PizzaPlease12

Hello there!

I will be providing critique to your homework!

• Superimposed lines - generally well done, you don't have much fraying on the start of the lines, they are mostly confident and quite accurate (slightly less so on longest lines, but that's to be expected).

• Ghosted lines - as above, pretty confident lines. Though gotta note that sometimes you miss the starting point, make sure to be mindful of it when starting a line.

• Ghosted planes - already can see the improvement with accuracy on the start of the lines, so great job on that! The second page of ghosted planes has a lot of repeating lines though - try to avoid them. No matter how inaccurate the initial line is, just keep it there and don't try to fix it with another one.

• Table of ellipses - good job on those! All of the ellipses are very confident and varying in degree. Not all are accurate, but again - very minor gripe for now.

• Ellipses in plane - as above, confident lines and not bad accuracy at all. A couple are a slight misshapen, so make sure you prioritize the shape over accuracy to the plane.

• Funnels - make sure the straight lines dividing the curves is directly between the curves, as it's meant to be the minor axis for the ellipses, use a ruler to measure if necessary. Most of the ellipses are well done, though some are a bit tilted off axis.

• Plotted perspective - some of the lines of the boxes that are behind are marked extremely lightly, or in some cases - not marked at all. Make sure to mark all lines for this exercise... Also, what are you hiding behind that scrap of paper on frame 3, hm?! All around - well done.

• Rough perspective - the boxes are generally well constructed, but I will bring up again that you use a lot of repeating lines, try to avoid them. Accuracy of the lines is pretty good, you have some curves in the lines, but nothing too major, well done!

• Rotated boxes - looks very good! I will bring up repeated lines again and when adding additional line weight, make sure to only do it with just one extra line, not multiple.

• Organic perspective - some of the boxes look really rushed, take your time with those exercises. This is also where the repeated lines and multiple lines for weight are most apparent. But boxes itself and nicely varied and increase in size well.

All in all, the biggest issue you seem to have is repeated lines and too many lines for adding weight, so be sure to work on that when you tackle the 250 Box Challenge!

Hi Teh_Stamper! I'm Tonygotcakes and I'll be giving feedback on your L2 submission.

1. Organic Arrows

You have done a good job exploring a variety of arrow shapes and they would have sold the illusion of depth very nicely. I use the phrase "would have sold" because the way you use hatching undermines the work that you put into the arrows. Otherwise, it would have been a solid submission.

You can imagine the light source for every arrow is in the same position as the viewer. As the light travels to an arrow, it will hit the bigger/closer section and block the section behind from receiving the light, which results in the cast shadow. The 1st page - bottom left corner arrow for example, have the hatching conflicted to what I describe. The 1st page - top right corner arrow is even harder to read because the hatching makes it confusing to look at. For the 1st page - bottom right corner arrow, although the hatching is in the correct place, the overshooting undermines the effect that hatching is trying to create. I have some tutorial on how to figure out the correct sections to do hatching in case you are interested in having a look.

In this exercise, we are supposed to draw an arrow with consistent width from start to end in 3D world. This arrow is heavily affected by foreshortening, therefore when we capture it in 2D surface, the section closer to the viewer will be bigger and vice versa. The 2nd page - top left corner arrow shows that the sections farther to the viewer are miles bigger than the arrow head. The arrow below that has the second section appear smaller than the first section. The first section stays behind the second and as a result, it should be smaller than the second due to foreshortening. The 2nd page - the rightmost arrow in the middle has too consistent width and the space between each fold is also too uniform. Both size and the space between each fold should decrease in magnitude for this arrow.

2. Organic Forms

The shape of a sausage will either be simple or complicated. When a sausage is simple, it is made up of two balls of equal sizes and a tube of consistent width (see this image). Any sausage that doesn't have this shape is considered complicated (see the image accompanied in this link). Some sausages in your 1st page have one end appear bigger than the other and the bottom right corner sausage of the same page is pinched in the middle as well. For some sausages of the 2nd page, the spine of them forms an S curve, which is too complicated for what we are aiming for. The line work from your 2nd page is also wobbly as you focus too much on accuracy. Remember to apply ghosting techniques from Lesson 1 for every mark you draw to ensure they come out straight and smooth.

You draw the holes on either end of a sausage too small and only draw one round. Treat them as ellipses and go over them 2-3 rounds as per instructions (1 round + 1-2 extra rounds over). You should draw them bigger as well to make it easier to apply the proper technique. Although degree shift of contour ellipses & contour curves is coming along nicely, some of them do not align well with the body of sausages (see 1st image and 2nd image).

3. Texture Analyses & Dissections

You follow the instruction properly for Texture Analyses as you take time observing and writing down notes to help you understand the textures. There is also a nice transition from dark to light as well for the 3rd panel of each row. However, I think you can push the transition even further because shadow shapes at the far right of a panel still look big and "tightly packed" together. Besides that, you do not take your time to fill in shadow areas properly as there is still a lot of gaps inside and sometimes your mark overshoot outside of the shape which makes the shape a bit chicken-scratchy and unclean.

Moving on to dissections, you have done a good job breaking the silhouette (for corn leaves however, you leave a bit of gap on the silhouette) and wrapping the texture around the sausage nicely (I think the exception is armadillo skin as the texture doesn't follow the contour of the sausage). However, sometimes you capture form shadow of the texture, as apparent on pineapple leaves and cactus. For tin can, the blackness you describe is not cast shadow and does not represent the true texture of it. You can think of textures as all the bumps and holes we feel when we glide our hand/fingers on the surface of a material. When you draw black areas, you are drawing shadow that those raises cast on the surface behind (see this image). A proper way to capture the texture of tin can is to draw the thick horizontal shadow that spans across the contour of the can (see this image).

4. Form Intersections

Your pages show that you aren't plotting before drawing as apparent on the back corner of some boxes and the box at the top left corner of page 4. Every time you draw a straight line, follow every step introduced in Lesson 1 (plotting -> ghosting -> executing). Each step is as equally important as the other so don't skip anything.

In this exercise, there are two important factors to keep in mind: (1) keep your form equilateral as all objects should fit snugly inside a cube or anything close to a cube and (2) all objects should have shallow & consistent foreshortening rate. Take page 1 for example, most of your boxes are too rectangular & the foreshortening is too dramatic. You should apply hatching & line weight in a similar approach to the box challenge as well. From the same page, hatching lines should touch the frame instead of leaving a gap in between and line weight should stay on the silhouette of a box instead of the legs of the initial Y. Some line weight looks chicken-scratchy as well.

5. Organic Intersections

Just like Organic Forms, you should keep the sausage form simple (see this image). Some sausages don't have enough support and will fall off. You also don't draw through forms for some sausage (for example, 1st page - top sausage: the tail of it dissapears behind another sausage). Your linework here is a bit wobbly and you could have employed more space for the exercise as well.

This wraps up my critique on your submission. If you have any answer, feel free to ask and I'll try my best to answer them.

Hi there!

First of all, I would like to congratulate you on having completed the 250 box challenge, that is no small feat. Getting the mileage in is important and you have just done a lot of that.

I would like to start out by mentioning what you have been doing very well! You seem to be applying the ghosting method excellently. Your lines are not wobbly, don't fray and overall show to have been drawn in one confident motion. Also have you extended every one of the lines in the correct direction. Well done!

It seems you have trouble drawing the inner, or last, corner of a box, as can be seen on the boxes 22-28 and sporadically appearing throughout the 250 boxes afterwards. For this, I would recommend checking out this different approach on how a box can be drawn: https://imgur.com/a/DHlA3Jh

Almost all of the boxes appear to have a similar orientation and foreshortening, you can definitely try out more drastic perspectives on them, as you have done on box 145. If you find yourself struggling with this, here is an additional note from the website: https://drawabox.com/lesson/1/10/foreshortening

A few times you drew divergent lines, but that doesn't seem to be a big issues of yours. In case you would like to take a look at it yourself, here is an example: https://imgur.com/mWLlnYl

Unrelated to perspective, you had not employed any use of lineweight, which in combination with the points you made on where the lines should connect, make the box appear flat and harder to make out its orientation. The hatched lines arch a lot and could be spaced more evenly.

A small improvement you can make very easily is the usage of different colours, even just one that you use for the extensions of the lines will make a big difference in making your work cleaner and it should give you a more recognizable system of what you can improve and where your lines are vanishing towards; How accurate your drawn lines are.

Overall, your penmanship seems to be good and I am sure you can quickly improve on the small issues I mentioned. I won't mark your lesson as complete as of now, and would ask you do draw 30 more boxes with dramatic foreshortening. You can simply reply to this comment with a link of your work.

Best of luck!

It started to make a little bit more sense to me after the 100th box or so, as long as all the lines converge on a 3- point perspective kind of way you're doing it right

Amazing shading and line work!!

It's a good idea to start with a warm up so you aren't drawing messier boxes than needed as part of your actual submission.

Your superimposed lines have fraying. Just make sure you're ghosting and drawing from your shoulder.

Ghosted lines are fine. Same with planes just try to push them a bit more, as in do more exaggerated shapes not just squares.

You're ellipses have a tiny bit of overlao but it's nothing serious

Your funnels are symmetrical.

In rough perspective you're supposed to trace your lines not the lines back to the vanishing point in order to see mistakes

In rotating boxes your 2nd boxes are the same size as the middle one and then dramatically shrink, it's supposed to be gradual and the shape is more of a circle where yours is a square, I'd say your boxes taper enough at first and then the second one tapers too much.

The only problem with organic perspective is the perspective itself but the 250 box challenge is for that

I think the 50% rule actually has two related but separate goals, and it is the one place in the course where I think it is sometimes more important to follow the spirit of the rule, rather than the letter.

I can't speak for art so much, but learning other things I often see people who get stuck doing exercises and studies indefinitely as they wait for the real world applications to become easy enough. E.g. I've seen language learners spend literal years just cramming vocab and grammar, and when you tell them they need to pick up a book, watch a tv program or talk to someone they say "I tried but it's still too hard. I think I just don't know enough yet" and often they never reach that goal despite putting in hundreds or even thousands of hours. The fact is, some things are just hard at first and if students wait until they feel ready many will never leave the start line. Also, isolated exercises have a synergistic relationship with real world practice that you lose when limiting yourself to just one or the other. I'm as guilty as anyone of falling in to this trap, so I find it helpful to remind myself this is the same impulse that told me not to start an art course in the first place, since I couldn't imagine myself ever being good at it.

So that's why I think the 50% rule has the restrictions it does, but fun is also an important part of it, and it could even be argued that avoiding things you like because they don't fit the rule's criteria is breaking the rule, since part of the rule is that you make the art you want to make irregardless of how useful it is. This is why I say the spirit is what's important. If figure drawing is fun but drawing from imagination feels like pulling teeth, then do both and treat the first as fun time and the latter as a necessary exercise. Or count them as contributing some portion of time to each. Or don't worry too much about the specific timings and just make sure you have a full spread of activities. I prefer to think of things on a spectrum from "purely for fun" (e.g. an abstract doodle) all the way to "purely educational" (e.g. linework exercises) rather than trying to fit everything in to binary boxes.

That's my opinion anyway. I must admit I'm a bit biased by the fact that I suck at time management, but I also find it a significant drain to be constantly trying to categorise every activity.