Pingu83

Hey Owl! I am paperhat and I will be doing your lesson 1 critique.

My critique will be divided into three sections:

Lines

• Super-imposed lines: Your lines are looking confident and not wobbly. That is great! There is also only fraying on one end and not on both. On your first page this fraying is a lot, however, your second page is already much better. So you have already improved a lot in only one exercise! Some of your longer lines are slightly arching. Arching might happen if you are not using your shoulder pivot. However, it might also happen if you use your shoulder pivot. In that case try to consciously arch in the opposite direction. Try to pay close attention on which pivot your are using.

• Ghosted Lines: Your lines are mostly confident looking here as well. However, there are some lines where it appears that you tried to correct the lines in order to reach the desired end point, resulting in some lines making s-curves or arching. It is natural that one might want to do so, but a confident line that is not accurate is always better than a non-confident accurate one.

• Ghosted Planes: Your lines are again confident looking and also quite accurate. You also remembered to always make a dot for each starting and end point. Great work!

Ellipses

• Tables Of Ellipses: Your ellipses are nicely touching and repeated two to three times, that is perfect! (For future reference: two times is preferred) Some are over/undershooting a little, but that is perfectly fine. The ellipses also look very smooth (confident), which is great! One thing you should do when you use this exercise during your warm-ups is to not only change the degree of the ellipse itself (how wide it is), but also its degree relative to the borders. You also did not include a lot of different angles for your ellipses, most of them are quite wide. Try narrow ones as well!

• Ellipses in Planes: The ellipses are again quite smooth and confidently drawn. Sometimes the overshoot, but that is totally fine and will get better with more practice.

• Funnels: You placed the minor axis correctly, cutting the ellipses in two halves! You missed two draw through one of your ellipses twice (left upper corner funnel). Most of your ellipses look confident and do not overshoot too much. One thing to note: Some of your funnels have an ellipses on the middle line diving the funnel into a left and a right half. This is not how it is supposed to be, the line in the middle is an ellipses itself. The ellipses you draw into the funnel should be kind of mirrored at this axis. This mistake might have happened because you did not change the degree of the ellipses much, try taht when using this exercise as a warm-up.

Boxes

• Plotted Perspective: You draw through your boxes which is very good. Your hatching looks neat and orderly.

• Rough Perspective: You draw through all your boxes and use the line correction method. Some of your lines are not as confident as they should be and have a little wobble to them or are making an s-shape. For drawing boxes the same thing holds as for drawing just lines: confidence over accuracy. All in all this looks good though, you are also not extremely far from hitting the vanishing point, this will also just get better with time (especially after doing 250 boxes :D)

• Rotated Boxes: : THis looks really good! You keep the corners between boxes close and tried to rotate the boxes very well. Your hatching and lineweight are neat and make your boxes pop. Good job!

• Organic Perspective: : Here your lines are loosing a bit of accuracy, but that is fine as they are mostly confidently drawn. You used different sizes of boxes and angles, which is great. You also tried overlapping some boxes. One problem I can see you having with this exercise is the lineweight. Your lineweight is not really neat and looks more scratchy, which lets your work appear a bit more messy. When applying lineweight be sure to always ghost those lines as well, that is crucial! In the middle third on the second page there is also one other mistake that ruins the 3d illusion a bit. Here you applied linweight to a (somewhat) small box that should be behind the big box in the front, however, the lineweight let's us believe the smaller box is in front. Overall this is good though!

You have done great work here! The main points you should work on are apllying neat lineweight and practicing different ellipses (you will need them!). The ellipses part you will work on during your warm-ups , as for the lineweight you can try this is the next challenge which I will move you onto! 250 boxes are welcoming you!

I'm noticing wobbly lines across multiple excercises here, including rough perspective, rotated boxes. Your ghosted planes look pretty fine though.

Your superimposed lines you had some slightly arcing lines I noticed. In organic perspective you have a little bit of an arc to the end of many lines.

Your ellipses could be a bit denser on the ellipses with funnels.

Overall it looks like you're improving though. You're also grasping the perspective and point of the excercises quite well.

I'd say:

Make sure you're drawing on a stable surface; this includes if a pad you're using isn't bent (I had one that was!)

Are you drawing from your elbow or wrist rather than with your arm? Drawing from either of these could explain the bit of an arc to your lines.

I think you might need to ghost your lines in a bit more before you draw. Also make sure you're ghosting right from point to point a few times, and ghosting with the whole arm. Make sure you're not resting your hand heavily on the page at all, remember to hoverhand.

Lines:

Your superimposed lines look really good! I would just say to watch out for when your lines are arching a teensy bit, you might not be using your shoulder as much as you should be. On your superimposed curves, just make sure you're starting at the same starting spot, and maybe when you use these exercises as warmups later, incorporate more S curves.

Your ghosted lines and ghosted planes look great!

Ellipses:

Your ellipses look great! On a couple you draw through the ellipse more than 2-3 times, but that's alright.

Your funnels are also good, a couple of the minor axis lines are off center and don't cut the ellipses in half evenly, but the ellipses look good otherwise.

Boxes:

Your boxes look really good. When you're hatching on the sides of the boxes, try your best to use your shoulder when you do and to make the lines confidently. Your rotated boxes look good, however you're missing some boxes. I'm not going to make you redo them because you obviously understood the exercise and rotated your boxes well, just something to point out.

Overall, your lesson one looks great!

How are you doing, SpellFire? I'm here to check your submission and give you feedback and some tips so you can improve even more. =)

Starting with your extended lines. This is a really important step that helps you understand the vanishing points, perspective and the relationship between lines/angles but you struggled a lot with this. You usually extended at least one set of lines to the wrong side. I assume that you used the Y method to build your boxes like it was explained on the website. This method is "beginner-friendly" because it also tells you in which direction to extend your lines! You should extend them from the center of your Y. This image should help you understand what I'm saying better. I'll use some of your boxes and show you the correct way to extend the lines.

Since you didn't extended your lines correctly, it's won't be as easy to me (or you) to check if the lines were converging or not. I can see some divergence on every box. That's due multiple factors such as not extending the lines correctly. I won't go in detail why since it's not worth at the moment. Also, you should draw boxes with that converge to one one and it seems that you were always aiming to draw boxes with the lines being parallel.

Moving on to hatching, when you are hatching your box, you should pick one VISIBLE side of your box and you there are many instances where you picked an inner side of the box. You drew boxes with 3 visible sides so as long as you hatch one of these three sides, it's perfectly fine. The hatching itself actually looks good. They're parallel lines and your lines aren't too wobbly. Remember to keep focusing on confidence over accuracy when doing lines/ellipses.

Line-weight is another problem. You forgot to do another line over the silhouette and the visible sides of the boxes like it was explained on the website. Remember to treat that as a ghosting exercise. You should reread the line-weight section on the website. Also, remember to be subtle when doing that! I don't want the lines to be too thick.

Another detail that I'd like to point out is the size of the boxes, your boxes are too small. Like really small. You should do 3-5 boxes per page but they should be bigger. You can check my submission to have a better idea on how big they should be (of course, look a the later pages).

Finally, the orientation of the boxes, almost all boxes were draw from the exact same angle. You should try different angles too! There is a "Y randomizer" on the website that gives suggestions for your boxes. You should try to use it too.

As you can see, there are many little mistakes that kept snowballing and as a result, I can't mark your submission as complete... :(

What I can do however is give some revisions to do! ;) You did many mistakes so I'll be asking you to do more boxes (probably a lot of boxes) and we'll work together to fix all of these problems. I don't want to overwhelm you with many boxes so I'll ask you to do 10 boxes for now and we'll fix each mistake one by one.

First, we'll work on the extension of your lines. I want you to do 10 boxes and make sure that you extended them in the correct direction. After you sent me those 10 boxes I'll ask you to do more boxes and I'll tell you to be careful about another mistake. But for now, I just want 10 new boxes extended correctly (and hatch a visible side of the box).

You can always send me a message on Discord to ask me questions about the Challenge.

JoaoSiilva#9754