>>5807928Boxes and other construction methods attempt to replace natural drawing and seeing ability with a substitute that guides an idiot to some sort of enlightenment. Whether it works or not is debatable. It has nothing to do with imaginative drawing, and has everything to do with a person's inability to visualize forms in space, or really see basic forms in complex objects (to see "simply"). This is why construction-based approaches are used for both imaginative drawings as well as drawings from real life. It is to pacify the idiot.
The meme that people like to use is that the old masters used construction and "you can't see it" because they somehow, somewhere, moved past it. That they used it and then discarded it. This meme was unfortunately spread in Hale's Drawing Lessons where it had a boxy caricature that people mistook for real. Yet very few drawings when they were young exhibit anything close to construction approaches. Even in their underdrawings that they erased or drew over, x-ray and imaging analysis seldom shows construction. Almost every single one was based on an innate ability to observe, deconstruct, draw and render.
While it's true that something may seem constructed, as you'd be hard pressed to find a hand that isn't boxy or a head that isn't oval, the idiot thinks that this is both the start and the end rather than a very basic observation that someone put down on paper because they were in a rush or deciding on composition of things. So, in their ignorance, they end up drawing boxes everywhere thinking this is part of rudimentary drawing stages.
As a result, construction and draftsmanship are not at all related to each other. Old masters were perfectly capable in their viewing contour lines of the body and could effortlessly put them down on paper. This is what nearly every imaging scan shows us, that the underdrawings and early sketches are very much done either by observation, or fluid movement of contour line from memory/imagination.
