Armoo

Giver of Life

Joined 2 years ago

4375 Reputation

armoo's Sketchbook

  • Sharing the Knowledge
  • Giver of Life
  • Dimensional Dominator
  • The Relentless
  • Basics Brawler
    2 users agree
    2:46 AM, Saturday August 24th 2024

    Congratulations on completing the 250-box challenge! I will try to give you some feedback.

    I can see that you started before the updates to the challenge, so I will try to base my critique off of the original rules. Overall, I can see a lot of improvement between the first and last pages. Your lines have gotten much smoother, and the boxes look very solid. I also like how you chose a variety of different angles/orientations for your ys. One thing is that the back corners of your boxes are sometimes off like in 222. Don't worry, though, since this is a very common mistake. One tactic that might help is drawing the inner corner lines first before the rest of the faces. Here is a step by step example made by Elodin: https://imgur.com/a/DHlA3Jh. Try it out in your future warmups and see if it works for you. Other than that great job and best of luck with the rest of Drawabox!

    Next Steps:

    Move on to lesson 2!

    This community member feels the lesson should be marked as complete, and 2 others agree. The student has earned their completion badge for this lesson and should feel confident in moving onto the next lesson.
    12:04 AM, Saturday August 24th 2024

    No problem, I was glad I could be of some help. Good luck with the rest of Drawabox!

    3 users agree
    4:37 AM, Friday August 23rd 2024

    Congratulations on completing lesson 3! I will try to give you some feedback on your plant drawings.

    Arrows

    Great job on these. Your lines are smooth, and the arrows have good foreshortening. My only critique is to be more confident when adding line weight to the overlaps since they seem a little wobbly compared to the rest of your lines. Don't worry if they don't exactly follow the curve since this is meant to be practice.

    Leaves

    Your leaves have a nice variety of shapes and textures. However, try to construct your complex leaves out of simple shapes first. For example, I think you should've approached your maple leaf by first drawing basic leaf shapes around the stems and then adding complex edges on top like in this example: https://imgur.com/a/5fJIBAU, instead of just drawing the silhouette around the stems.

    Branches

    Great job on this exercise. Your ellipses are aligned well with the minor axis lines and the knots look solid.

    Plants

    You should definitely NOT feel bad about your plant drawings. As you said, the goal is not to make pretty drawings but to construct solid forms, and your plants do a great job of that. Your stems and branches have a good variation in the degrees of their ellipses which make them bend convincingly. I like how you put contour ellipses on your spherical surfaces, like with the blueberries and oranges. I also liked how you matched the contours of your forms with their silhouettes. For example, the ridges on this pumpkin match well with the bump in the outline: https://imgur.com/a/mavqSS3. Overall, great work!!

    Next Steps:

    Move on to lesson 4.

    This community member feels the lesson should be marked as complete, and 3 others agree. The student has earned their completion badge for this lesson and should feel confident in moving onto the next lesson.
    1 users agree
    7:01 AM, Saturday August 17th 2024

    Congratulations on finishing the 250-box challenge. I will try to give you some feedback on your boxes.

    Overall, there isn't much to say. Your line work is fantastic. All of the lines are smooth and look like they were done using the ghosting method. For the first 50, you have a lot of sets which converge almost exactly to the vanishing point which is very nice. And for the last 150, you do a great job of changing up the angles of your ys and switching between shallow and dramatic foreshortening.

    Next Steps:

    Great work!! Move on to lesson 2.

    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.
    0 users agree
    3:02 AM, Tuesday August 13th 2024

    Hello, congratulations on finishing the 250-box challenge! I also did the original version before the changes so hopefully I can be of some help.

    Your boxes have improved a lot from the first to last page. My personal favorite is box 200. One critique I have is that some of your silhouette lines are wobbly such as on box 132. Remember to treat your outlines like superimposed lines and prioritize smoothness over accuracy. I can see you were practicing this with the exercises above box 156. At the beginning of the challenge, I liked the different angles you were using for the boxes. However, for the last 100 boxes, you drew almost all of them with a top-down 3/4 angle with very close vanishing points. In your future warm-ups, I would recommend switching up the foreshortening and orientations of the ys so that you get more comfortable with drawing boxes at different angles. Another thing I noticed was that the back edges were sometimes off, however this is very common. One piece of advice Elodin gives is to draw the inner corner lines first before the outside edges. Here is a diagram explaining it better: https://imgur.com/a/DHlA3Jh. Try it out in your future warm-ups and see if it works for you. Apart from that, best of luck with the rest of Drawabox! Let me know if you have any questions.

    Next Steps:

    Move on to lesson 2!

    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.
    0 users agree
    3:26 AM, Saturday August 10th 2024

    Sorry. I wrote a critique but I didn't know someone had already given one. Please ignore this message.

    Next Steps:

    Overall, this is a great first submission and I wish you the best of luck going forward with 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.
    1:49 AM, Tuesday August 6th 2024

    Hello!! The shadows on all the arrows look to be in the right locations so good job! I can also see that you worked on making the ellipses change in degree for the organic forms. One thing to work on going forward is making sure your ellipses touch the boundaries of the sausage. For example, the ellipses in the bottom left sausage are kind of floating in the middle.

    Don't worry about the textures too much since that exercise is designed to be difficult. It looks like you drew the cast shadows for the elephant skin and I like how some of the skin bumps break the silhouette. The old tree texture does flatten out the sausage a bit, and I think this is because the shadow lines run straight across the form instead of curving along the sausage. This is not the same type of bark but here https://imgur.com/a/Xf8MZgv you can see how the shadows created by the cracks are more warped rather than straight. However, overall it looks like you understood the concepts and are ready to move on to the next lesson!

    Next Steps:

    Best of luck with lesson 3 and the rest of Drawabox!

    This community member feels the lesson should be marked as complete, and 2 others agree. The student has earned their completion badge for this lesson and should feel confident in moving onto the next lesson.
    2 users agree
    5:28 AM, Monday August 5th 2024

    Congratulations on completing lesson 2!

    Arrows

    Good job on your line work; the lines look confident and smooth. However, some of the shading is a little confusing. For example, in this image https://imgur.com/a/dobVG9f you shaded both sides of the arrow where it overlaps. Make sure you only shade the inside portion to clarify which part of the arrow is on top. Here's how it might look: https://imgur.com/a/7qa0jwG.

    Organic Forms

    A couple of your sausages have inconsistent widths. This will get easier as you gain more control of your lines in your warm-ups. Your contour curves wrap around the sausages well. However, for the contour ellipses, make sure you are varying the degree of the ellipses to show how the form is turning in space. Here is a good diagram from lesson 2 showing what I mean: https://imgur.com/a/e7tXzTy.

    Texture Analysis/Textured Organic Forms

    The shadow shapes in your crumpled paper texture are done well. However, for your dirt texture, try not to outline the individual pebbles. Although I am not 100% sure since I haven't seen the original reference, it does look like you outlined the pebbles rather then build them up through the surrounding cast shadow shapes. Also, with the dirt texture, the transition from dark to light is a little too sudden. The black bar should blend in more into the middle shadows. As for the textured organic forms, some of the textures like the strawberry on page 1 and the bricks on page 2 don't wrap around the form. Bricks are difficult to translate to a round form like a sausage. I think a good approach would be to make it look like one of those cylinder brick watch towers. For the strawberry texture, you can think of the seeds as ellipses. If you take a look at this photo https://imgur.com/a/yBe70Yd, you will see how the seeds that are facing towards the edges look squashed compared to the ones in the center. This is because they are turning away from the viewer. However, in your drawing, they are similar sizes, which makes the surface look flatter. Also try to draw only the shadows cast by the seeds and not the actual seeds themselves.

    Form Intersections

    Your forms look solid. Many of the intersections are actually just the overlaps but you will have more time to practice these later on in the course.

    Organic Intersections

    Good job on the sausage forms; they fit together convincingly. One critique I have is about the shadow shapes. Try to exaggerate the curve of your shadows so they look like they wrap around the form of the sausages below them. I had the same issue when I submitted my lesson 2 homework. Take a look at this drawing: https://imgur.com/a/qeYt5xv. Also, the bottom sausages should have a full cast shadow under them.

    Next Steps:

    Moving forward I would recommend redoing 1 page of arrows with the shadows in mind, 1 page of organic forms with ellipses, and a textured sausage (don't have to do whole page). Let me know if you have any questions.

    When finished, reply to this critique with your revisions.
    8:09 PM, Wednesday May 22nd 2024

    Oh, I see what you mean about the top right arrow. Thank you!

    7:48 AM, Tuesday May 21st 2024

    Sorry for the extremely late reply. I got caught up with school but now I am back to doing Drawabox. Here are my revisions for the lesson. If you have time can you give me some feedback? https://imgur.com/a/x5uL7MN

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