I never finished the drawabox lessons because I found it unappealing in it's tone and bruteforce approach that often slowed me down more than it helped enable my learning.

Drawing insects and cars are as good as anything else to construct, but they don't hold as much value to me to learn as the human figure. I didn't want to wait until I filled all the pages worth of content drawabox would have me fill before I got to drawing the things I wanted to draw, so I got through the early lessons and applied construction to human anatomy instead, then my learning took off.

Nowadays I find more value in Scott Robertson's How to Draw. It's far more thorough and it gets the reader through construction concepts extremely quickly. There's no "stop what you're learning to draw 100 of this and 250 of that" or prompting to post your work online and have someone tell you to redo the work before moving on to new concepts.

5 pages to cover line and ellipse fundamentals, 5 pages to explain perspective terms, 13 pages to cover perspective techniques like mirroring planes and curves over an axis, then suddenly you're at perspective grids. Within 20~ pages you've laid an extremely robust foundation for construction.

The flip side to that is how much drawabox's early lessons laid a foundation for what I should be doing to improve line control and giving me a baseline understanding for what construction is. Before drawabox, I had no idea it was even called construction or that it was a way you could learn how to draw.

I still remember looking at some of the work the drawabox creator showed from student submissions and being shocked that their grid lines were drawn in pen without using a ruler. It completely blew my mind. I still remember feeling gutted because it seemed so impossible and I had to overcome the massive feelings of inadequacy because my lines looked horrible by comparison.

But that's the benefit of drawabox. It's not to be the most complete way of teaching someone how to draw. What it does really well is to show someone who's never considered how to draw a box in perspective what the rules are for a whole new world of possibility.

I drilled those line ghosting exercises and ellipse worksheets to the point that I filled sketchbooks with them. I numbered pages to keep track and drew pages with straight line exercises, then pages of curves, then pages of ellipse worksheets, etc.

It was extremely uncomfortable but that's what mileage looks like when it comes to building pen control and that's the value that drawabox gave me. I didn't finish the courses because my interests were pulled elsewhere and I wanted to develop my construction in a subject matter that held more interest to me than treasure chests, bugs, and cars. I found the bruteforce methods to be stifling my passion for art but that foundation kickstarted my construction journey and I'm glad I found it.

I remember being so stunned by the complexity of Scott Robertson's How to Draw that it took me several phases of picking that book up, feeling overwhelmed, and putting it down before I finally built up enough comfort with perspective to gain value from it.

I think drawabox fits that role of getting beginners in front of a sketchbook, equipping them with practical, cumulative exercises, giving them a framework for gauging success, and shoving so much content in front of them to draw that it seems impossible not to improve just by completing them.

Would I want to construct a similar set of lessons like drawabox but with changes to fit my taste in learning? Sure, but I haven't put in that kind of work and I appreciate drawabox's creator for the work they did. I would wager that an incredible amount of users have benefited from those lessons over the years. When I want a quick way of recommending line control and ellipse practice to others I'll often say "Do the early drawabox lessons" because it's such a quick, easy way to find that information.

Plus, the fact that it even exists for me to have a love / hate relationship with is a good thing. It means progress in the overall accessibility of art fundamentals to newcomers. It means advancing the conversation on effective ways to learn and it means people who don't have the same learning preferences as I do will have something in drawabox that meets up with their preferences.