Repetition vs. Iteration

34 days. 52 hours. 47 pages. 6,000 individual lines.

This week I completed drawabox.com ’s 250 Box Challenge and earned the badge of “The Relentless” for the effort.

I’ve been working through the Drawabox course since Thanksgiving (thank you Lake Huritz and Visual Arts Passage for the recommendation). The course’s focus on spatial reasoning skills is über motivating. I’m on my way to believing everything I draw is really 3-dimensional — that my page is a window to a much larger (3-D) space.

Right now, the exercises are a lot of repetition. Filling pages with lines, ellipses, ribbons and sausages. But these exercises aren’t purely repetition. I’m doing each to the best of my ability, then reviewing it, and doing it again. I trust that my physical dexterity with a pen as well as my mental models will improve over time.

The 250 Box Challenge feels less like repetition, and more like iteration. Drawing box after box — albeit different shapes and orientations — to get closer to correct outcomes. My first box was a disaster of diverging vanishing points. I made all the classic mistakes. It wasn’t until box 50, that I figured out I needed to draw bigger boxes in order to be bolder with different dimensions and orientations. With box 100, I’d decided constructing the boxes in the same order each time helped with accuracy — no matter their orientation.

At box 150, frustrated, I watched another student’s box video. Brilliant! My mental model improved (as did boxes 151-199). By box 200, I started to see almost immediately when a line was off. Most delightfully, at box 225 I could foreshorten my boxes and face them in any direction I wanted. Boxes 249 and 250 were minor triumphs — not perfect, but clearly on their way.

Finishing the 250 Box Challenge has renewed my appreciation for iteration. Now on to DrawaBox Lesson 2!