polarshifts

This isn't going to be a very comprehensive review, just some personal observations.

On the plus side, the line work is excellent - confident, straight, accurate. And you've clearly got the hang of construction method and forms look solid. I think a lot of flair in the details.

What is letting the drawings down are the basic proportions. The birds, fish and reptails are fine, with the mammals there are cases where the legs look too thin or the neck looks too long.

I had a quick look through the Lesson 5 notes again and I realised there is really much guidance on the matter. The notes might mention how the ribcage is about half of the torso, but when it comes to judging how long or wide the legs are, we are left to eyeball it. The course covers this in Lesson 7 with vehicles in which it may take the wheel of a car as basis and then measure out the lenght and height of the car in terms of how many wheels they span. I guess you could try taking, say, the head of the cat in your reference image and use that to get a sense the overall dimensions of the animal?

I've just completed this lesson. A such it's still fresh in my mind so I can throw in some observations.

Overall, I really the mark making. Your pen strokes are very confident. The various insect legs all came out very well, solid, good slow and you can clearly make out which leg in infront of the other (by contrast my insect are just chaos). Very good idea to take a scan of the raw construction and then of the complete drawing.

I think what you may want to focus more on is observation, like getting the proportions between the different parts (head, abdomen, thorax, wings..) as well as the direction of this part. So for instance, in the first image of the wasp, the abdomen is in the picture is not rounded, it is concave. Likewise the fly's head isn't a just a sphere, it is more heart-shaped.

I can point these things out because they are the same issues I had, plus my really messed up insect legs.

Hope this helps. But on the whole it's really good stuff.

Bear in mind I am just a beginner, only a couple of Lesson further down the line,

Lines: These are fine I think in general. There is some fraying at the ends and some misses on the ghosted planes, but that is pretty normal.

Ellipses: These are largely OK,

Perspective: Plotted Prespective is good, The Rough Perspective got better with each page which I guess is the whole point of doing multiple page.

The Rotate Boxes has some issue, but it's not that far off mark. The key trick I think you are missing is that the boxes on the outer most rows should be smaller than the centre box. They are rotated away from the viewer so all sides should in 2D terms shrink. You have made the base of the top box smaller correctly but the height is visually still too long and as such what was a cube-like box start looking more like a retangular prism. It you reduce further the height of the top, I think the rest would fall in to place much better. The corners are just hard though, I wouldn't sweat that, I made a mess of that too.

On Organic Perspective, they get better with each page so that's OK. There is a nice flow to them. I don't think you needed to draw the internal lines (this is the official example homework https://d15v304a6xpq4b.cloudfront.net/lesson_images/598a86fb.jpg) but I guess it doesn't hurt.

Thanks. I will take your points on board.

1 Arrows are fine. I think in a couple of cases the shading in on the outside rather than the inside of the ribbon but it can be tricky to tell.

2. Organic forms are great. I don't you need that many ellipses within the form, but they all look really accurate so that's a win.

3. Textures are very good. I a very few cases the perhaps don't wrap (like the fries and strawberry) the organic form, maybe you could work on the silhouette and bending the texture a bit.

4. The Organic Intersections work very well and the viewer really believes they have weight.

5. The Form Intersections I find harder to judge. The forms are excellent but, as someone who is still a beginner and only just done these excercises myself - and not as well - my brain still find making sense of the intersections very hard.

Overall I think you can confidently move on to the next lesson.

1. Lines: These are OK. There is some fraying at the end, especially on the longer lines but I think that is pretty normal.

2. Ellipsis: You are follwoing the two key instructions of keeping the direction and looping around 2-3 times.

3. Perspective: Plotted Perspective is fine. With the Rough Perspective in the early examples boxes further away from the vanishing point miss their target, but this is correct in the last example which shows progress. The Rotated Boxes exercise is excellent, ift came out really well, well done. With the Organic Perspective the flow is good and suggests the 3D movement however quite a few boxes have divergent sides, which should be converging to the notional vanishing point and I think I see some darker lines which attempts to correct this (which I think is against the rules).

Overall I think you can confidently move on to the next stage (which I think is the 250 Box Challenge).

1. Lines look excellent to me, very straight, very precise.

2. Ellipses have a great flow and smoothness, though I think we are advised to loop two max three times, I suspect you may going round a few more times which can make it hard to see where the real shape is.

3. Perspective. Plotted Perspective is fine. With the Rough Perspective, I think the side facing the viewer should not be slanted, in effect a 2D rectangle with to sets of equal, parallel line. In some instances the sides facing the viewer converge which doesn't work with One Point Perspective and I think undermines the rest of the drawing. Not a big deal, we'll all be drawing so many more boxes before this is over. The Rotate Boxes looks great, though I think I see in the construction some extra lines which feels more like how one draws when sketching in pencil but I think on Drawabox we are only meant to draw the lines we plan to use. The Organic Perspective looks great with a nice flow and good sense of depth.

I personally you shouldn't have any problem moving on to the next stage, which I think is the 250 Box Challenge.

I think so. Again, I am just a beginner who started Drawabox a month ago. But I think the ethos of the programme is give everything an honest attempt and then push forward. Everything in Lesson 1 keeps coming up again and again, so there is plenty of chance to improve.

That's a massive improvement on the rotated boxes. Feels good, doesn't it?

Sorry if this won't be very useful, but I think you've done a really good job and ticked all the boxes, pun intended.

1. Thinking 3D: The arrows are great. OK, so some are a be deformed bu they are very 3D which is I think the real point of the exercise. The organic shapes are excellent.

2 Textures: The textures also work very well.

3. Intersections: I am not sure about the Form Intersections, but that is because I struggle myself with the concept. Even in the official examples I'm not really seeing. The Organic Intersections look great.

I think you will enjoy the next section on Plant Construction (I've only just started it).