Anyone can learn to draw. It's not some magical talent a few people are born with. It's a skill you can train. We can help.

Drawabox is a set of free exercise-based lessons that focus on the fundamentals - the skills you'll need to make sense of all the other resources and tutorials out there. First we focus on the basic mechanics of mark making, and how to use your arm. By the end, we develop a strong understanding of form, 3D space and construction.

I won't lie to you - our approach is tough and involves a lot of hard work. It's also structured and gives you a clear path with concise explanations and assignments you can complete and submit for review.

You can read more about Drawabox and how it came about here.

Or you can join the community of thousands of beginners and professionals alike and get started.

Homework

Once you've completed a lesson, one of the best ways to refine your understanding of that material is to help others by critiquing their work. After having done thousands of critiques and having improved immensely over the last few years, I can attest to that myself.

  • Lesson 4: Applying Construction to Insects and Arachnids

    CabbageHeads

    9:07 AM, Thursday May 28th 2026
  • Lesson 3: Applying Construction to Plants

    Slime

    6:15 PM, Thursday June 4th 2026
  • Lesson 2: Contour Lines, Texture and Construction

    Ghostea

    1:22 PM, Saturday May 30th 2026
  • 250 Cylinder Challenge

    Tawny_0wl

    10:35 AM, Thursday May 21st 2026
  • Lesson 3: Applying Construction to Plants

    Ion

    2:05 AM, Saturday May 30th 2026
  • Lesson 4: Applying Construction to Insects and Arachnids

    Celeste_mary

    3:44 PM, Saturday May 23rd 2026
  • Lesson 2: Contour Lines, Texture and Construction

    dll_mac

    7:06 PM, Tuesday May 26th 2026
  • Lesson 2: Contour Lines, Texture and Construction

    Nar3

    3:15 PM, Tuesday May 26th 2026
  • Lesson 5: Applying Construction to Animals

    lauralolly

    2:08 AM, Tuesday May 26th 2026
  • Lesson 2: Contour Lines, Texture and Construction

    PedrinPvp22

    6:04 PM, Sunday May 24th 2026

Questions/Discussions

Take a moment to answer someone's question, or contribute to a discussion, if you have anything to offer.

  • Pattern I noticed with The Next 50, is there something I can do to improve this?

    EdgyFedora

  • What to submit for admission in concept art school

    Crosby

  • Lesson 7 making a cube in space

    drusk

  • Feeling intimidated by the cylinder challenge

    343

Sketchbooks

Along with Drawabox work, our community members also post other artwork to their sketchbooks.

  • NoWorkOnMonday's Sketchbook: Please Please Me

  • metonym00's Sketchbook: Sketchbook while tackling 250 box challenge #2

  • snugglethebunny's Sketchbook: Animals

  • NICIUS's Sketchbook: Necromancer (50% rule) - a gesture drawing exercise that went too far

  • Vigi's Sketchbook: 50%

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Framed Ink

Framed Ink

I'd been drawing as a hobby for a solid 10 years at least before I finally had the concept of composition explained to me by a friend.

Unlike the spatial reasoning we delve into here, where it's all about understanding the relationships between things in three dimensions, composition is all about understanding what you're drawing as it exists in two dimensions. It's about the silhouettes that are used to represent objects, without concern for what those objects are. It's all just shapes, how those shapes balance against one another, and how their arrangement encourages the viewer's eye to follow a specific path. When it comes to illustration, composition is extremely important, and coming to understand it fundamentally changed how I approached my own work.

Marcos Mateu-Mestre's Framed Ink is among the best books out there on explaining composition, and how to think through the way in which you lay out your work.

Illustration is, at its core, storytelling, and understanding composition will arm you with the tools you'll need to tell stories that occur across a span of time, within the confines of a single frame.

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