources for transparent 3d shapes on mobile that I knew of so I’m glad it exists now. Drawing the circle is more of a muscle memory thing to me at this point but it’s still a big hassle because I have neither muscles nor a good memory! How I practiced it was explained before. One thing that’s so important to keep in mind is that you’re drawing a perfect circle in perspective. So each curve from one corner to another needs to be symmetrical to make it a cube. It’s a bit tricky because just like the boxes
18:10 they get heavily affected by the perspective too but since there are no clear cut lines crashing onto each other and making a distinct shape it’s hard to figure out if you got the proportions right or not. If your cube ends up looking weird it is most likely that even though you got the ellipse right you might’ve missed the proportions that makes it a circle. There are two kinds of rotations we will be making. One is horizontal and one is vertical. Some of the horizontal rotations require to first rotate the initial box vertically. To rotate a box vertically you draw circles around the horizontal planes. And to rotate a box horizontally, you draw circles around the vertical planes. If you draw them around the front and back planes you get something completely different! But, it’s not used for the Krenz Cushart exercise at all! Once you draw the circles you move one
18:57 corner on it and move the others according to that and kind of eyeball everything. This was about all that I learned from the box rotation video. However we need to go a bit further than that. After you draw the circle, draw an X from the corners you drew circles around. With that you have the center of both the plane and the circle. Now you can divide your planes into 4 even squares by drawing lines going through the center, following the perspective, and if you go just a little bit farther you’ll have sliced your circle into 8 even parts! I really despise eyeballing so I slice them all one more time which also requires eyeballing but it is really easy and having concrete guidelines is way better than trying to eyeball on the spot! And now we have the perfect guide for the cube rotation
19:47 exercise! Move the corners one slice at a time and connect the dots. It really is that easy. Once you have made boxes from all corners you’ll have done all this exercise requires. The further you go from the initial box the harder it gets. The circles get a bit hectic on the highest angle so I end up using different colors to see them properly. Since we’re on digital you can draw the circles once and use different layers to move the new boxes around. But while drawing the on-paper examples I’ve realized starting from scratch each time might be more beneficial especially if you don’t have practice with circles. I kind of didn’t notice that the way I approach this practice was fully dependent on being able to draw circles. How you make the boxes perfect enough to be used as guides for art purposes
20:35 (and by that I mean that they will only look perfect, but actually aren’t) you just transform this layer to fit the boxes. I don’t know why I made such a big deal of it. As I briefly mentioned I tried the practice on paper too because even though I was confident that it would take more time but still be doable I felt like I’d be a fraud if I didn’t actually prove it. (Since I can’t record videos I will try to showcase examples with copying what I did on paper, on digital.) Unfortunately on paper there were no layers I could use, I tried using different colors but it looked so messy. So I accepted my fate and took it out of the options. The first option you have is just starting from scratch each time. I drew these guide boxes with a ruler. I also drew them
21:21 aligned simply because it was easier but it came in handy down the line. Then just like I’d do in digital I drew the circles and drew the rotated boxes on top. You have to draw the circles each time which I guess is good exercise. It also didn’t take as long as I thought. I timed this one and got 5 minutes. I didn’t try to go faster or slower. However I have no way of proving it except this screenshot. So I guess you’ll just have to trust me. After the one I recorded I guess the angels wanted to help me out because I realized since the initial boxes were aligned, I could use the ruler to rotate these vertically. Obviously you still need to measure the actual vertically rotated boxes but the ones after that you only need to draw the circles for.
22:06 I’m glad I had less circles to slice. Slicing the circles was really hard since I was drawing them so small. It gets confusing pretty quickly! So using thin pencils or drawing them big is important. Though the bigger you go I think the harder it would be to draw. One unexpected discovery I had with doing this practice on paper was that it’s much easier to draw the circles! I mostly chicken scratched instead of gripping the pen so hard that my hands start creaking randomly just to get any resemblance of an ellipse. Though I guess you would achieve a similar effect by using a pencil-like brush on digital too. But it was definitely way better for my poor old fragile wrists. It was also very therapeutic like those adult coloring books.
22:53 Considering it took more or less 75 minutes I think it is more than doable on paper! Especially if you care about being able to transfer your skills over to traditional. The second option is to only draw the circles referencing the earlier ones. So that means you’ll have to rotate and measure less. However, I didn’t do it myself. I’ll just show a visual representation of what I mean. The reason I didn’t attempt it is because I have zero confidence that I can do it. I don’t think I can freehand proportional circles in perspective. Maybe random ones? Sure, but definitely nothing good enough to draw cubes in. The third option is to print this template (or trace from a device). This way you can reduce the amount of measurements you have to make but also not miss out on any much needed practice!
23:40 I’ll try to put a link to it in the description. Oh, and of course, you can also use it digitally. Just as a disclaimer if you are a beginner beginner and (by that I mean you don’t already have a habit of drawing for fun) I wouldn’t recommend starting with any type of rotation exercise. I believe it’s best that you start with casual observational drawing. This is a highly repeated beginner’s advice and the reasoning behind it is that for a beginner the most important thing is to continue partaking in the activity. The easiest way to do that is to draw what you like and create a positive reinforcement cycle. But I also have an underrated take on it which is that if you can’t draw something as is from a reference you can’t turn it around or draw it from imagination. The best thing
24:26 a beginner can do is avoiding overloading themselves. You don’t need to be able to do charcoal portraits that scare off printer companies. Just good enough where you can communicate what’s in a reference without much struggle. For most adults without factoring in disabilities and outside factors I’d estimate that it would take between 3 months to a year with adequate time spent practicing. But as always this is just my opinion. So, should you draw a thousand boxes? Unless you’re a NEET with infinite amount of time, probably, probably not. But maybe consider drawing around 250 of them. Am I going to continue drawing them? Absolutely. I enjoy my routines and I don’t like it when they change. So unless my
25:13 life gets so busy that I have not even a minute of free time left I’ll continue doing them until I get bored and annoyed. And the first one is not happening any time soon because I am a lazy bum! Oh and here is a comparison of my boxes now and me a year ago trying to do the same thing but failing miserably. And if you want to see what you can do once you are able to draw these rotated cubes
