one of the first things i started to learn when getting back into drawing about 2 months ago was drawing cubes. i think i got over excited though because my early boxes werent that good at all.

but that makes sense since they were some of my first cubes. perspective is something had no clue about and mostly drew through feeling and trying to feel out what a cube would look like at whatever angle i was trying to draw it at.

about a month ago though i found myself almost completely abandoning cubes and jumping right into skulls. this was my first page dedicated to learning the skull based off a 3d skull i found off sketchfab. one thing i learned from this is how useful it us to try and draw something from memory. it really skyrocketed my understanding of the skull i think.

after some time i felt i could roughly draw a skull from profile view solely from the guidelines i made for myself. i have no idea if they are good or not though but i was very proud of myself

to cut a long story short though i did move onto the front view of the skull and essentially repeated the same process that i did for the profile view. unfortunately the issues came in when i tried to draw it at a 45 angle which turned out so incredibly bad.

to be clear a bad drawing isnt going to stop me from trying to learn. however the issue with this particular bad drawing was that i had no idea what i was doing. i thought since i could draw the profile and front view that it shouldn’t be too tough to draw a 45 angle skull.

little did i know that it was incredibly tough to do. i felt i had a decent understanding of the front and profile that things would just fall into place but none of it did and I hit a massive roadblock.

then i realized that i still couldn’t draw a box at any perspective. and how could i expect to draw a skull at this angle when i couldn’t even draw cubes at this angle?

currently my mindset when it comes to drawing is to learn the things i need to learn when i need to learn them. i will draw this skull at a 45 angle eventually but i need to take a massive step back and go back to boxes.

so these are some of the little experiments with boxes after i put the skulls aside.

they’re not good still. more importantly i still didn’t really understand what i was doing and was mainly drawing off feeling. i understand what vanishing points are but i couldn’t quite visualize it and half the time it wasn’t even in my mind.

this was extremely noticeable every time i got to the boxes that involved 3 meaningful vanishing points. and like dejavu i made another realization… how could i expect to draw a box at those angles when i couldn’t comfortably draw a rotating cube on a single axis?

i don’t know if i wasted 2 months of work or not, but it was a good lesson to try not to jump too far ahead in your studies. that desire to draw more complex should be indulged in during your freetime drawing sessions.

so now im taking another step back and sticking with boxes on a single axis for now and trying to understand how vanishing points change and shift as a cube rotates

sometimes its hard to learn stuff when there aren’t any answer online for some of my stupid questions. or maybe there are answers but im too stupid to understand them.

one thing i struggled to understand is how a cube changes based on the distance of two vanishing points on a single horizon line. i eventually realized that it seems like its all dependent on the cube itself. the distance between two VPs doesn’t necessarily change the shape of a box if the box is an distance from the viewer.

if one were to create a cube and locked its 2 VPs to their respective positions and then moved a box closer to the viewer, then it’ll likely morph into a more diamond shape, and would also do the same if it were moved further away from the viewer.

maintaining a consistent shape of a cube while it moved further or closer to the view requires the VPs to move as well.

so… how does this help me when making my rotating cube? well i guess it helps me because i think this is one of those points where the next step to progress is done by simply drawing over and over again. i understand what i need to do now and i understand the logic behind it (i think?) and now its just about being able to put it into practice. its pretty exciting.

to be honest this all feels very basic and obvious and maybe it’s dumb to write so much about it. but as a beginner it feels good to feel like i understand and now i just need to practice. i wish i didn’t waste those 2 months with the half hearted cube and skull shenanigans, but a lesson was learned and maybe there was some skill that i trained while i was doing that. i dunno. thanks