GabrielEggers

Wow, Thanks so much! I really appreciate the feedback. Thanks for the demos I will check them out.

Hi Balzek,

Great work. I especially appreciate how you dove into the intersections and really explored them. Your arrows are over very good, but show a little confusion on which side to shade at times and on at least one it looks like you lost the sense of which way it was connecting. Anyway it looks like you figured that all out as you were going, so great work. The thing that you seem to need the most practice with is drawing confident ellipses, which shows up in the two sauage shape exercises. I'd recommend doing your warm ups on ellipses to really practice that and get those curves smoother. The texture study needs a lot of work, I guess it's probably going to take some more practice to get the idea of how to convey the transition from dark to light well. It does look like you did significantly better on the dissections, in capturing texture, which is no mean feet and good practice, but they also lack a sense of lighting at this point, so if you can figure out how to do that transition better on the texture study, then you could apply some of that technique to forms as well. Overall I really do like your dissections though, it looks like you are learning a lot about how to convey texture. The organic intersection look pretty good and you definately filled up the page, two things that could be improve though are your sense of weight in how they are interacting and your cast shadows, but I think you got everything you really needed to on that one at this point.

Hi Mintlune,

Great effort on this lesson. It looks like you are understanding this stuff pretty well for the most part and are learning as you go. I'll comment on each exercise for you in turn.

Arrows: These look pretty damn good. I think you got everything you needed to understand more or less on this one. I do think you could explore this a bit further with some more practice, with a eye towards imagining the space. For instance trying to make one that really redes into the background/pops out into the foreground in a dramatic way, or an arrow that seems to go back and forth in depth which each curve. But anyway, that's just some bonus work to improve your skills if you like. The one minor critique on these is that some of them seem pretty wobbly, so try to keep working on those confident lines.

Sausages (both kinds): these look nearly perfect to me, at least as far as I can tell. Good work.

Texture Study: Your top and bottom textures look pretty good. The middle one is a little rockier, but argueably a harder texutre to transition. On all of them I'd say you could improve your transition to cover the values range a bit more smoothly with some more practice. Something to consider, but I think you got the basic ideas on this one and are headed in the right direction.

Dissections: Some of your disections are pretty convincing others less so. This is a pretty tough exercise but is mostly just a matter of practice and really looking at what you are mimicing. Your transitions on these could be better too. But good effort on this one as well.

Intersections: Man, this was a really hard one. Congratulation on even muscling through it at all. It actually looks like you were starting to get it with the last page of them you did. I would recommend revisting the others and trying to darken in intersection lines. I'm not seeing that in the pages with just squares, even if you can't figure out where they go, just try do it for all of them and then sleep on it and try again and see if you start to get it better.

Organic Intersections: Looks like you get this one. I don't even mind that you got a bit creative with your second page, it's slightly different then what he asked us to do, but it seems like good practice and shows good understanding of how this stuff would look intersected.

Hi Daniboyy,

First off. Great job on making the effort to work through lesson 2 of this course. It took me a long time to get back to it after I hit the intersections exercise and was overwhelmed by it. Look like you are missing a page of dissections, and also I'm not seeing the intersections in your album.

If you are like me and were overwhelmed by that part. I'd say just muscle through it and sleep on it and trying it again, rinse and repeat as necessary until it at least sort of starts to make sense. I had to try out a lot of lines and messed up a lot before I started to feel like I was seeing it and my intersections were making sense.

As far as the arrows go. They don't look too bad, but they are looking a little flat in that they don't seem to be receding into the background/popping into the foreground much. Try to imagine the space as you draw. If you need some technical assistance in how to do it, start with some smaller tighter curves before expanding into looser larger curves and draw your second line so that it runs closer to your initial line on the tighter small end and further away gradually as you get to the larger looser end. Does that make sense?

Your sausages of both varieties look fine to me. I had trouble and still do with keeping the curve on the ends properly rounded, it looks like you are actually a lot better on that.

Your texture study and dissections need work. I would really recommend that you go back to the videos and text on texture and watch it again and try redoing the texture study following the principals he lays out. I'm not really seeing the transition from dark to light and there is some outlining going on that doesn't look very real. It might help to set up some dramatic light using a desk lamp on something with texture and looking at how it transitions, or maybe you can find some images like that online.

Wow, those look significantly better than mine now. Sorry I checked out from this site for so long. Hopefully you moved on to future lessons already.

So sorry for checking out from this site for so long. Yah I hope you already went to the next step. Your work looks great now.

Hi Allonsbro,

So first the good news. A lot of your boxes look pretty good. None of them seem wildly crazy, the lines look pretty good and there seems to be some improvement as you go through the challenge. Now the bad news you have way too many perfectly parallel lines and even worse boxes where one or more sides is expanding instead of receding to a vanishing point. So some points of advice and some images to help you understand what you need to do to avoid this problem.

1. Sight the placement of your corners from different angles when deciding where to place them. It's going to look different to you from different angles and you need to explore looking at it from different angles and comparing and using information

from different angles to get an accurate sense of where the lines that meet the corner are going to point. You can leave a few dots on the page in the process of figuring out where you want your corner to be. Uncomfortable even said that was fine.

2. Try ghosting out the lines to a vanishing point before you draw them. This can also help you check to see if they are going to meet eachother reasonably well or not.

3. Don't try to make all your line sets quite so close to parallel, its sort of cheating yourself on the practice, you really can't tell if you did a good job if the lines aren't going to converge until several feet off your page.

Now as to the linked images I mentioned here you go, this might help you understand something about how to place your corners so that your boxes always have sides that converge to VPs properly.

https://imgur.com/az9Zqju

https://imgur.com/EwDEmOn

Hi Poly,

Good work on these. They are overall looking quite good.

A few things to consider:

1. Are you siting the placement of your corners from multiple angles as a fail safe to make sure you are perceiving them properly (this can perhaps surprisingly make a lot of difference as the perception of the lines trajectory can vary a lot from different angles of sight), doing this can help you learn how best to look at the page when planning and help to hon your perceptions.

2. It looks like you did some fixes on some of the boxes with notes to figure out how you could fix ones that were mostly good but with one angle pretty far off. This is a great idea. Consider also thinking about the appearance of the shapes of quadralaterals formed for each side of the box and how they relate to each other on opposite sides there is some patterning here that can help with your judgement as well. Sometimes thinking about that can make it obvious that you are about to make a mistake when other stuff fails to check your eye properly.

3. A lot of your larger mistakes seem to be with the placement of your third outer corner. You may want to try placing the center point before your final corner, as that can really help some people to properly align that final outer corner to converge with the other lines properly. If that doesn't help and you are still having issues, try actually ghosting out your hand towards to VP from the various lines to figure out where it is going to be and use that to help you place the corner properly, it should at least avoid very large errors in placement for that third outer corner.

4. You probably got this, but I'm going to mention it in case it helps you to think more explicitly about your converging lines or even if it just reinforces your own observations: The closer that two lines start to each other the shallower the angle they need to be at to converge at the same VP. That is to say when you have a box for instance that is flattened in one direction, the lines that make up the sides that are far from eachother (the narrow sides) are going to have a very shallow angle between the lines that make up a single side (it may even not be easily noticible at all sometimes when looked at in relation to just those two lines) but they will both point more sharply towards a common point mirroring the two lines that make up the opposite side. There is a similar issue you will encounter on more evenly proportioned boxes a lot of the time, where the two parallel lines towards the center are are very close or possibly even in alignment. if they start in a very close position and your VP isn't really close the angle is going to be very subtle, sometimes almost imperceptibly so with a distant vanishing point.

I'm attaching a link some diagrams I put together when reviewing another 250 box challenge submission, where the student was having a lot more trouble understanding some basic principles of how their boxes should look. It doesn't seem like you particularly need this, but it might still help you a little to see these diagrams in thinking about these boxes or for explaining it to others if you review other people.

https://i.imgur.com/az9Zqju.png

https://i.imgur.com/EwDEmOn.png

https://imgur.com/a/MLNMY2Z try copying and pasting this address in your address bar instead of clicking on it, I'm not sure why it's not working.

Box Pointers for 250 box challenge