5:58 AM, Sunday January 28th 2024
Thank you for spending the time to do this. I look forward to my continued journey.
This website uses cookies. You can read more about what we do with them, read our privacy policy.
olddesklamp
Dimensional Dominator
Joined 2 years ago
200 Reputation
olddesklamp's Sketchbook
12:10 AM, Thursday January 25th 2024
I followed through with Gyanyu's advice and did 25 boxes with a focus on line weight and hatching, but I did place great focus on where the lines were converging though.
6:23 AM, Friday March 10th 2023
Found a slightly bent metal ruler that worked as a good straight edge when the pen was held at a high angle. Although not fully straight, it worked A LOT better than the DVD case. I also gave up on shading the boxes in the plotted perspective exercise partway through since I was short on time.
I made sure to watch the videos and review the notes before tackling the organic perspective exercise again, and managed to make my lines decisively save for a few instances where my pen accidentally hit the paper while ghosting. I'm aware of the curved lines on some of the boxes, and made sure to perform the movements with my shoulder, but it didn't seem to help by much in this case.
9:58 AM, Saturday February 25th 2023
The plotted perspective looked like it was done in freehand instead of the advised method and shading isn't compulsory but I think if you must do it, then do so well, the hatching lines weren't planned and should have been done with a ruler.
I didn't have a ruler to use, so I instead opted for a DVD case I had nearby. At some point I swapped this out for a small cardboard box as it was more reliable, but IIRC it was after the exercise. I tried folding a piece of paper on itself but it was too flimsy and not sturdy enough. I'll find something else to use before tackling it again.
The recommendation below is an advertisement. Most of the links here are part of Amazon's affiliate program (unless otherwise stated), which helps support this website. It's also more than that - it's a hand-picked recommendation of something we've used ourselves, or know to be of impeccable quality. If you're interested, here is a full list.
Framed Ink
I'd been drawing as a hobby for a solid 10 years at least before I finally had the concept of composition explained to me by a friend.
Unlike the spatial reasoning we delve into here, where it's all about understanding the relationships between things in three dimensions, composition is all about understanding what you're drawing as it exists in two dimensions. It's about the silhouettes that are used to represent objects, without concern for what those objects are. It's all just shapes, how those shapes balance against one another, and how their arrangement encourages the viewer's eye to follow a specific path. When it comes to illustration, composition is extremely important, and coming to understand it fundamentally changed how I approached my own work.
Marcos Mateu-Mestre's Framed Ink is among the best books out there on explaining composition, and how to think through the way in which you lay out your work.
Illustration is, at its core, storytelling, and understanding composition will arm you with the tools you'll need to tell stories that occur across a span of time, within the confines of a single frame.