samuraijac

Thank you for your response! I'm glad I'm not the only one experiencing this. I may give you my feedback on the 250 box challenge, although I'd feel more comfortable critiquing lessons I've already "passed"!

...there is no average wait time because...

As a math tutor, I feel like I should say this: there is an average wait time. There has to be. "Wait time" is a quantity we can measure for every submission that's been critiqued. Theoretically if you added all of those quantities and divided by the total number of critiqued submissions, you would get... the average. But just because we know that value exists doesn't mean we know what it is, or that we can even estimate it (easily). So I totally believe that there is no available info on the average wait time, but the gods of statistics... they know.

Cheers,

Jac

Good to know! This clarifies things. Thank you (and hanamiroyui and jordanasza) for your responses.

"interesting to never redraw a line. I think i must have skimmed over that part in the reading material, I'll try placing more dots and not correcting."

I just re-read Lesson 0 and Lesson 1 and I couldn't find it in the text! So I'm not surprised you missed it. But I am positive that you are not suppose to redraw lines that are off. Uncomfortable may have mentioned it in a video; I know I frequently seen it repeated in other lesson 1 critiques.

Good luck and have fun!

Cheers,

Jac

Hi AmishCyborg!

Congrats on getting through lesson 1! Here is my critique:

Lines

In your lines I see a little wobble, but I think the wobble lessens as the exercises progress. The most important quality of the lines is that they are straight and confident, which yours are mostly. For the super-imposed lines, the most notable thing is that your lines fray very quickly (although they don't fray at the very beginning). Maybe add superimposed lines to your warm-up exercises until you can more cleanly draw (using your shoulder) directly on top of a straight, ruler-drawn line.

Also, I think you didn't plot all the lines you drew. One thing that will hone your accuracy is regularly having a clear target to hit. For example, did you draw dots to plan the lines that bisected your planes in the ghosted planes exercise? You should practice drawing the dots before every line.

Ellipses

With the exception of the first two circles, it appears all your ellipses are drawn through two times, which is perfect. I see some ellipses floating (not touching the bounding box), but I can see you made an effort to keep the ellipses within and touching the bounds, each ellipse touching each other, without overlapping. That's the goal.

Just like with straight lines, we want to eliminate any wobble in ellipses in favor of confident, smooth stroke (even if the ellipse is inaccurate).

Your funnels are well done, but on several of them the line you drew is off from the middle, so it can't easily be used to gauge the accuracy of your ellipse. Still, I think the ellipses tend to be symmetric relative to the midline of the funnel, which is good. (Some are wobbly; you want to try to draw ellipse that don't wobble first and then try to draw them accurately.)

Boxes

In your rough perspective, your lines have quite a bit of wobble. Also, throughout all your boxes exercises, there are many lines that appear to have been re-drawn because the first pass was a mistake. NEVER re-draw a line, no matter how "wrong" it is. You are expected to keep drawing the rest of the figure using the "wrong" line as if it's correct. This is admittedly really tough, but thems the breaks.

I think you have the same problem here I mentioned before in that you didn't plot your lines. I think you just ghosted over a blank spot on the page without dots to guide you (please let me know if I'm wrong). The great thing about plotting with dots, that if the dot is wrong or off you can alter it and place a new dot. But once the line is down, it's down.

On rough perspective, width lines should be parallel to horizon and height lines perpendicular to horizon. I think you managed this mostly, but some of those lines do stray off diagonally.

On one box you have a note "This 1 is good but still looks bad"- I think by "good", you're referring to the perspective lines going to the same vanishing point. However, you might notice that the back face is crooked (the horizontal lines are not parallel). The right face of the box looks larger than the left face, but it should be SMALLER because it's further from the viewer. This just goes to show that because a box is "good" by one metric (1 set of lines meeting a vanishing point), doesn't mean the whole box is fine. But, it's much easier to FOCUS on one metric at a time! So for these lessons you'll often be drawing stuff "right" according to what the lesson wants you to focus on, but it won't look pretty.

Great effort with the rotated boxes! You didn't need to do two pages (and in the future I recommend against doing more than the required homework), but I can see why you wanted the practice. You made a point to have each box have different vanishing points, even though it made those corner boxes really tough.

I like your organic perspective (except for I think you didn't plot your lines and you made corrective marks which should be eliminated). You seem hesitant to draw the boxes on top of each other. You'll had more depth to your art when you aren't afraid to put objects "behind" and "in front" of each other in space while representing them on your page. Also, for the final page, you didn't draw the "behind" boxes all the way through. You stopped drawing the lines where the viewer would stop seeing them. Don't do that!! We want to visualize the 3D reality of these boxes, not just what's visible in our specific 2D perspective. If you want to distinguish what box is on top, lineweight should be added with confident ghosted lines, and solely to the part of lines to overlap.

Overall, there are a couple of key things for you to keep in mind moving forward: focus on drawing straight, confident lines using plotted point, drawing confident ellipses and circles, and don't ever re-draw or correct a line. I believe you understand the lesson well enough to move forward to the 250 box challenge! Remember to do warm-ups to practice the things outlined in this critique.

The only exercises you are expected/required to do are the exercises at the end of the lesson. I think it's recommended that you do 5-15 minutes of warm-ups (using exercises from lesson 1) before you jump in the current homework.

I'm so happy to hear that, Dredd! Don't feel you need to put in as much work into your critique as I did (I have a tendency to go overboard), but I'm sure your notes will be very welcomed by the artist you help! Not only will it help them, but critiquing other students is a great way to learn yourself.

This tool is REALLY helpful in critiquing lesson one, please use it!: https://pastebin.com/dYnFt9PQ

P.S. Also, I believe the site has recently implemented something where if you have submissions waiting to be reviewed, they'll be higher up in the queue if you critique other submissions (and users agree with your critique).

Hi Dredd2701,

Great job completing the first lesson!

I'm also a beginner, so you can keep that in mind for this critique.

Lines

Your super-imposed lines are pretty good, but they all seem slightly arched instead of straight. Did you draw the initial lines with a ruler before drawing over them? If you are using a ruler for the first line, you might have arching because you're not drawing with your shoulder (which admittedly takes a lot of practice). Though arched, I don't see a lot wobble so that's good (not in your straight lines, maybe a little woble in your curves).

I think your short and mid-length lines are the best, with a bit of fraying only at one end. However, for the longer lines and all the curves, I see more fraying at both ends (and more error in general). It takes a little discipline when starting to draw your line to ensure that you've placed the pen at the correct starting point and not off.

I love your ghosted planes! I feel like you used the ghosting method and focused on making your lines straight. I also like that I don't see any corrective marks.

Ellipses

I think you nailed the ellipses section!(Pretty sure you did it better than I did).

On your tables, the ellipses are mostly kept within the bounds, each ellipse touching each other, without overlapping. It seems your circles tend not to touch the box in which they're bound, so maybe during warm-ups in the future do a couple rows of circles being mindful they touch the boundary.

On funnels, you the minor axis (the line in the middle) cuts ellipses in 2 symetrical halves for the most part. I think the line tends to be more off than the ellipses are. The larger ellipses on your corner funnels tend to be a tilted relative to the midline where instead the center of the ellipses should be aligned with the midline.

Boxes

In your rough perspective I see some lines with arch or wobble, but I think they get straighter as the lesson progresses, so you're on the right track. I think you are over-prioratizing the length of the line - all the lines seem to have the correct length but are not necessarily confident or correctly placed. Keep this is mind from the ghosting lines exercise description:

"..there are several levels of "success" with this exercise:

Level 1: Line is smooth and consistent without any visible wobbling, but doesn't quite pass through A or B, due to not following the right trajectory. It's a straight shot, but misses the mark a bit.

Level 2: Line is straight, smooth and consistent without any wobbling and maintains the correct trajectory. It does however either fall short or overshoot one or both points.

Level 3: Line is straight, smooth, consistent without any wobbling. It also starts right at one point and ends exactly at the other."

As I understand it, this prioritization remains true for future exercises.

Also on rough perspective, width lines should be parallel to horizon and height lines perpendicular to horizon. This is tricky and I think you accomplished it for a lot of the lines, but there are a handful that stray off diagonally.

Your rotated boxes are great! This is a tough exercise. I think on some boxes aren't rotating (at least along one of the two axes), but overall great.

(Here is an example image of boxes that don't rotate: https://d15v304a6xpq4b.cloudfront.net/lesson_images/d73eea49.jpg).

Organic perspective is good. Even though you have tons of boxes, you were a little hesitant to overlap them. You'll add a lot more depth to your images when you aren't afraid to put items "in front" or "behind" others in the 3D space your representing.

Where you did choose to overlap boxes, you can add clarity by adding line weight to the appropriate lines to the box in front. Line weight should be added with a single confident stroke drawn over the original line using your shoulder.

And there you have it! Sorry if this was long! But I think you're more than ready to move on to the 250 box challenge, which should definitely help you get in the habit of drawing if you can complete it. Good luck and have fun!

Cheers,

Jac

It's beautiful! Great effort. There are some boxes that aren't rotated because they share vanishing points (as demonstrated in this image: https://d15v304a6xpq4b.cloudfront.net/lesson_images/d73eea49.jpg ), but I'd say you got the gist of the exercise and are ready to move on.

Good luck on the 250 box challenge!

You can do it!! The rotated boxes are intimidating. We really have to push ourselves to try and complete the hard exercises to the best of our ability when they come up (the texture one I'm doing right now is killing me ^^' ). Discomfort is a necessary part of growth.

Good luck! Keep going and keep growing!

Those rotated boxes are awesome! Great job! Good luck on the 250 Box Challenge!