Hey everyone, it's time for a new month, and that means a new theme!

I started this year with the intention to post one finished piece of art on my blog each day, and though my daily updates won't be changing, I want to do some things a little differently. I'd like to use this space to showcase things I'm learning, everything I've done up to this point has been me fumbling around in the dark. Speaking of fumbling, I was doing just that around the internet and found a link to this really cool site, it's called drawabox. There are a whole bunch of neat lessons on there that are based on instruction from an artist I wanted to take an online class with! I think this will be a good way for me to learn more, and get better, instead of just working toward some vague goal that I won't really know if I've achieved. So for the next however long this takes I'm going to be working on the lessons and homework assignments assigned on that site, and post my work here.

Alright, now that I got that giant disclaimer out of the way, let's see what I did! I'm going through each and every one of these lessons, so I'm starting at the start with lesson 1. It's all about lines, ellipses and boxes.

My homework for the first part of the lesson is to draw several 2" lines (I did 10), several lines that were half a page in width (10 again), and some lines that stretched the full width of the page (I think you know how many I did by now). All of these lines were drawn with a ruler. Once that was finished, I went over each line by hand 8 times, to test and improve my mechanical drawing ability. I also added some squiggly lines to trace over as well. Let's see how it turned out!

I think these came out pretty good, it might seem kind of easy at first, but it's pretty hard to go over everything exactly right 8 times! As you can probably tell I had a little trouble. The first set of lines (the short ones on top) were made by moving my hand from the wrist. Those were definitely my cleanest lines, mostly because I tend to draw small and you don't need to involve a whole lot of the arm to do so. My next set of lines were drawn by me moving my forearm from the elbow, those came out pretty sloppy, but I also think they were scrunched a little too close together. Finally the last lines were made by me moving my arm from the shoulder, that way I could move across the page and keep my lines straight. Trying to do that from the wrist or elbow would have created a lot of sketchy lines.

I'm gonna keep doing these for the rest of the week, so I'm sorry if these next few posts won't be terribly exciting, haha! I know this is going to benefit me and my art in the long run, but it might not be super fun to look at right now. The next lesson's gonna be pretty neat though, it's on organic forms, and those are kinda my favorite things! But there might be a month of squiggly lines and boxes before that, so yeah.

Check back tomorrow if you want to see my progress! Thanks for stopping by tonight!