I have a question regarding the use of orthographic studies when doing these exercises, and I don't mean this as an attack on the lesson content - I'm genuinely just wondering why I'm feeling this way. These orthographic projections help with understanding relative proportions before going into a 3D drawing, but when translating directly (as in, knowing that a button on a GameBoy is approximately 1/3 up (y axis), 1/5 depth (z axis), 1/3 across (x axis), so lets project those exact planes cutting 1/3, 1/5, 1/3 into the Gameboy to get it right) it is very tedious and route; it doesn't feel like I'm learning how to draw it intuitively, it feels much more like I'm just "copying". Like I'm manually copying the process a 3D rendering program would do, if that makes sense. I find my brain is able to go on autopilot and just say "well, this goes exactly here via the following subdivisions..." and it feels like I don't end up understanding the object well, even if the final result turns out.

Does this make sense? Is this just part of the rigorousness of the learning process? During Lesson 5, I felt that blocking out the animals as organic forms was really difficult and rigorous, but doing so forced me to make mistakes in blocking out those forms freehand, and I felt I ended up understanding the subject better (i.e. After drawing a few horse's heads, I could then draw the horse's head rotated slightly a bit better.).

Overall though, I'll say this lesson has helped tremendously in understanding how to attack real life studies, and the viewing the world as just a series of bounding boxes. Thank you to the TA's for your hard work critiquing!