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I do touch on this in the "FAQ" portion of the video, which is also elaborated upon in the text portion of the lesson which you'll find here: drawabox.com/lesson/0/2/faq but to give you a short answer, no you are not required to only work from your imagination, in the sense of reference not being allowed, but there are certain ways of using reference that would constitute a study rather than play. Specifically, this would include any situation where you are reproducing an image exactly as it appears - a mastercopy (or masterstudy as they're also referred to) is an exercise used to learn how the artist made their choices as they worked through a piece, so that we can better understand the choices we make, and how we make them. And so, as an exercise, it would not fall under play. Similarly, copying a reference photo directly would also be a different kind of study - and thus would not constitute play. Using multiple pieces of reference however (which I demonstrate in this video with the example of a woman riding a tiger through a market), where you are making your decisions in terms of what goes where, and choosing reference based on what fits *your* intent, rather than allowing those references to dictate your choices, is fine. The only situation where I would not recommend using reference at all however is if a student is actively afraid or hesitant to work without them - that they reach for those references as a necessity, rather than as a tool. In that case, it would be more important that the student break down that fear by facing it head-on, choosing to draw without reference. Then, once that fear is weakened, you can go back to using references and will probably find yourself less tethered to them as a result. Ultimately what you do for play is not meant to help you improve your skills. It is there to break down the expectations we impose upon ourselves (like that arbitrary feeling that at age 40 not being able to draw at a certain level feels yucky, despite being 40 years old actually saying very little about how much time you've spent learning to draw, and how you've gone about it), as it's those unrealistic expectations that manifest as barriers to our growth. One last thing - a lot of people create this idea around drawing "from your imagination" as though it is a very specific badge of honour that one can only achieve by specifically drawing without references of any sort, just pulling stuff out of your head. But that's not actually what it is, not in the slightest. It all comes back to what I said earlier about the "choices" we make. About being in control of the idea of what it is we wish to draw, and not allowing the tools we use to dictate those choices. Reference can - and often does - still play a role, it's just one that helps elevate what it is we ultimately produce. The use of reference in this manner itself is also what fuels and develops our internal visual libraries - allowing us to take bits and pieces of that with us, and rely on it later when no reference is available. But it is not the absence of reference that qualifies as drawing "from your imagination" - it's how the tools themselves are used. I can draw without reference, and I frequently do - but if I'm working on something where the end result matters, whether it is for my portfolio, or a piece for a client, then I will absolutely use reference to help me produce the best result I can. The result is still a reflection of my imagination though, because I was in control. I chose which tools would help me achieve my goal, rather than choosing the goal that would fit my tools. So, I wouldn't worry too much about the whole "drawing from imagination" thing right now, because it's more likely to create its own arbitrary barriers in your path, created by yet more expectations of how things *might* be, rather than how they are. Rather, in developing your spatial reasoning skills, and learning to understand how the objects you're drawing are built up with individual three dimensional forms, and how they relate to one another in 3D space, you will find your ability to draw from your imagination, to use those references as tools rather than decision-makers, improving without you even intending for it to do so. Drawing from my imagination isn't something I've practiced all that much, in a direct or specific sense. Rather, I practiced my foundational skills (spatial reasoning again being the most important for this), and allowed the rewiring of my brain to manifest in how I was playing.

Honestly, I'm not really a big proponent of art school in the traditional sense of a 4 year degree program. It depends on the school of course, but the ones that both offer degrees *and* actually teach you how to draw tend to be painfully expensive. I myself studied programming in college, and it wasn't until after I graduated and started working as a game programmer that I decided I wanted to change careers towards art. I, like you, always continued with it on my own, but had not approached it in a structured fashion focused on learning - it was just a hobby, nothing more, nothing less. When I made that decision to change careers, I spent the next 15 months doing what I could to add structure to my self-teaching, while continuing to work that job and save, and then moved to Los Angeles to attend Concept Design Academy for about 6 months - or two terms - worth of classes. CDA isn't an accredited school, but rather it's more of a night school that some of the instructors at the neighbouring Art Center College of Design (one of those super expensive schools) would teach at to earn extra money. I basically spent my first term on fundamentals, going back to a blank slate so I could fill in the *many* gaps in my understanding from having taught myself, and then the next term was on learning more specific intermediate concepts - mainly focusing on composition/illustration and form language/design. This was back in 2013/2014, but today both CDA and other schools that have come up in the same space offer online classes (mostly thanks to the pandemic), making that sort of venture both a lot more affordable (while the classes I took were under $1000 each, which pales in comparison to what one would pay at a more traditional art school, most of my expenses were from having to move to LA and not being able to work during that time). And that's just one of the kinds of options that are available today. Aside from those kinds of classes with feedback that you can get from CDA, from Brainstorm School, from CGMA, and so forth, there's also much cheaper subscription based resources like New Masters Academy (which, full disclosure, is our sponsor), one-off courses from Proko.com, and so forth that really make going back and developing those skills easier than ever. Well, of course it all still takes a great deal of hard work, but the other barriers that exist around it have come down a great deal. All of which is to say - there are so many ways to pursue those skills if you want to, and frankly the best ones don't sit in the dusty halls of a hundred year old institution you can only access by selling your first born.

I know it's jarring - but I have yet to see a single student who isn't way off on their initial attempts. And frankly, I can be off by a significant margin too when I try that exercise. Always remember that the end result of an exercise isn't that important - what matters is what we gain from doing it, and what it tells us about how to keep improving.

Wow, you actually pay attention to RUclips comments and answer questions? I thought you'd be too busy to care. ​@Uncomfortable

@@PhthaloGreenskin Hahaha. I treat responding to comments and being active in the discord community as part of the job.

Hahaha, well 2nd graders are 2nd graders after all. Although there is a "form" of chicken scratching that is extremely useful, where we simply build up a longer line through a series of individual intentional, thought-out, intentional strokes - but what beginners tend to do doesn't actually involve thinking things through and getting those strokes to flow fluidly together. And so once we learn to pay attention and where to invest our efforts, eventually we can come back to a technique like that and get a lot more out of it. For now though, it's really just a crutch that students reach for because it's all they know how to do, and they're more focused on maximizing their immediate result, rather than working towards a longer-term goal.

Hahaha, honestly when you think down to what we're learning here and how we go about it - it's all on that level, where we're trying to rewire the basic functionality of how our brain engages with these kinds of motions. Translating the intent of what kind of mark we wish to make, to how our brain understands intuitively how to execute it. One thing about your comment gave me a good laugh though - 100 on the IQ scale is supposed to represent the average, with above 100 being above average and below 100 being below average :P

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I get where you're coming from - I've been there myself, and I hear it from my students often enough. On our discord server, we have this channel called #well-that-went-poorly, where we don't allow conversations/commentary, but restrict it only to students posting work they did that, while they may feel went badly, ultimately serves as a celebration of the fact that they drew at all. We also have #well-that-went-fine, which serves the same purpose. The "poorly" version is only different in that some students feel they need permission to share work they aren't proud of. Often enough we'll get comments from students pointing to the "poorly" channel, saying that what's posted there is far better than they can do, and that it might not be appropriate for those students to frame their work as they do. Those comments both miss the point, and hit the nail on the head in the same breath. The thing is, no matter how developed an artist is - whether they're a beginner with no objective sense of what might be good or bad about their work (just a vague sense of inadequacy that fuels their thoughts towards self-deprecation, as a sort of malformed sense of integrity), or if they're an intermediate artist as I was when I was drawing in the sketchbook I showed here (I'd been drawing for 10 years at that point, but not in any structured manner intended to grow/improve/learn/etc), or whether they've been working professionally for years - we all experience to some degree that sense of our work not being where we want it to be, and that comes out in how we talk about it. The important takeaway here is that those feelings are not based on reason or objective fact. They are based on how we feel, and those feelings are only valid within the context of our own selves. So if I describe one of my sketches as being sub-par, it doesn't need to reflect upon how you should look at your work - nor should your views of your own work reflect upon how another student does. While I'm certainly as susceptible to that manner of thinking as the next person, I actually take a lot of pride in collecting and showing the entirety of my development over the last twenty-something years, and I regularly share this album with my students on discord whenever discussions like this come up: imgur.com/a/Ca5JB (imgur's overly sensitive maturity filter will probably display a warning, but there's no nudity in there). We all start somewhere, but that isn't what's important. What's important is where we're going.

@Uncomfortable I really appreciate you taking the time to give such a detailed response. It's heartening to hear your perspective on this. It's kind of scary to think that that anxiety never truly goes away though. I didn't anticipate how much of an emotional and mental challenge learning to draw would be, I always thought it was moreso about the hard hours of mechanical learning that would stump me most. Psychology is weird. Anyway, thank you very much for your advice, I think it's helped a bit 😊

I'm glad to hear that the 50% rule has had a meaningful impact on you. As to your question, as you said - it depends - but what it depends on is your intent. When it comes to beating down perfectionism, as we all must do to some degree, a lot of it comes down to paying attention to the motivation behind the choices we make, or the choices we feel inclined to make. Learning where they come from, reflecting upon why we feel inclined in that direction, can help us identify the root of that intent, and assess whether it's coming from a place of fear, or a place of exploration. The two feel very different, and usually fear is going to be attached to more negativity and stress, whereas exploration tends to be more positive, allowing us to fall into a flow state that the stress of perfectionism tends to work against.

​@@UncomfortableThanks!

It is absolutely a very complicated concept - and one that relies heavily on the kind of spatial reasoning skills this course develops throughout its lessons, but most specifically through the constructional drawing exercises we perform from lessons 3-7. What we're doing here is introducing the idea that forms relate to one another in 3D space depending on how each is oriented and positioned in space, and that those relationships can be defined, and are useful to understand - but at this stage you are definitely not expected to grasp how it all works. In the next several lessons, we'll be engaging with combining different kinds of forms together, and that will slowly rewire your brain from understanding those relationships as they exist in the two dimensions of the page, to understanding them as they exist in three dimensions - but don't pressure yourself to need to exhibit that understanding now. Just do your best in applying the instructions as you can, and trust that we will be exploring this concept a lot further.

@@Uncomfortable oh that makes sense, thanks!

It really doesn't need to be so precise. If we don't mention such things in the material, then you can be fairly assured that it doesn't actually matter.

Thank you so much!! I appreciate your prompt response

Many talk about it in regards to "self-improvement", but I don't for just that reason. People like to reduce complexity into simpler forms, and so it's entirely natural for humans to try and conceive of themselves, or of others, as the totality of... something. What they have, what they can do, how they can contribute... But that doesn't inherently mean that it is the only way to look at things. It is a natural stance to have, but not necessarily a beneficial one, especially if it goes hand in hand with introducing the kind of unrealistic, unreasonable, and ill-informed expectations that can hold us back from achieving those same goals.

@@Uncomfortable I will admit i've had a love-hate relationship with your course and philosophy over the years, but i'm ready to commit to your instruction 100% [50% of the time] on the topic, i think viewing drawing as self-improvement is good. idk, i feel like sometimes we go too far to cushion failure. Like, i feel like a person needs a strong internal drive to learn a skill as complex as this one. and it sorta feels like padding the walls/floors to suggest that you aren't better for having taken on the challenge, and worse for running away from it Eager to dig into your course, i think your principals and words have stuck with me for a reason.. i always had trouble with the "letting go" part of learning, maybe i can, just this once ;)

​@@Retrofire-47 I certainly understand being of two minds on this. I find that the issue comes down largely to what traditional school tends to emphasize - don't *just* do the bare minimum, always do more, always strive to be the best you can be, etc. The problem with that is that learning drawing as a skill feels like it's this academic pursuit, but it's a *lot* more like a sport. You can go and play the sport (and you can be bad at it but still successfully play), and you can go and do drills and exercises to improve your skills in a targeted fashion, but at the end of the day, like a sport, the goal is still to play in the games, run the races, etc. This lines up really well with drawing. When people view it as an academic pursuit, they slip back to needing to have a personal role in dictating what it is they do to learn, even when right at the beginning, as a blank slate. A lot of this comes from that deep need for self-improvement, to always be bettering themselves, and to ensure they're not just doing the "bare minimum". But that bare minimum is designed - by me, for whatever that's worth - to account for everything a beginner requires. When they start imposing other ideas on it, other expectations of how learning, and of how learning drawing specifically *should* work in their view, they tend to start building up layers on top of that instruction. Layers that are not necessarily reliable, because they're not based on experience or knowledge. And so they tend to add way more hurdles, and distract themselves from all I really asked - and more than that, with those expectations come even more road blocks into following some of those instructions at all (like the more generalized terror that comes from someone asking a student to draw just for the hell of it, even if they don't know what the thing they're trying to draw looks like in reality). And so not only does this desire for self-improvement overcomplicate the study aspect of things, it also stops them from some of the aspects of the course that strives to help students develop greater resiliency so they *can* do what they need to with confidence, instead of anxiety. That confidence, that willingness to draw things badly, is like a super power - but instead of investing their time in developing that super power, the ability to rocket forward without concern for the shots being taken on them, turning away blades and bullets without slowing down, students are concerned about the very next drawing they'll make. What they fail to realize that the next drawing they make is beyond irrelevant. Your next drawing is never going to be the magnum opus that puts you on the map - it's just going to be another drawing, one of hundreds and thousands. A drop in the bucket. But we prioritize that over the super power that will actually help us get to our goals. Whew, sorry for the rambling - but hopefully that helps get into more detail as to why I don't think the whole self-improvement angle is helpful at this stage. Later, absolutely (if you're pursuing a career or whatever else that requires you to be excellent at the given skills), but right now students want to run hundred meter dashes, but they can't even tie their shoes.

The result is a series of truncated pyramids pointing towards a shared center, but I would strongly advise you against trying to simplify the exercise into focusing on whatever approach will achieve that result. The exercise itself is in the process we use, and the hurdles it has our brains jumping through. There are many ways to achieve a result, but what you get out of them may differ. One approach may teach you more about one thing, another approach may have benefits towards an entirely different area, and another approach may still get you the result but ultimately impart you with little.