optimuserik

Thank you for the critique.

In my warmups I deffinitely went and focused a lot on doing ellipses. They are still not in bound but they are much more smooth. The contour curves however I am still struggling with.

I only noticed much later during warmups that the arrows really don't feel right and I saw that I completely missed the line weight part. I am also struggling with that a lot. Any attempt to add line weight just adds more lines that completely miss the mark.

I felt like I was having an absolute workout with the solid intersections. It has been a while since my mind has worked this hard on something that looks so simple. I don't know if it is any good or how to figure out if it is, but I tried.

Great job on the revisions :)

Hello,

Really good job overall. It seems like you switched your layout or the paper sizes at some point and the page gets more busy, but consider being consistent over being efficient with drawing all the boxes in one place.

One of the advantages of having fewer on a page is that you draw more frequently the extensions and get to learn from how they look. Another advantage is that you can go longer on the extensions and see whether they actually converge accurately. In your case we have very short extensions it is difficult to see if they converge properly.

In case the vanishing point is close there are some examples in the later part where is looks very accurate so good job. Anything else is difficult to judge, so you possibly fall into the 'good enough' part.

I consider that your earlier layout and pagesize is much more beneficial and you could draw longer extensions and see better. On your own you do have the ruler and you can see at least, but it is less clear either way.

It is good that you caught yourself drawing extensions in the wrong direction and corrected it.

The thicker contour on the outer edge of the boxes is difficult to see if it is present or not because of the extended lines. I did not consider looking for this in my own drawing and did the same. But most of your lines appear to have the same thickness. You may have forgotten about this part of the exercise.

You did really good on the shapes, rotations and size variation on the boxes too, really good job. They might all be on the smaller side in case you kept the page size, but they are varied enough. Far better than my attempt where I accidentally got locked in very similar rotations and proportions across most pages.

Really good work overall. I would really appreciate if you triet to critique my own attempt at this.

Well, looks like this was an adventure of discovery of boxes.

First of all, and I think this is very important. You very thoroughly yet with surprising consistent hashing crossed out and attempted to negate some boxes which you tought of as some sort of 'bad'. I think this is a very short sighted thing to do. As shown in one of the comics here, you need to accept and learn from the mistakes. The most horrid box that you may be embarrassed about is the one you need to accept and take your time analyzing what happened and what went wrong. Crossing it out means that you do not want it to exist, or that it does not show what you can actually do and an attempt to hide it and potentially not learn from it. Now it might be anything from sneezing and the line going wonky or a cat jumping on you or just simply having an awful day and it just not working out, but you still need to think about it and accept it. Even if it is such a wild and seemingly not relevant to the task at hand, you can learn to adjust something so that the next time you sit down and perform the task you are in a better position to handle outside events. If the reason however is simply that you moved incorrectly a few times in a row, than you absolutely need to try and learn how to prevent to accumulate mistakes.

Now, that was longer than I anticipated, but with that out of the way, it is actually a pretty good attempt at the exercise.

Your hashing is pretty great, nice and neat. It improved throughout the exercise and was acceptable to begin with.

Good variation on the boxes drawn, both shapes and rotations are really good. Much better than what I did.

You did ok on contouring the edges, they do not overlap perfectly, but the intention is there. In case you were not doing it this way, I found that knowing which of the lines are going to be the edges ahead of time and when drawing them going over it at the same time helped me, but my precision is not very good to begin with.

You did quite a few mistakes on the orientation of the lines extended towards the vanishing point in the beginning. Unfortunately, because of imgur not doing you any favors and the order of the pages being inconsistent, this is difficult to track, but you learned and it is good later in the exercise. Please pay attention in the future where you started and where things should go.

At the end the lines are also mostly converging so you can see you improved and you looked at all the previous attempts and kept little notes on where things went wrong. Good job.

While I do not know what size you are working with the boxes appear a little small and this makes the exercise more difficult because you have less room for error and you do not get to move and train your shoulder enough. You might have the tendency without realizing to move to elbow or even using the wrist. I discovered many times that I probably did not even use my shoulder after finishing a day of drawing. Consider doing some larger ones for comparison of difficulty.

Pretty good job overall. I would appreciate if you could critique my attempt as well.

Hello,

First off, excellent job on your progress. Your convergence is pretty good at the beggining and is getting significantly better in the later boxes.

Your hashing appears well done and really consistent, great job.

I do not know what those very thick portions of corners were in the earlier parts but it looks like you stopped doing them with only one towards the end. They feel like very dramatic and messy corrections, you should avoid them.

It seems like you were more varied with the shapes of the boxes early on and you slowly got into a comfort zone and started doing similar looking boxes towards the end. I unfortunately did a similar thing and most of my boxes look very similar across pages.

One unfortunate approach you are doing is disregarding the contour part of the exercise. You should go over the outer edges of the box 1 additional time to make them thicker ever so slightly. You seem to have fairly thick lines for all the boxes, I hope you did not misunderstand the requirement and it is only thick because of the colored lines.

Great job overall. I would appreciate if you could critique my own attempt at the exercise.

Hello,

First off fantastic job, while having all sets of line perfectly converge is the ideal we strive for it is still a dream and we should accept to be satisfied with 'good enough'. Now that doesn't mean to give up, but accept that we are not perfect. Having 3 out of 4 lines early in our drawing journey 'pretty much converge' is good enough.

While I do not know mechanically how the pens function, based on what you said and how some of my pens behave after a while (although mine are probably the cheapest and only ones I could find close by), it looks like somehow your first pen was either really forgiving, possibly not exactly 'felt tip pen', or the strongest out of the batch that can take punishment. It sounds like you accidentally broke the second one by using the same force as on the fading first one, but based on how the boxes look it does not look broken at all.

In conclusion, you should have considered to try to do the contour anyway.

It feels like you fell into a similar pattern as I did, many your boxes tend to be the same proportions and you mostly rotate them, there are a few 'slim' boxes. It is better than mine, since I discovered that I got stuck in 4 or so rotations for the vast majority.

Your hashing is pretty consistent, you moved one from your first attempts pretty quickly, great job.

I hope you made the discovery on your own why 1 or 2 of your boxes got very distorted. It was because of the very dramatic convergence. And it seems like you more consistently chose a less dramatic convergence as you got towards the end.

Good job overall. I would appreciate if you could also drop a critique on my own attempt.

Hello,

You can really see the improvements in time, with a jump towards the end.

You got more patient with the hashing and it looks better, you did a few bigger boxes, more would be a good practice for future.

In the middle there are a lot of very small boxes which potentially make your life more difficult. Hashing them and getting them to converge is difficult since you don't have much room error and the error will accumulate.

The variation of the boxes is really good, much better than I did.

There are some boxes where you ended up with a 2 point perspective which is not really great for this exercise. All of the sets of lines should converge and not be parallel. While you might end up by accident with a parallel set of lines, keep in mind that you should not do this on purpose for this exercise. I do not know if this happened on purpose but one with perfect horizontal lines is suspicious.

On a rare occasion there were mistakes on the side that was hashed, it happens but be careful.

Good job, and keep practicing. Consider some large boxes taking over 1/4th of the page for future warm up exercises.

I would really appreciate some feedback on my own attempt if you have the time.

Great work overall.

Only few additional critiques:

On Rotated Boxes: You fell into the mistake "Not actually rotating" on some of the edges, be careful of that.

On Organic Perspective: Some spacing between boxes is inconsistent.

For Plotted Perspective: The point of hashing a face and thickening the silhouette of boxes is so that you can focus on the box in all the clutter that eventually appears on the page. If the hashing is on different faces than this gets lost.

For Rough Perspective: You seem to have been in a rush. Even if you do not use a ruler and highlight the mistakes until after a page is done, you can still take your time and plot it out in the head and adjust for the next box. You should also use bigger frames and bigger boxes. Drawing 5 times the amount of boxes is not helpful if you do not take your time to mentally figure out everything that is going into the current box, analize what went wrong, and improve on the next box. Working with bigger dimensions will also teach you how to use your shoulders better and attempt to move smooth and straight for bigger distances.

I agree with Delphine on Rotated Boxes. Please take your time with this exercise. It is very difficult, and rushing trough it will not benefit you. Work with a much bigger size as well, it will be easier and cleaner, and keep the gaps minimal. This current one is too rushed.

Organic Perspective: Same as in Rough perspective, take your time, work with bigger and fewer frames so you have breathing room to grow and shrink sizes. There is little and inconsistent change in size and no dramatic exaggeration of boxes closest to the viewer. Also consider the 3rd set of the lines that should have the same VP.

Some feedback.

On Organic Perspective.

You seem to have rushed trough this exercise. While it is usually recommended to have some boxes overlap to see the difference in size as it gets closer to the viewer, having all the boxes this close together makes a lot of clutter and it is difficult to analize and adjust. While the angles when you start should be larger than 90 degrees take care that you are able to make all of them that way, don't rush through it.

Also consider that when you make the second sets of lines that you are already fixing where the third set is going to be. When creating the second set take your time and think about where the third set will end up, and that all the vanishing points will be somewhat consistent. It is difficult, but take your time and you will have less distorted boxes.