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Lesson 1: Lines, Ellipses and Boxes

2:00 AM, Saturday August 28th 2021

DrawABox Lesson 1 Exercises - Album on Imgur

Direct Link: https://i.imgur.com/rnK24mR.jpg

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Even coming from no drawing experience outside of doodles in high school, this process has been humbling lol. I am still struggling with accuracy on my ghosted lines and ellipses, and approximating perspective is not something I feel I was able to improve on throughout these exercises, but I can at least recognize now that those are areas that I am struggling with. I'll probably give the rotated boxes another go - I made some serious mistakes early on that kind of set the rest of the exercise up for failure.

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8:01 AM, Saturday August 28th 2021

Good job on finishing lesson 1, let's get started:

Superimposed lines

The issues I noticed so far are:

  • Your lines make arches. This is surely caused by the natural movement of your shoulder. You can correct this with practice, and if it always happen, try making an arch on the opposite side, so your brain somewhat corrects it.

  • There are dots at the end of your lines. Try lifting up your pen before reaching the ending point of the line

  • There are frying ends, but you fix this with practice

Ghosted lines

There are some little curves, but nothing dramatic.

Ghosted planes

I like these. Your lines look confident and bold. Keep practicing lifting up your pen, as said earlier.

Ghosted ellipses

So I see that you tried to keep things inbounds, but some ellipses didn't reach the limit of your box so you decided to fill with more ellipses to fit the empty space (like here: https://imgur.com/a/u5O7f97). What I would recommend you is to stop in that moment, think about your next ellipse, and then try to make it fit with our already defined limits. Also, you coud have added more divisions in your rectangles, not only with straight lines, but also with curves.

Ellipses in planes

Keep it up with ghosting through your ellipses, they will improve and be more accurate.

Funnels

Issues about funnels:

  • Many ellipses are separated ones from the others. You need to keep an eye on this

  • Your minor axis isn't accurate in your ellipses. Think before executing!

  • Play a bit more with the widths of your ellipses, they look a bit repetitive

Rough perspective

First, some lines aren't that confident, and second is the accuracy of some lines. Ghosting your lines is the key!

Rotated boxes

What happened here? The rotation of some boxes is too big compared with the rotation of others! For example look at this post (https://imgur.com/a/4OD2vfP) . You'll realize that the boxes aren't event of the same dimensions.

Organic perspective

To get you introduced of one of the common issues that will appear on the 250 box challenge (chek the 2nd image on https://imgur.com/a/4OD2vfP). Also, you could have added more boxes in some frames...

And that's much of it! As final notes, I think is a consistent work, and there is an evolution during the process. However, I want you to repeat something before going for the 250 box challenge...

Next Steps:

Before going for the 250 box challenge, I want you to do these exercises:

  • A page of funnels. Keep in mind the points I pointed out earlier.

  • (Optional) A page of rotated boxes.

Once done, come back and I'll check them

When finished, reply to this critique with your revisions.
9:58 PM, Sunday August 29th 2021

Thanks for the feedback, DCP! I would agree with everything you said, and I think most of my issues stem from not enough time spent on the preparation phase when ghosting my lines.

In the re-do of the funnels exercise, it may not look like it but I really did try to focus on keeping the ellipses aligned with the minor axis - I seem to have a hard time aligning them perpendicularly. I also have a much harder time when the degree is very narrow!

As for the rotated boxes, I think this one shows marginal improvement... still very flawed, but I was at least able to keep them somewhat consistent in size this time.

https://imgur.com/a/dCvU1e2

I hope I linked that properly - if not, the URL is https://imgur.com/a/dCvU1e2

12:47 PM, Monday August 30th 2021
edited at 12:48 PM, Aug 30th 2021

Keep practicing and you'll see improvement on your ellipses, boxes and so on. Time to move on

Next Steps:

Lesson is complete. Remember to do warm ups, check your mistakes and try to crrect them in your exercises. Go to the 250 box challenge

This community member feels the lesson should be marked as complete. In order for the student to receive their completion badge, this critique will need 2 agreements from other members of the community.
edited at 12:48 PM, Aug 30th 2021
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