CritiquesForReference1

This is not an actual critique for this work and should be used purely for reference only

Source: https://imgur.com/a/HCUd3Tu

Starting with your arrows, they're looking good. They flow quite nicely through all three dimensions of space, and you're generally applying the compression of space that comes with perspective to the distances between the zigzagging sections, although I did notice that as they get farther away, you start to end up with a more consistent spacing, often avoiding letting them overlap (though you've got some nice overlapping in a few places). Just something to keep in mind.

Moving onto your leaves, they do get a little more stiff here, compared to the arrows. This can often happen when students get more focused on the fact that they're drawing a concrete object now instead of just abstract things. This causes us to put all our effort towards capturing how the forms sit statically within space, but our leaves are more than just big heavy solid objects. They have flow to them, they are pushed and pulled through space by the wind, and so capturing how they move through the space they occupy. One thing that can help with this is to simply draw a little arrowhead at the end of the initial flow line. This can help us to think about how that line represents the forces that apply to the leaf, that drive it through the world, giving ourselves a basis of motion upon which to build our leaves.

Additionally, I've started noticing that your linework has a rather uniform quality to it. Each stroke seems entirely the same weight throughout its entire length, rather than showing signs of a more normal, confident stroke. Generally when a mark is drawn confidently, the pen will be moving before it is able to fully make contact with the page, resulting in ends that taper. In your work, however, the linework appears more as though the pen was fully touching the page before setting off.

There are 3 possible causes for this, but it is likely a mixture of all three:

• Your scanner settings. It's very clear that your scanner is doing more than just capturing the image - you're likely using the "drawing" presets, which ramps up the contrast and really blasts out any middle ground, eliminating the nuance of your linework and leaving us with more on the ends of heavy blacks or full whites. Instead, you should be using the photo presets, which capture the image more faithfully.

• Drawing too slowly. If you draw a little slower, your pen will have a chance to make full contact with the page before moving onward, giving a more uniform appearance to your line, rather than a natural taper.

• Pressing too hard. If you press harder, it'll basically touch down on the page much quicker, resulting in the same effect as drawing slower.

Moving onto your branches, you're heading in the right direction, but ther is plenty of room for improvement. First and foremost, I'm noticing that you're not fully drawing through your ellipses. You should be drawing through them two full times, right now you're stuck at 1 or 1 and a half at most. Secondly, your actual lines are struggling in terms of accuracy. This is admittedly pretty normal. Seeing those 'tails' is fairly standard for this exercise, but I think you are showing signs of perhaps not investing as much time in the planning and preparation phases of the ghosting method, resulting in them being further off the mark than they generally would be. You may also not be rotating your page as needed to find a comfortable angle of approach.

When doing this exercise in the future, make a point of using the previous segment as a runway for the next one - that means overlapping it directly before shooting off towards your next target. This will force you to contend with the inaccuracies of those segments, rather than being able to draw your next one where the previous one ought to have been.

Moving onto your plant constructions, your results are somewhat varied. A number of the issues I talked about earlier are still certainly still present, but there are a number of others that I want to draw your attention to:

• Here you're not drawing through the forms of your flower pot. That means drawing those forms in their entirety, as though you have x-ray vision, including the ellipses for the bottom of the pot, as well as along the rim. You're also not drawing the full thickness of the flower pot's lip, which would generally be done with an ellipse inset within the one you did draw. Drawing through your forms helps us to better understand how they sit in space. It's worth mentioning that you also didn't draw through those ellipses (going back around them two full times), resulting in extremely uneven shapes. Keep in mind that drawing through your forms (like we did with the boxes in the box challenge, drawing all the lines that make up the form) is different from drawing through your ellipses... it's an unfortunate overlap in terminology that may confuse you if you think they're the same thing.

• As a side note about flower pots, if they're cylindrical, construct them around a central minor axis line. This will help you align all of the ellipses you'll need to draw.

• The cactus itself has its individual arms drawn as pretty complex forms from the get go. Constructional drawing is all about building up complexity gradually, starting with absolutely simple forms. This is because simple forms are much easier to imbue with the illusion of solidity. If you jump too complex too quickly, your drawings will appear as being entirely flat.

• You're doing a better job of drawing through your forms here.

• The flower pot in this drawing is also extremely simplistic. Even though the lesson is focused on plants, whatever you draw should be treated with the same attention. Also, don't just leave the bottom of the form open as you've done there, as this flattens things out. You need to cap it off with another ellipse to ensure that it maintains the illusion of being three dimensional.

• For the flower in the top left of this page, you started out with an ellipse to establish the bounds of where the petals of the flower would extend. You then went on to largely ignore this ellipse, letting those petals extend to wherever, causing a contradiction in your drawing. Every single mark you draw on the page exists as a declaration of something about the object you're drawing. You're effectively answering a question, so you can think of your drawing as your response to an interrogation. If you answer the question one way, and then go on to answer it differently when asked again, you give away the fact that you're lying - that what the viewer is looking at is not an actual flower, but rather just a series of lines on a flat page. Avoid contradictions wherever possible, and adhere to every decision and answer you've given already, even if this leads you to draw something that is somewhat different from your reference image.

Lastly, I noticed that the line weights in this drawing got somewhat out of control, with a lot of areas becoming extremely thick, and for no apparent reason. This sometimes happens when students try and cover up mistakes where they may have accidentally drawn a line, realized it was wrong, then tried to correct it. If you make a mistake, leave it be - you don't want your mistakes to determine which lines are thicker (and in turn, which areas of the drawing draw your viewer's attention). If however this was intentional, line weight is meant to be subtle - the thicker you get, the more you're going to flatten out your drawing, turning it into a graphic element. Line weight works on relative terms - the subconscious picks up the fact that one line is slightly thicker than another, and so while your conscious brain may not realize, the information is still whispered into your ear. If you need to get thicker than that, then you get into the territory of establishing cast shadows, which behave differently from line weight. Specifically, they don't stick to the form that casts them like lineweight does - they fall on other surfaces.

So, while you've got some good development here, there are definitely things I want you to continue to work on before marking this lesson as complete to show that you understand what I've laid out in this critique. I'll list them below.

I'd like to see the following:

1 page of leaves

2 pages of branches

4 pages of plant constructions

Make sure your scanner is set to a preset or profile that doesn't increase the contrast (to better capture the nuance of your linework), be sure to draw through all of your ellipses and to draw each form in its entirety to establish how they sit in 3D space. Also, don't give flower pots less attention.

Source: https://imgur.com/a/MQLFM6T

This is definitely a big move in the right direction! Your images capture a much greater range of nuance in your drawings (looks like you ended up just using a camera instead, which is totally fine). You're also doing much better with your leaf and branches exercises, and perhaps most importantly, the improvement to your actual plant constructions is significant. You've clearly invested far more time and care into each construction, and they've come out far better for it.

I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete.

This is not an actual critique for this work and should be used purely for reference only

Source: https://imgur.com/a/sBi5rpx

Nice work! Starting with your arrows, these are largely looking very well done, and convey a strong sense of fluidity and energy in how they flow through all three dimensions of space. I did notice a couple places where you seemed to redraw lines where you may have felt you'd made a mistake, which resulted in those areas getting scratchy, though for the most part you did a good job of drawing with confidence and avoiding any such habits.

Moving onto your leaves, I'm very pleased with how you largely carried over the same confidence and flow from your arrows, and also demonstrated a strong grasp of how construction is to be applied, adhering to the underlying phases when adding new detail. I did notice a couple places where you strayed from this however - specifically on these two spiky leaves, we can see where the spikes zigzag around the previous phase of construction (the simpler edge). In these cases, as shown here, it's best to either add those to the simpler form of the leaf by ensuring every spike comes off the simpler edge.

Moving onto your branches, you largely did a good job, but I did notice one common but important mistake - you only seem to extend your edges slightly past a given ellipse, rather than the full halfway towards the next ellipse. This additional extension is important because it gives us ample runway for our next segment to overlap directly before firing off towards its next goal. This in turn allows us to make the segments flow together more seamlessly, instead of having visible breaks between them.

Moving onto your plant constructions, these are largely very well done. You're demonstrating a really confident manipulation of form, both the more solid forms we see in our flower pots, and the fluid, flowing forms of the leaves and petals. I do feel that you're certainly drawing with a great deal of confidence behind your marks, which generally is a strength, though there are certainly places where this may drive you to take action a little too soon. For example, the flower pot on this page ends up being slightly haphazard. Taking the time to construct your cylindrical forms around a central minor axis line, and then ghosting through each ellipse a little more will certainly improve your results. Don't lose that confidence, just be sure to reinforce it with proper planning beforehand.

Another thing I noticed was that you usually give your drawings plenty of room for your brain to think through their spatial problems, but there were a couple exceptions. For example, the orchids are quite tall, and therefore the flowers themselves end up being cramped into a fairly small space. To top this off, it was placed in a page with another drawing, giving it only half as much space as it otherwise could have had. On top of giving such plants their own dedicated page, you may also consider just drawing the orchid flowers themselves, allowing you to focus more specifically on their forms and how they flow through space and relate to one another.

The last point I wanted to make is about this more detailed drawing. I think this was a pretty solid attempt at adding more detail and texture to your drawings, and you should be pleased with the result. I did however notice that there was a tendency to be a little more scratchy with your linework, using more hatching in certain places (likely to represent the gills of the mushrooms, which is certainly a good way of thinking). The result however is that you end up with a lot of little pockets of sharp contrast, with a lot of white/black crammed together. This kind of contrast will draw the eye due to its visual noise - and when it comes to composition, controlling where the eye goes is key. So, it's generally good to allow yourself to let these areas fuse into larger, more solid shadow shapes, filling them with black and allowing the edges of these shapes to tell us about those shapes' contents, rather than having lots of little bits of white inside. This will allow you to focus the viewer's eye where you want it to go, instead of having it get lost in the weeds, so to speak.

To that point, just one last thing - I noticed that the dirt/gravel at the base of this lovely little cactus were largely drawn with fairly complete outlines around then, then hit with little splashes of shadow. When tackling this kind of texture in the future, leave the lines out entirely. Try your best to capture the impression of the little nuggets of dirt using shadow shapes alone. I know it's difficult to do this without being able to first establish where each piece of dirt sits, but try and focus in on one individual piece at a time, placing the shadow it would reasonably cast, then moving onto its neighbours.

So! All in all, great work. I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete.

Here's a helpful tool to use when drawing your boxes: https://tasty-tangy-meeting.glitch.me/

It was added to the box page very recently, within the last day or so, but what it is is a generator for your starting y. This will help you break out of the groove you've built up in drawing your boxes.

This is not an actual critique for this lesson and should be used purely for reference only'

Source: https://imgur.com/a/Virp7WH

To start, I want to let you know that as I write this critique, I have not read through your self-assessment. This is so I don't neglect to mention things on the basis of you already pointing them out yourself, or make any other changes to how I would have otherwise written my critique. I'll look through it afterwards to check for any questions you may have - but for the future, while self critique and self-analysis is excellent, you should keep it to yourself.

Starting with your lines section, you're doing an excellent job of applying the concepts covered in the lesson. Throughout the super imposed lines you present a clear focus on maintaining a consistent trajectory and a confident stroke, and you reinforce that with the ghosting method in the next two exercises to add control and precision to the mix. You accomplish this without sacrificing the previously established confidence, so your marks are executed without any hesitation, but are generally doing a great job of hitting their mark.

You carry these principles over into your ellipses, to keep them both accurate and evenly shaped. There are definitely some places where your ellipse start to get a touch unwound - always remember to draw through them only 2 to 3 times, with 2 being ideal to be able to get that confident motion in there without losing the intended ellipse you're looking to draw. There are some cases where I can see you going around the ellipses 4 times.

I'm very pleased to see that in your ellipses in planes you generally don't allow the ellipse to get deformed in order to fit in its container (except the few cases where you didn't draw through your ellipses a full 2 times, and a few cases on the second page). The key here is that, just like with the ghosted lines, the first priority is to ensure that our ellipses are evenly shaped, and actually ellipses, then worrying about whether or not they touch all four edges of the enclosing plane.

Your funnels are coming along well, though I'm catching a very slight tendency to slant your ellipses, so keep an eye on that.

Jumping down to your rough perspective boxes, it seems to me that here you've stopped applying the ghosting method to your linework, and instead slipped back to simply drawing them all in one go - no separate preparation or planning. Your lines suggest that you're taking more time during the execution phase and making the marks more slowly and carefully. It's important that you apply the full 3 stages of the ghosting method to every single mark you draw for these lessons. It is time consuming, but it will ensure that your lines are smooth and controlled. Your current lines in this exercise do show a tendency to wobble (due to you drawing them more slowly), and also show a tendency to press a little harder with your pen, which makes them feel more stiff and clumsy.

For your rotated boxes, you're doing a great job of keeping the gaps between your boxes narrow and consistent (so as to eliminate any unnecessary guesswork), but I am seeing at least to some degree the issue explained in these notes - that is, your outermost boxes on the major axes don't rotate much relative to their immediate neighbour, and instead run parallel towards the same vanishing points.

Lastly, you've got a great start on your organic perspective boxes, though there is room for improvement in getting your sets of parallel lines to converge more consistently towards their shared vanishing points. This is totally normal and expected however, and it is exactly what we will focus on in our next step.

So! All in all, really great work - just remember to apply the ghosting method to every single mark you put down. Feel free to consider this lesson complete.

Addressing your self-critique there, it seems to me that your expectations for the work are largely different from mine. This isn't uncommon for students, because where they focus on their results, I'm focusing on what the work tells me about what you understand, what you don't understand, and where you're investing your time and effort. As I've said here that your use of the ghosting method is solid (aside from the rough perspective), and that your ellipses are generally very well done, and those statements are entirely true. Continue to focus on simply completing the exercises to the best of your current ability, and don't worry about judging the results for yourself. It's easy, when one is overly self-critical and too focused on minor issues that are expected to occur and will improve with practice and mileage, to end up investing their time where it is not best spent. So far it doesn't seem to me you're doing that, but there is certainly that risk, especially when you think of exercises like the organic perspective - something that is merely an introduction to a concept, not a test of skill - in terms of "hate".

Long story short, leave the judgment to the party critiquing your work.

This is not an actual critique for this lesson and should be used purely for reference only

Source; https://imgur.com/a/cDbg2Nf

Your arrows are off to a good start. They flow smoothly and confidently through space, though one thing to keep in mind is that perspective applies to both positive and negative space. The positive space is reflected in how the ribbon of the arrow itself gets narrower as it moves farther away. The negative space is represented in how the spacing between the zigzagging sections gets compressed as we look farther back. It's easy to forget this second part, and to have perspective only apply to the positive space instead. Don't be afraid to let the use of perspective on negative space cause your arrow to start overlapping itself - this is a great way to show the depth of the scene.

Moving onto your organic forms with contour lines, I'm definitely seeing that you're working to keep your sausage forms simple. One area where you're not quite achieving this is in keeping the ends spherical. Right now they're somewhat more elongated, so be sure to keep an eye on that. Secondly, looking at your contour ellipses, their degree appears to remain fairly consistent across the whole length of the form. Instead, as the orientation of each cross-section changes relative to the viewer, the ellipse itself will grow wider or narrower, as shown here. Also, keep in mind that the smaller ellipse you draw on the tips of your sausage forms should also follow the pattern of your other contour ellipses' degrees. It doesn't look like you're necessarily thinking much about what degree the smaller ones ought to be, and most of them come out very wide and circular, even if the contour ellipses just before it are much narrower.

The thing about contour curves vs. contour ellipses is that they are actually the exact same thing. The only change is that when drawing contour ellipses, we're doing so as though we have x-ray vision, and we can see those lines as they wrap all the way around the sausage form. When drawing contour curves, we're only drawing the visible portion of those lines. So the full ellipses still exist, they're just partially on the opposite side of the form. That means that when we look at the tip of a sausage form that is facing more towards us, we'll actually be able to see the whole contour ellipse once again (just like the smaller contour ellipses you added at the end of your contour ellipse sausages). This means that you could, and should, do the same thing for this second page.

Lastly, one major concern with your contour curves is that you're regularly having the contour curves fall outside of the silhouette of your sausage forms. Since we're trying to give the impression that these contour lines run along the surface of the form, we need to work on having those curves sit snugly between the edges of the form, so it appears as though the lines are right on the surface.

Moving onto your texture analyses, your first one - the crimpled paper - is really well done. You're clearly thinking in terms of shadow shapes, rather than outlines. As you get into your other two textures however, you definitely slip back into laying things out with solid outlines, creating these clear borders between forms. It's really important that you keep pushing the full focus on shadow shapes. Lines don't exist in the world around us, and so while we are always going to be tempted to just outline things first, then later think about the shadows they cast, this defeats the purpose of the exercise. The same principle appliews to your dissections, where you're really just drawing outlines throughout. I strongly urge you to go through the texture section of this lesson again. I feel that you had a strong start with the crumpled paper, but you gradually let the explanations covered in the lesson slip, and just focused on what little you remembered of it.

One other thing worth mentioning is that you've drawn a lot of these dissection textures as though they were sitting on flat surfaces - you need to think more about how the textures wrap around this rounded surface - about how the surface turns away from the viewer as we come along the sides.

Now, I'm not going to ask for you to redo these texture exercises, because they are an introduction to a series of concepts, and I give a lot of room for students to have issues with them. Additionally, your second page is visibly better - in that you're thinking much more in terms of cast shadows, although those outlines are still very much present. Still, it's a step in the right direction.

Your form intersections are a good start, and are also moving in the right direction. The forms you've drawn feel quite cohesive and consistent within the same space, and the linework is drawn confidently and executed with solid control, for the most part. You're also exploring the intersections themselves - something we're again only introducing here, and will continue developing throughout the entirety of this course (as this concept is tied to the overall spatial reasoning skills at the core of drawabox).

Lastly, your organic intersections are showing some of the elements we're looking for - you're letting some of the forms wrap around each other - though I do feel that there's a lot of room for improvement here. Firstly, the forms tend to feel somewhat flattened out, and where some forms pile on top of others, we don't seem to register the volume of those underneath as much as we should. Additionally, the way you've drawn your cast shadows is very scratchy and haphazard - you should be outlining the shadow shapes themselves, then filling them in fully.

Before I mark this lesson as complete, I think it's a good idea to revisit the organic form intersections.

I'd like you to do 2 pages of organic forms with contour ellipses, 2 pages of organic forms with contour curves, and 2 pages of organic intersections. Before each one, be sure to reread the notes/instructions and watch the associated videos to ensure that you follow the instructions to the letter, and focus on the core purpose of each exercise.

Source: https://imgur.com/a/9OhYvFM

I'm seeing improvement in most of the areas I pointed out - you're definitely trying to make the ends more spherical, and for the most part it's working, though there are now situations where you get pinching/narrowing through the midsection of your sausages, so keep an eye on that. Your contour curves are generally doing a much better job of sticking to the surface of the forms as well.

One thing that you still do need to keep at the forefront of your mind though is the degree of your contour ellipses and contour curves. They're still remaining pretty similar in width throughout. In your contour curves you do have some cases where they reverse in their curvature (which is essentially like narrowing so much that they get into a negative width, which is good), but they jump from one to the other with no intermediate steps.

I am going to mark this lesson as complete, but make sure you focus on the shifting widths/degrees in particular when doing these exercises as part of your regular warmup routine.

This is not an actual critique for this lesson and should be used purely for reference only

Source: https://imgur.com/a/7u4FjGi

https://imgur.com/a/7u4FjGi

https://imgur.com/a/apKKuBY

https://imgur.com/a/GKzgcdi

Alrighty! So to start, congratulations on completing the challenge. It's clear that you were very thorough in adding your extension lines to all of your boxes, and that you put a great deal of effort into this challenge. It's also quite clear that it was a considerable challenge, and that there was a lot of struggling involved, so I commend you for that.

There are a handful of things I want to point out that caught my eye, and that I feel will help you when practicing this kind of exercise in the future.

First and foremost, the key to this exercise is simple (at least conceptually, though notoriously difficult in practice): All that matters is that we focus on how our boxes are made up of 3 individual sets of 4 parallel lines each, and that our goal is to get the lines of each set to converge as closely to a single vanishing point as we can. Any problem you may encounter - for example, the notorious "back corner" being out of whack - is a symptom, and the problem is always going to be inconsistent convergences towards shared vanishing points. It can be easy to get distracted by these symptoms, attempting to address them more directly (if the back corner keeps coming out wrong, focus on fixing the back corner) - but this merely takes attention away from the actual cause and makes that symptom worse.

When we go to draw a line, we generally do so in relation to other lines present in our drawing. It's easy to get distracted, thinking about the lines that'll share a corner with the one we're drawing, or that'll share a face, etc. Instead, when drawing a line, there are only 4 lines you need to be aware of:

• The line you're drawing

• The other 3 lines with whom it shares a vanishing point

To put it simply, you're only thinking of one set of lines at a time, and no others. This includes the lines that may not yet have been drawn - they're still fluid, and their orientation can be changed up until they themselves are drawn, so you're going to be dealing with some lines that cannot be changed, the line you're drawing now, and the lines that have not yet been drawn - all of which belong to a single group of 4.

When thinking about these lines, we need to think about how to orient them so they converge consistently towards a single vanishing point. At the same time, we can consider the angles between those lines as they leave the vanishing point itself as explained here. Often you'll find that the two middle members of a given set will have a very small angle between them, and this can frequently mean that by the time they reach the box itself, they may as well be running parallel to one another. This gives a useful clue to avoid unnecessary guesswork - so in those cases, you can draw the two middle lines as being parallel on the page, and then focus on getting the outer two lines of the set and how they ought to be oriented to converge more consistently towards the single vanishing point.

Now, to that point, I noticed that with the boxes where you were using very shallow foreshortening, it looked to me like instead of thinking about actual vanishing points, you seemed to just be focusing on keeping them all parallel in 2D space. This is not correct - instead, even if the vanishing point is really, really far away, you need to be thinking about it as a concrete point in space to which all of these lines are pointing.

Related to this, as you pushed on later into your set, I noticed more and more that you were extending your lines in the wrong direction. This makes any analysis of such extensions largely useless - because the point is to study how those lines behave as they recede in space, and whether or not they converge in a consistent manner. Studying how those lines diverge doesn't tell us much of anything.

There are some cases, like box 222, where all three sets of extensions appear to be extended in the wrong direction, but due to how we're drawing through all of our boxes, it's unclear which side is which. They could be extended correctly, but in which case the box itself would have been drawn incorrectly (with the far plane being larger than the near plane). Giving the benefit of the doubt here, my eyes tell me that the box was more correct, and it was merely the extensions that were off. Adding tight hatching to one of the front-facing faces as shown in the bottom right of this diagram helps clarify which side is which.

Then you've got boxes like 224, where some of the extensions are incorrect. Here either the red and green lines are extended correctly, but the blue aren't - or vice versa.

All in all, there are a number of things to keep in mind here when practicing freely rotated boxes in the future - and I strongly recommend that you integrate them into your regular warmup routine, making a greater point to always think about concrete vanishing points, and avoid just trying to draw your lines to be parallel in 2D space, as well as in 3D.

I'll go ahead and mark this challenge as complete, and leave it to you to continue applying what I've outlined here.