Drawing Drills Arts and Crafts

After yesterday’s harried drawing drills, tonight I decided to make time for a different approach, to see how they would turn out. This was much more relaxed. I crafted a little paper box to study as I drew boxes rotated in space. Though after a while I switched to just drawing imagined boxes.

Now, I’ve never used AutoCAD (though one time during my graphic design undergrad studies, I toured a box factory that made like…cereal and granola bar boxes, and the designer there showed us how they used AutoCAD). Still, I tried to channel generic box template. Alas, when I cut it out, I accidentally cut off some of the tabs that I’d sketched. What can I say, I hadn’t used a craft knife and ruler in a while and was having fun and became over enthusiastic in cutting all the lines! Clearly need to do some paper arts sometime.

The finished box! Double-sided tape helped keep it together. I numbered the sides because I wanted to draw the boxes, number the sides, then add the color later. That way I could draw them all in one go, and then go in with each colored marker.

The colored-sides approach lasted about half the page before it felt too stiff and a little boring. Still, it was fun to reason about how the planes were moving through space and how to draw a single box flipping around.

The sheet of printer paper I had under my first drawing had marker bleed through, so I sketched on top of that – basically recreating many of the same boxes, but perhaps with cleaner lines. This time I didn’t draw through the whole box, but only the lines of the visible planes.

Finally, on the last sheet of paper (last night’s marker bleed through sheet), I used the Ohuhu markers to do rough, fast sketches. I felt very warmed up and I like how these turned out.

I’m hoping tomorrow I have more time for cloth folds or some other study. But drawing drills are an investment in muscle memory, so I’m happy with these studies, even if they are very plain.

‘Til next time. <3