Svendogee

Thanks for the heads up. this link should work

https://imgur.com/a/m2iutX0

:O thanks, matey. I'll do better ones in the future (I hope, heh)

I really appreciate your kind words! I really enjoyed yours with all the silverware. It was a very ambitious drawing, good job!

Thank you!

Love these colors and it works really well at the thumbnail scale!

no apologies necessary my sore back dude 8)

These are looking better, and I think as you progress you'll begin to feel less pressure on yourself. Take care of yourself both physically and mentally! As you move on to the box challenge I really want you to make sure to only do a few in a day, both for your back and for your mind. It's ok that you are taking a long time, and that you've done it before. By the time you finish dab you'll still be years younger than old man Sven!

So go ahead to your 50 boxes that we're talking about on discord right now and I don't want to hear of you doing over 5 a day! Draw for fun!

Haha it's okay, after a year most people would be pretty rusty but don't worry we'll get you right as rain!

First of all - make sure to take your pictures in a better light! :P

Your superimposed lines are hit or miss - your straight lines are looking pretty good and confident, but your wavy lines not as much. That’s just a matter of mileage though so it’s ok. With your ghosted lines, you did a pretty good job on them, but you could have drawn a lot more on the page so don’t cheat yourself out of free practice.

Moving on to your ellipses, I see you are trying to draw through them an appropriate number of times, but things are a little wild still so keep practicing in your warm ups to try and get your draw through passes to tighten up. Your ellipses in planes are sometimes hitting the proper points of the plane edges properly anchoring them in space, and sometimes they aren’t. You did do a good job keeping everything packed tightly in your tables exercises leaving no room for ambiguity. I also am seeing a marked improvement in your ellipses quality in the smaller ones, but the big ones are still pretty messy so keep practicing! :) Your second page in the album is quite a bit messier, so I’m not sure if you started rushing on the second page or they were posted out of order so you were more warmed up on the second page, but if you do feel yourself rushing remember to get up and take a breather at the very least. Rushing is the last thing we want to do. You definitely skimped out on your ellipses in funnels. While drawing large is important, this does feel more on the side of rushing so I’ll be having you redo this portion.

Your rough perspective is on the right track - your verticals are perpendicular to the horizon and horizontals parallel to it. As comfy already told you on discord - try to keep the notations on your page to minimum (preferably none). Your line quality is pretty decent here, but try to make your dots smaller as that gets pretty distracting. Your converging lines are where we expect them to be, and as you continue on with CONSISTENT practice, your accuracy will improve.

Now let's move on to everyone's favorite rotated boxes. The biggest thing in noticing right off the bat is that things are very messy here. This is due to a combination of being heavy-handed and those heavy dots that I referred to in the last exercise. That being said, you know the drill: this exercise is hard and you are expected to have a hard time with it (even if you've done it before!)

So with that in mind, here is my list of important concepts that I run through to make sure you are understanding all the key principles.

Adjacency - Your adjacent lines are nice and close so you can properly utilize them as perspective guides. Good job here!

Rotation - Your boxes are not rotating, but rather skewing and shifting over, so give this gif some more attention and try to internalize how the rotation is driven by the vanishing points moving along the horizon.

Scale - You have some more room on the page you could have utilized. A good rule of thumb is to draw as large as you can so that your brain has the most room to work through these spatial problems. It sounds kind of odd, but it really does work.

Finally, let’s look at your organic perspective. There are some definite signs of rushing here, but I can understand that as you’ve done this several times now. That is not an excuse though, as you should be doing everything to your best efforts. That means ghosting all your lines appropriately and using your shoulder (you are having a lot of arcing going on). Your perspective is pretty good, but hard to tell because of all that arcing! Your compositions are pretty static because you have little to no overlapping and scale difference, meaning that instead of having boxes flowing through space, they are more just a series of forms sitting there. Remember that a big part of selling the illusion of 3d space is to overlap your forms so the brain perceives them as occupying a single physical space, and scaling your boxes up and down to have a distinct fore, mid, and background.

I want to make sure you are in the right mindset before jumping into the 250 box challenge so I want you to do one more page of funnels (try and recreate uncomfortable’s example on the page) and one more page of organic perspective where you slow down and apply what I talked about. Reply to this comment with your work and we will go from there.

Hey there edamame, I'll be your TA today so let's get started. Don't worry about the double post: if you really want to get rid of the extra one you can ask Uncomfortable on Discord to delete it and he will.

Starting with your superimpose lines I am liking the smooth confident strokes you are making. Even though you have some fray and in the longer ones you lines remain confident and smooth resulting from proper use of the shoulder. Your ghosted lines are looking really nice.They are crisp, starting on the point you decide to start on, and your accuracy is pretty much there.

Moving on to your ellipse exercises, things start off a little dicey but you quickly get the hang of things. With your ellipses in planes you are about half and half when it comes to hitting the proper points on the edges to firmly root your ellipses in space. When you draw through in this section it gets a little much at times, but in later exercises you are mostly drawing through an appropriate number of times. Moving on to your tables exercise, while things are still a little messy with the drawing through and the passes not being as tight as I could be, you are definitely on the right track. They are all firmly connected to one another, properly anchoring them in space and leaving no room for ambiguity. Your funnel exercises are where you really start to shine: your minor axes are aligned to the funnel axis and your draw throughs are much cleaner. Good job!

Now let's take a look at your rough perspective. You are doing a pretty good job keeping your horizontal lines parallel to the horizon and your verticals perpendicular. There is a little bit of skew going on but that's all within acceptable margin of error. The biggest thing I want to point out here is that you re-draw some of your lines. A big reason we work in ink is to force us to be very mindful of each mark we make and prepare accordingly. When we make a mark in ink we have to be ready to live with the results. When you re-draw a line to try and hide or fix a mistake you are almost always just bringing more attention to what you were trying to hide. So keep that in mind in the future. Your converging lines are on the right track and as you continue to practice your accuracy will improve.

Now let's get to the rotated boxes. As I'm sure you felt deep within your soul this exercise is extremely hard. We don't expect students to fully understand this exercise at this point; the analogy uncomfortable likes to use is that we are quickly throwing students into the deep end just to show them what things are like. Our only expectation is for the student to try their best and to finish it to the best of their abilities which you did, so good job! I will now run through the important concepts to facilitate a better understanding of the key takeaways here.

Adjacency - Your adjacent lines are pretty far apart so you can't properly utilize them as perspective guides. This is a really useful technique so make sure you're understanding it and can properly leverage it. This would have been especially helpful for you in those tricky corner boxes.

Rotation - Your boxes are not rotating, but rather skewing and shifting over, so give this gif some more attention and try to internalize how the rotation is driven by the vanishing points moving along the horizon. To your credit, you actually did a pretty good job rotating the boxes along the right horizon line!

Scale - You have some more room on the page you could have utilized. A good rule of thumb is to draw as large as you can so that your brain has the most room to work through these spatial problems. It sounds kind of odd, but it really does work.

Finally let's take a look at your organic perspective. I like that you drew lots of boxes in each of your compositions and played around with scale. You could have afforded to shrink down more boxes to give a more distinct background and had larger boxes for a more distinct foreground. I also like to see that you are not afraid to overlap your forms as that is what causes the brain to perceive said forms as all being in a singular space. These two principles: overlapping forms and scaling your forms are key to selling the illusion of three-dimensional space on the page. Once again I want to remind you about what I said regarding drawing over your lines to try and fix them. Most of these “mistakes” would slide right past any casual viewer. Your perspective is showing some development but there are still a lot of cases of divergence (near planes being smaller than the far planes, opposite of reality). This isn't a big deal though since you're about to draw 250 boxes and that will surely help your sense of perspective.

And along that note I will be marking your lesson one as complete and sending you off to the box mines. Keep up the good work and we will see you next time.

Hello there pump! Good job finishing lesson one, I'll be your TA today so let's get started.

Right away with your line exercises I am noticing that you're still needing some practice and mileage using your shoulder to make your marks. This is not uncommon for beginners so don't take it to heart - Just remember to keep practicing these exercises in your warm-ups every time you sit down to draw. With your superimposed lines there is a lot of wobbling going on which goes back to what I was saying about using your shoulder; much of the same can be said for your ghosted lines.

With your ellipse exercises you are honestly doing a pretty good job of drawing through them appropriately and keeping the subsequent passes tight. With your ellipse in planes exercise I see you are trying to hit the proper points on the edges so that your ellipse is firmly rooted in space and now it's just a matter of improving accuracy through practice. With your tables exercises, your ellipses are much less anchored In space as discussed in this section of lesson 1. Your ellipse quality in the funnels exercise took a dramatic downturn sadly. your confidence is much less and it appears you were not ghosting or otherwise preparing like in your other exercises. Make sure to be mindful of your orientation of your ellipses, specifically the alignment of your minor axis.

As we move on to your rough perspective boxes you are encountering a problem that lots of students do. As we move from abstract exercises to drawing more concrete things it can start to get overwhelming. The way to deal with that is to look at a box not as an object but merely as 12 lines. Each line should be prepared appropriately - planning where your line should go with starting and ending points, ghosting until you feel confident, and executing confidently with the shoulder. Once a student gets into that mindset things start coming together a lot better. you did a good job trying to keep your horizontal lines parallel to the horizon and with more prep and ghosting you would have had much less skewing going on.and your verticals perpendicular, and with more prep and ghosting you would have had much less skewing going on. Your converging lines are about as accurate as we expect at the stage and as you continue to practice your ability to draw lines towards a distant target will improve.

Now let's move on to everyone's favorite, the rotated boxes! I always like to open up the section with a disclaimer that we don't expect students to be able to do this well as that is not the point of this exercise. The point of this exercise is to introduce students to new concepts within spatial reasoning and just to show them how many things there are to think about. as long as a student tries their best and pushes through to completion that is all that matters and that is what you have done! That being said, I do have a list of concepts I like to run down to make sure students are getting the most out of this exercise in terms of understanding and learning.

Adjacency - Your adjacent lines are pretty far apart so you can't properly utilize them as perspective guides. This is a really useful technique so make sure you're understanding it and can properly leverage it.

Rotation - Your boxes are not rotating, but rather skewing and shifting over, so give this gif some more attention and try to internalize how the rotation is driven by the vanishing points moving along the horizon.

Scale - You honestly did really well with scale here. A good rule of thumb is to always try and draw something as large as your paper allows because that gives your brain the most room to work through the spatial reasoning puzzles. You took up the entirety of your page which is great! Keep up that good habit.

One last thing: your lying quality is still kind of shaky which really comes to bite you when you start drawing complex things like this exercise. You are definitely showing improvements, and my biggest critique is actually in your hatching as it gets quite sloppy as you near what I assumed to be the end of your exercise. Make sure that if you ever feel yourself beginning to rush as you near the end of something to get up and stretch and give yourself at least a five-minute breather before continuing.

Finally let's take a look at your organic perspective. Your lines are still pretty wobbly here which is a detriment to the overall solidity of your forms. You really are going to want to get used to planning out and ghosting every line and using your shoulder so that you don't end up having to redo more boxes after you already do 250 of them! Your compositions are nice: you have a lot of motion in them and you are playing with depth well by scaling down boxes as they recede into the distance. Additionally, I like that you are not afraid to overlap your forms because that causes the brain to perceive these forms as taking up a single physical space. These two principles work in tandem to help sell the illusion of three-dimensional space on a two-dimensional paper. The only other thing I want to point out is that just a couple times you try to redraw your lines causing it to look scribbly or messy. One of the main reasons we have students work in ink is to get them used to preparing and thinking about every Mark they make before they make it and then living with the results. When you try and redraw a line to correct a mistake all you are doing most of the time is drawing more attention to that mistake so it's best to just live with the line and move on and in later lessons you will begin to learn different ways to draw focus away from areas you don't want so much attention to be on.

With all that being said I will be marking your lesson one as complete. You definitely have room to improve, but we don't expect perfection, just effort. As you move on to the 250 Box challenge make sure to be more deliberate with each mark you make. Make sure you read all of the instructions thoroughly, take plenty of breaks, and make sure that you are drawing for fun per the 50-50 rule so you don't get burnt out. keep up the good work and we will see you next time.

This is better, but keep trying to be mindful when you make each mark - your hatching is still pretty sloppy.

I will be moving you on to the 250 box challenge so that will be a good time to stretch your patience, and never be afraid to take breaks rather than get rushed and sloppy.