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8:41 PM, Monday April 29th 2024
Hello and congrats on completing lesson one. My name is Rob and I'm a teaching assistant for Drawabox who will be handling your lesson one critique. Starting with your superimposed lines these are off to a fine start. You are keeping a clearly defined starting point with all of your wavering at the opposite end. Your ghosted lines and planes turned out well. You are using the ghosting method to good effect to get confident linework with a pretty decent deal of accuracy that will get better and better with practice.
Your tables of ellipses are coming along pretty good. You are doing a good job drawing through your ellipses and focusing on consistent smooth ellipse shapes. This is carried over nicely into your ellipses in planes. It's great that you aren't overly concerned with accuracy and are instead focused on getting smooth ellipse shapes. Although accuracy is our end goal it can't really be forced and tends to come with mileage and consistent practice more than anything else. Some of your ellipses in funnels are having some slight issues with tilting off the minor axis. https://drawabox.com/lesson/1/18/notaligned This is something you should always start considering when drawing your ellipses. Your ellipses are off to a great start but there's still room for improvement so keep practicing them during your warmups.
The plotted perspective looks great, nothing to mention here. Your rough perspective exercises turned out pretty good. It's great that you are keeping up with the confident linework on these. You are also doing a good job extending the lines back on your boxes to check your work. As you can see some of your perspective estimations were quite off but that will become more intuitive with practice. One thing that can help you a bit when doing a one point perspective exercise like this is to realize that all of your horizontal lines should be parallel to the horizon line and all of your verticals should be perpendicular(straight up and down in this case) to the horizon line. This will help you avoid some of the slanting lines you have in your constructions.
Your rotated box exercise turned out well. I like that you drew this nice and big as that really helps when dealing with complex spatial problems. You also did a good job drawing through your boxes and keeping your gaps narrow and consistent. I can see that you were a bit perplexed by the corners but please don't just leave something blank if you don't understand it as you will be assigned revisions in the future for doing so. A big part of learning how to draw is getting used to working outside of your comfort zone so at least attempt to put something down even if you don't fully understand it. While the rotations here aren't perfect this was a very good effort overall. The more you draw and develop your spatial thinking ability the easier these rotations are to handle. This is a great exercise to come back to after a few lessons to see how much your spatial thinking ability has improved. Your organic perspective exercises are looking quite good. You seem to be getting comfortable using the ghosting method and drawing from your shoulder for confident linework which is great. Your box constructions are solid for the most part and I can see you are developing a sense for how box lines converge to vps. Nice work!
Overall this was a really solid submission that showed a good deal of growth. Your line confidence and ellipses are both coming along nicely. I think you are understanding most of the concepts these lessons are trying to convey quite well. I'm going to mark this as complete and good luck with the 250 box challenge. Keep up the good work!
Next Steps:
The 250 Box Challenge
7:38 PM, Tuesday April 30th 2024
Hello Rob, thank you for encouragement. I think all of the instructions and concepts are mostly quite clear, which is wonderful. But I'm not entirely sure what I left blank, though? If I did, it was unintentional and I can add what's missing if you elaborate further.
I'll add just in case that the little question marks I drew in some of my homework were mostly just a sign of my frustration when the lines didn't go where I intended them to go ("argh, come on, hand, what are you doing?"). I know it'll get better with practice, though.
Anyway I'm having quite fun with this and I'll continue with the 250 box challenge. Thanks again!
Edit: Ooh, I just read the instructions again and realized it should've been a 5x5 grid of boxes bent around the "ball" and I missed the corner pieces. I just kept drawing boxes until I thought no more could be seen behind the previous ones, heh. Ok. I'll redraw it at some point.
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