babylonsticks

Cool, that's pretty much what I've been doing, except I draw in the parallels of the different sides before dropping in the rest of my points, as per the method used for the organic boxes exercise.

But she's on the money - it's about visualising where the line might be. I don't use a physcial guide because the intention is not to draw a box correctly but to understand what it is that makes a box work correctly. So there's no point using a guide if all it does is give you a nice result.I find it much more useful to look at my boxes afterwards, check what I did wrong, and try to fix that mistake on the next set of boxes. To me, a guide would totally defeat that approach.

Simply put: I'd rather get it wrong without a guide than get it right with a guide, because in the former approach I learn more and faster. Good luck!

Hi. thanks for reposting this. But the homework is incomplete. You also need to post the Ellipses and Boxes homework assignments before someone will grade it. The instructions on the site can be confusing at first, but they want you to post all the assignments from lesson 1 at once, not after each section.

Could you define 'trying your best'? Did you ever undo or zoom? How did you manage to use full shoulder motion on a tablet (unless you have a large one)?

I wouldn't be too worried. You still have a lot of boxes to go. A lot of them are pretty parallel. But then actively attack that: squeeze your convergence angles a bit harder and make the perspectives a little more aggressive. I try to have a crazy one in there every now and then - something that rocks the boat (like your 33).

You have the opportunity of 250 boxes to test the principles you were show and to push your comfort zones. You are definitely feeling solid about the current boxes you have drawn. If you take more risks, I think you'll get what you want from this.

I'm only at box 30, but from what I understand it's about grasping the relationship between parallel lines. It's not specifically about finding the vanishing point, but instead to read the parallel lines and then have an intuition about where that vp wil be. Then it's balancing that relationship so that all three pairs of parallel lines respect the different vps of the box.

The closest I get to graphing a vp is to ghost in a line that converges with its parallel twin, then dropping a dot at the approximate point where I think the perpendicular line would meet it. I suspect anything giving more guidance than eyeballing it like this will defeat the purpose of the exercise. Afterwards, I look at the plotted lines and spot where I got stuff wrong, then use that knowledge to second-guess my choices when I do the next page.

I don't know if that helps your question, but thanks for the topic! I do sometimes wonder if I'm doing this right.

Congratulations on completing the first lesson!

This is my first critique, so it won't be as thorough as other critiques here. Also, I have zero authority here and don't understand all the rules of the process.

So I am commenting entirely under correction here. Just a fellow student talking to another.

Overall:

It's not easy completing this homework, and you deserve credit for that. But these also feel rushed and don't pay enough attention to the rules laid out in the lesson.

Your linework is smooth and steady. But you might be too impatient to get your lines down, when you should be focusing more on your ghosting. You need to improve your ghosting, or the 250 box exercise is going to be incredibly tough for you. Practice line and plane ghosting.

Focus on where you put your pen down. If you miss that first dot, the rest simply won't fall in place.

Ellipses are tough, but don't rush them. If you want to improve your focus and control, draw lots of ghosted planes and ellipses in them. I practice that warm up all the time. I sometimes have to force myself to do other warmups instead.

If you can, use a different colour pen when you plot the lines afterwards. It makes it a lot easier to study them and see where you can improve your technique. That's much harder to see if the lines are all the same colours. (Here's an example)

Some details:

You are pretty focused up to ghosting the planes, but here you start becoming sloppy and impatient with the lines inside the planes. One box is missing lines.

Your ellipse exercises feel very rushed, particularly the ellipse planes.

The funnels received deeper focus and look good. Nice work - you definitely have the skill to do the homework well enough.

Nice work on the perspective exercises. But your ghosting is very sloppy - some lines in the rough perspective homework don't even touch any points at all.

Congratulations on completing the rotated boxes exercise. It's a monster. I think you did follow the rule being explained there (shifting the vanishing point). I'm glad you didn't restart this. The point is not getting it right, but exercising the specific principles explained in the lessons and homework. It's not about doing it right, but trying it honestly.

I think you need to revisit the content on how to draw the boxes for the organic perspective exercise. Judging by your line directions, you are not following those steps.

Again, congratulations for making it to this point. I totally think you're up to the task and have the skill to handle the lessons on this site. But really pay attention to what is being explained in the lessons. I read a homework assignment a minimum of two or three times before I start, and I often refer back to it while I do the homework. The goal is not to finish, but to follow and understand the principles laid out in the lessons.

Don't rush things, focus on learning and execution, and reapply what you've learned in warmups - and you'll improve quickly.

Congratulations - nice work. I've recently hit the 10% mark and I wanted to see if I was doing it right. This has been very helpful!

Fantastic, thank you!

Well, doodling is not a single activity. You can doodle for different reasons. When I do character design, I doodle characters towards some basic descriptions. If I'm trying to construct a scene, I doodle different compositions.

Likewise, you can doodle for educational purposes. But then I think it should be focused and with specific outcomes in mind. For example, I'm working on basic shapes, so I might doodle for 30 minutes using basic shapes as my foundation. But if I deviate and just doodle anything, I'd miss the point. Also, if I doodle while watching TV, that isn't focused and thus also misses the point.

So, whatever the activity, I want to to be focused on an educational need and with an outcome that brings me closer to that need. It's not about repetition. If the activity doesn't fit into that description, it belongs in the other 50%.

From what I understand, the only squares you can draw with a ruler is for the Plotted Perspective exercise. In all the other homework assignments, you only use a ruler to prep the page with boundaries and guides. So if it's not the Plotted Perspective homework, you should freehand draw all your lines using the ghosting technique.