pikscarots

Hello! I think you've done really well on this lesson! I have a couple of comments to make:

Your form intersections are really good! Just make sure to take extra care when giving them convincing looks in intersecting with one anothers' contours. For example, the top sphere in your third page appears to intersect with the top cube a little awkwardly, undermining it's curvature.

On your computer mouse, there are two lines that could both be interpreted as being the silhouette of the top of the mouse. Be a little more picky when you add clarity to the outlines on your forms- you don't want two of your lines to contradict each other.

Your hair dryer is really nice. I would have liked to see a little more definition (if at all) in its bodily planes. The way its body is constructed (and the way its silhouette looks) makes it look somewhat rectangular (like a tapered rectangle), and since it appears to be being looked at from above just ever so slightly, my brain is telling me that I should be seeing more of the top of the hairdryer. This is contradicted by the dryer's circular part (the one where the air comes out of), as that makes me think that we can't see the top n'or the bottom (as the top both the top and bottom lines of the circular part seem to be converging in opposite directions; one converging down and the other top; meaning that the top and the bottom should not be visible). The contradiction is enforced due to the fact that the point at which the body connects to the dryer's head looks flat. I can see that you've put a little shadow of sorts to help clarify the form. I think this would have done wonders if these shadows ran alongside the side of the form as a whole (kinda like contour lines), not just appearing to be placed exclusively beside the lines that you've made. Taking a little more time to make sure that the forms you carve from your bounding boxes and orthographics seem spatially connected will go a long way.

This might be an issue on my end (as I cannot see the reference you used), but the top of your robo-cat toilet looks as if it is tilting to the side rather than tilting backward. The lines converging leftward at the base of the toilet are different than the ones on the top, which seem to be converging to the right. This is an issue with the box, not your ability to create solid forms from these boxes.

Lastly, on your skateboard drawing, it seems as if you got a little confused with the spatiality of the wheels on the back. I think that it would've been better to have drawn another bounding box so you could get the wheels' ellipses to have a consistent perspective with one-another.

Overall, I think you did extremely well! You're able to create solid, believeable forms that are not only complex, but somewhat geometric, too. I even felt like I've learnt stuff from seeing what you did!

Hello! Congrats on making it through the lesson. I have a couple of things that I want to share with you (and I deeply apologize for the wall of text):

FORM INTERSECTIONS

I found some of them to not be too clear (sometimes) how a form intersects with another. The lines defining intersections seem to be drawn through forms. I'd say this is a good way to think, but, to an onlooker, it doesn't do too well at defining the 3-dness of your forms. I think that, if drawing these intersections through the forms helps a lot with understanding how forms intersect with one another, continue to do what you are doing, with only further emphasizing the intersections that are visible. For clarity's sake, make forms' edges a little more defined, too.

Some of your linework can also be very wobbly and scratchy. Remember to not go over unsatisfactory lines with corrective passes as much as you can! This extends into your object drawings, too. If you have the time to, try to offset this by warming up with linework-focused exercises, like those found earlier in Drawabox. I found that doing so helped a lot, so it may help you too.

OBJECTS

It seems to me that in your XBOX controller, your orthographics were transfered visually rather than through measurements, I.E., you did not do the same measurements on the actaul drawing that you did on the orthographic. The whole reason you create orthographics is to understand your subject's form before re-constructing it on the page. If you aren't gonna adhere to your orthographics measurements, I say that doing them may end up being a waste of time. I think you've gained a better understanding of this as you've progressed through the lesson; I think you started to understand how to use (or avoid using) orthographics in an effective way.

Accros some of your subjects, I noticed that your contour texture work can sometimes not match up with your forms.

Your watch has some of its additional forms forms and lines running against the watch's contours. For example, the middle dial on the top of the watch looks like it has been tilted forward in your drawing, but, as seen on your reference, it stands upright alongside the rest of the watch's clock. Some of the small cut lines (especially

some of the ones to the left of the watch's clock) contradict the watch's curvature, making it a lot more flat than what I assume you wanted it to look like.

While the "Xs" on the front of your sneaker follow its form well, the hatching on the interior does not. I feel as if, because these lines don't seem to be convering to anything, they flatten the sneaker as a whole. The same thing applies to the shoe-patch- the way it's drawn tells me that you wanted the side of the shoe to be flat, which is contradictory to the shoe's silhouette, which makes itself out to be curved.

side note: On your stapler, I think that adding some shadows would've done a good job at emphasizing the stapler's form. I think it looks very 3-D, but it also looks like it contradicts the way you drew your bounding box (more on that later), so adding spme small extra shadows would help my brain focus more on the stapler rather than the box.

Something small that I've noticed is the lack of using lines to align some of your forms and details. Take those small circles beside the top screen on your DS as an example. In your reference, they appear to align together in what is a practically straight line along the DS's form. In practice, they appear to be out of line with eachother (especially since, horizontally, they don't align to one of the lines that you've made in your bounding box). Smaller things like this (others being- how the lines in the d-pad don't algin with eachother like in the reference, or how the square-shaped-thimg-at-the-bottom's vertical lines don't seem to be converging with your bounding box) really undermine the sense of form you're trying to create; something you want to avoid when trying to construct something that feels solid and believeable.

Something else that I've noticed is an ill-adherence to your self-made orthographics. For example, in the glasses drawing, your main drawings' box isn't subdivided like how the orthographics were. The glasses' form feels very flimsy, and it makes me think that you drew the glasses straight from observation, rather than breaking their form down and constructing it from the ground up. I don't know if this is mentionned anywhere in the course, but, to my understanding, drawing directly from observation isn't exactly the same as construction. While both things have you look at forms and how they sit in space, drawing from direct observation tends to focus more on an object as a whole (it's details, intricacies, and unique features), while construction aims to break said object down and understand how it should be built. I think you will get more out of these types of exercises if you use references as guides to help you with your construction, with them acting as blueprints of some-sort for you to imitate with your construction.

There are also some perspective-related mishaps that I've noticed. The side planes of your guitar's body don't converge similarly to your bounding box. This undermines the guitar's 3-D-ness. As previously mentioned, the bounding box around your stapler box looks skewed. Your stapler feels as if it's being observed from a different angle than the bounding box. A bounding box is used to give a good sense as to how you're looking at an object. It's better to use the box as a way of guaging a forms' perspective (or to guage HOW you are going to look at a form), rather than using it to guage smaller-detail proportions. For those smaller details, it may be more convenient to use orthrographics, or to construct additional forms inside or outside of your bounding box.

Overall, I've come away with the observations that, while your forms look very appealing to look at, I feel as if your exploration of constructing objects in 3-D leaned more towards observational drawing rather than raw form construction; something that will help build your understanding of how to create convincing objects without relying so heavily on reference photos.

Take the form on top of the horse's body for example.

Notice how the how the way you drew it makes it look very bumpy. While that may be what you saw at the time, it certainly doesn't convey solidity. If those lines had been smoother, it might've looked different than what you were seeing in your reference image, but it would read better as a solid, 3-dimensional object.

Looks like you weren't the only one replying a little late, haha.

Overall, I think you've done a good job at conveying the forms of the animals that you've redone. The main thing I want to bring attention to is your line work. It's really important to have clean lines, as they allow you to better convey an object's "3-D-ness", as well as making techniques like adding a boldness to your lines more convincing.

Good luck on whatever you may pursue in your life!

Hello,

Congrats on finishing the 250 cylinder challenge! I thought that I'd quickly look at your work, just incase I can offer anything helpful.

CYLINDERS:

Some of your ellipses aren't too confident (see first 5 pages). Remember to take your time when ghosting, as well as committing to your lines once they've been drawn. Remember to try to only draw through your ellipses two or three times over.

You're doing a good job at aligning your ellipses to the cylinder's minor axis, while identifying where you might've gone wrong. That being said, a recurring pattern that I've noticed is that, for the ellipses that were misaligned, their minor axes' were still parallel to the cylinder's minor axis. Because of this, I recommend to spend extra time making sure your ellipses are being cut in half by your cylinder's minor axis.

All-in-all, you did well, especially when recognizing and trying to fix mistakes. The main thing I want you to take away is that you should be spending more time making sure what you put on your page ends up being clean while not being overdone. Remember, you're using pen, so your marks are very permanent and apparent to an onlooker.

CYLINDERS IN BOXES:

Aside from one of the boxes in the first page, all of your cylinders in boxes are well-marked. The use of different colors and dashed lines makes it easy to tell where you made a mistake and what you need to improve upon.

Some of the edges of the boxes that you've made are diverging away their neighboring edges (see p.34's leftmost box, p.29's middle box, p.44's middle box), and, conversely, some converge too harshly to their neighboring edges (see p.31's middle box, p.32's leftmost box). It's really important to make sure your boxes come out clean, since, in this context, they're the backbone of what we're creating. Before making a mark representing one of your box's edges, it's good to imagine what the line you're setting up actually looks like. This lets you compare that line to the other lines that you've made, allowing you to do some course-correcting before you make a mark.

Some of your box's planes appear to be stretched or compressed (p.41's rightmost and middle boxes), which, in turn, makes the resulting cylinder look tapered on one end. Of course, these have their uses, but for consistency's sake, I would say to avoid doing this in the future if you were to use this challenge as an exercise, as it may make it more difficult to align your ellipses to your cylinder's minor axis.

One thing I strongly recommend you to do is to spend more time warming up using exercises from lesson 1 and 2; especially the ones involving drawing ellipses and box-like forms. This helps you get in the groove for tasks that require skills that these exercises focus on, such as fitting ellipses snugly between lines, or trying to estimate a box's convergence in perspective. This not only warms up your hand and arm, but also your mind; you may be more prone to recognizing a mistake in what you're doing before making a mark on the paper.

All-in-all, I think you've gained a lot of mileage from doing this challenge. Remember to use warmup exercises to help you work on tightening your ellipses, reducing the amount of passes you make per ellipse, and refining how you represent forms in persepctive.

Hello,

Congrats on doing the cylinder challenge! I know it's been a while since you've posted this, but I'm gonna take a look at what you've done just in case it would help.

The way I looked over your work is in increments of 50; I tried to take a look at your cylinders, 50 of them at a time, and gathered my general thoughts on each pool of 50. Some of your pages were out-of-order, so I might've missed some pages per pool, but I think my points still stand.

1-50:

You demonstrate nice confidence in lines, with both your ellipses and straight lines, which is good. Speaking of good, you're great at seeing patterns in what stumps you, and experimenting more with those more challenging things.

In general, your ellipses aren't perfect (and they probably never will be (and that's OK!!)), but they're generally clean, which is exactly what you want to be aiming for. You should aim to tighten your ellipses just a little more.

51-100:

Sometimes the sides of your cylinders can miss the mark a little (ex. 95 not hitting the other side, 57 slightly overextending). The same comments about your ellipses that I made for cylinders 1-50 stand true here as well.

101-150:

Something I would recommend you to do is to play with more direct-facing cylinders (ex. 103, 124), as you tend to struggle a little more with getting their ellipses' minor axes aligned to the form's minor axis.

151-200:

Some of your earlier cylinders in boxes are missing the correction lines relating to the ellipses' points of contact with the edges of their respective planes. This is fixed with your later ellipses in boxes, which is good. It's a good habit to re-read the assignment's instructions each time you start a "new phase" of an assignment.

Understandably, some ellipses begin to loosen up a little when trying to fit them within boxes (162, 194), but you were able to keep a strong level of confidence for the most part.

Some of the sides of your cylinders don't converge consistently with your boxes (162, 151, 194), but that can be a direct result of not perfectly fitting your ellipses within your planes- a skill that'd develop with time.

201-250:

Your ellipses seem to loosen up a little more here (219, 222, 228), but, in turn, the marks you make in perspective converge really well. Nothing stuck out to me that much in terms of having an incorrect perspective. Of course, there are some little mishaps here-and-there, but I can tell that you were able to pick up on them (like with 239, 240). I would just say to continue to fine tune your sense of perspective with objects in space.

All-in-all, I can tell that you've spent a lot of time and put a lot of effort into this challenge, and I think that you're ready to move on. Keep practicing your sense of perspective, and, if you are to use this as an exercise in the future, play with more direct-facing and longer-in-length cylinders.

Thank you for critiquing my work. I really appreciate that you've provided some images to go along with your comments, especially for the legs as I had struggled a lot with them. Good day!

Hello Marym, congrats on completing lesson 5! Here are the comments I have to make;

organic intersections

Remember to wrap the sausage forms around eachother. Since all of your sausage forms are curved, overlayed forms will curve as well. You did this well in the second pile with the top middle sausage. An example of this not being done so well is the one on top on the first page- it looks a little flat as it does not appear to curve around the existing sausages.

animals

Be careful with the marks you make! I can see that, in your second wolf drawing, the circles that you've drawn have been gone over many times. try to only go over them 2-3 times (as explained previously in the course), as you don't want to clutter your page up with too many marks that don't serve a purpose. Going around a cirlce or sphere 2-3 times is a good amount to make sure you get something that is both solid, usable, and clear.

In your first bear, it looks like the form you've added on top of its backside is flat. I don't know what your original reference image was, but I want you to remember that a form's silhouette is really really important. Because this additional form matches the silhouette of the underlying form, it appears to be flatter than what I assume you were intending it to be. This problem does not persist in the second bear.

When you don't rely on lines to define a form's solidity, you need to make sure that it's silhouette does all of the heavy lifting. For example, in your first donkey, the hooves' silhouettes do not imply the existence of different faces on the hoof. The front one has a line that seperates the front and side face, making that one look more 3-D than the back one, which only looks like it is 2-D. In cases like this, you have to make sure the silhouette of the form tells the viewer that the form is 3-D by thinking about how the hoof itself is 3-D. This applies to whether or not you choose to add any contour lines.

In regards to your second bull, make sure to make any additional forms follow the contour of the form that it comes from. If you add a footprint for the form (which is what I've assumed you've done for the animal's muzzle), make sure it too follows the base form's contour. In this case, the base form is a sphere, so the intersection between the muzzle and the head should be rounded, not straight and rigid. You did this well with your eye socket cuts.

When drawing something from above (like your frog), it might help to add a center line (like in lesson 4) to help orient your construction, especially since the animal itself is small. I'm saying this because some of the additional masses on the frog's back look like they build up on one side more than the other (I may be wrong as I don't have access to your original reference image).

For your hybrid, I want to point out that you haven't drawn in contour curves to mark where your legs intersect with the hybrid's body. These curves add a good deal of clarity, and are good to use when trying to understand how the creature is constructed. Also, remember not to go over lines too much as sort-of "cleanup passes"- the scorpion tail looks like it's been gone over multiple times. For Drawabox purposes, we only go over these lines to visually organize something that we make.

All-in-all, I feel as if you well understand the material in this lesson, and I think you're ready to move on. Just remember to keep your forms' 3-dimensional quirks in mind when you draw them.

Hi, from what I've seen, you're really good at applying construction to what you see. Apart from some small easy-to-miss details (like the rhino-lizard's tail looking a little flat), everything here feels very solid and real.

I can understand why you didn't refine some of the drawings or didn't add too many additional masses, as this was very last-minute. Something you can do to save time is, instead of drawing multiple iterations of the same thing, you could just draw one and have your efforts focused on it and it only. I understand drawing multiple iterations in the homework- it's good to do if it helps you better understand what you're doing. However, in something like this, I'd recommend that you save yourself a little bit of the effort and draw only one complete iteration of your creatures (you could also just draw one creature instead of two). Good on you for going the extra mile, though!

Good luck on the rest of Drawabox!!

Hello AHMEDHASSAN021, congrats for getting through lesson 5! Here are the comments that I have to make.

Intersections

Your organic intersections feel very weighted. they slump together really nicely. Some of the linework could use some work, especially the one at the top of the first pile. Wobbly lines not only look a little messy, but also undermine the solidity of the form that they represent.

It's good that you're thinking about how cast shadows wrap around the forms that they are cast upon. Remember to try your best to keep within the lines when darkening your shadows.

Animals

Your first bird head is appears to be a little bit two-dimensional. Remember that when we create the eye socket of an animal, we are carving into the base spherical form that we've created, so these carves would follow that form's contour lines, as opposed to being akin to a sticker being slapped onto a 3-D ball.

In your linx-like creature, I noticed some wobbly sausages. It's better to take your time when planning out a mark. Ghost as much as needed, as you really want that mark to come out clean. Another thing- some of your sausages lack contour curves around points of intersection, specifically with neighbouring sausages. These small contour curves add a great deal of solidity, especially since we don't rely on individual contour curves when using the sausage method- correctly defining points of intersection does their job really well. You can see this problem in your second canid drawing as well.

Remember that all additional forms have faces- front faces, back faces, top and bottom faces, etc. In your camel, the toes look like 2-d shapes. For Drawabox purposes, you must consider how these shapes that you see exist in 3-d, and you must draw them with that consideration in mind.

I can see that you've placed protrusions from the camel's body form to make some of its additional forms look more natural. This heavily breaks the 3-dimensionality that you've created. We should never change the silhouette of a form after creating it, as that will undermine its solidity. Instead, we should add an additional form on top of it, which would leave the original form intact and unchanged. In this case, instead of stretching out the camel's body form to fit some of the lumps on its back, it would have been better to add another form entirely to serve that purpose.

One thing I have to say about your second horse is to make sure to keep in mind how every form we draw is 3-D, and that they all intersect with one-another. You didn't draw a lot of contour lines or complete silhouettes of your forms, but everything still looks like it fits together nicely. For learning purposes, I'd say to avoid this when you're trying to study, as adding contour lines and/or completely drawing in your forms will let you have a better visual on what is actually going on in the drawing.

In your bear, make sure to communicate the curvature of some forms with your additional forms. For example, one of the forms you added near the top backside of the bear looks a little flat. Make sure to include subtle curves in these forms to communicate how they wrap around the forms that they sit atop.

The mane in your hybrid looks a little flat. Remember, even if things appear to be 2-D in a photo, they're still flat 3-D objects. Make sure to define where they connect to other forms to enforce this idea.

When looking at everying as a whole, I would say to be more careful with your lines. Try to avoid going over lines again and again as "corrective passes", like you did with the hybrid's tail. We're trying to build more confidence with linework through thinking about our lines more than what we would normally do. Remember to use the ghosting method!

I'm asking for two more drawings of quadruped animals (1 non-hooved and 1 hooved), and I want you to specifically focus on making clean linework and your forms look like they naturally interact with each other.