Lesson 1: Lines, Ellipses and Boxes

7:18 AM, Monday September 12th 2022

Lesson 1 - Album on Imgur

Direct Link: https://i.imgur.com/KMQLeA3.jpg

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I am returning to Drawabox! I stopped around two years ago because I found it hard to continue drawing while juggling other responsibilities, and decided if I was to return I would do so as a patreon.

Would I need to re-do the 250 box challenge, if I did it before (without official critique)? The submission got community feedback and was approved here: https://drawabox.com/community/submission/1OYA8ZIS

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12:24 AM, Tuesday September 13th 2022

Hello and congrats on completing lesson one. My name is Rob and I'm a teaching assistant for Drawabox who will be handling your lesson one critique. Starting with your superimposed lines these are off to a fine start. You are keeping a clearly defined starting point with all of your wavering at the opposite end. Your ghosted lines and planes turned out well. You are using the ghosting method to good effect to get confident linework with a pretty decent deal of accuracy that will get better and better with practice.

Your tables of ellipses are coming along pretty good. You are doing a good job drawing through your ellipses and focusing on consistent smooth ellipse shapes. This is carried over nicely into your ellipses in planes. It's great that you aren't overly concerned with accuracy and are instead focused on getting smooth ellipse shapes. Although accuracy is our end goal it can't really be forced and tends to come with mileage and consistent practice more than anything else. Your ellipses in funnels are having some issues with tilting off the minor axis. https://drawabox.com/lesson/1/14/notaligned This is something you should always start considering when drawing your ellipses. Your ellipses are off to a great start but there's still room for improvement so keep practicing them during your warmups.

The plotted perspective looks good although you are having a lot of issues with slanting legs on your boxes. An important thing to realize when you are drawing in two point perspective like this is that all of the vertical legs of your boxes need to be perpendicular(straight up and down) to the horizon line. Your rough perspective exercises turned out pretty well. It's great that you are keeping up with the confident linework on these. You are also doing a good job extending the lines back on your boxes to check your work. As you can see some of your perspective estimations were quite off but that will become more intuitive with practice. As mentioned previously one thing that can help you a bit when doing a one point perspective exercise like this is to realize that all of your horizontal lines should be parallel to the horizon line and all of your verticals should be perpendicular(straight up and down in this case) to the horizon line. This will help you avoid some of the slanting lines you have in your constructions.

Your rotated box exercise turned out decently. One thing that would have helped you here would have been to just draw this a bit bigger. Drawing bigger really helps when dealing with complex spatial problems. You also did a good job drawing through your boxes and keeping your gaps narrow and consistent. While the rotations here aren't perfect this was a good effort overall. The more you draw and develop your spatial thinking ability the easier these rotations are to handle.This is a great exercise to come back to after a few lessons to see how much your spatial thinking ability has improved. Your organic perspective exercises are looking pretty good. You seem to be getting comfortable using the ghosting method and drawing from your shoulder for confident linework which is great. Your box constructions are quite solid for the most part and you definitely have good grasp on how box lines converge to vps which makes sense as you've already worked through the 250 box challenge.

Overall this was a really solid submission, which once again makes sense as you've already worked through a lot of this material. You don't need to redo the entire 250 box challenge. We do ask that you do 50 more boxes to go along with your original submission so that we can get a more current assesment of your drawing ability. Keep up the good work!

Next Steps:

The 250 Box Challenge

This critique marks this lesson as complete.
1:20 AM, Tuesday September 13th 2022

Thank you for the critique!

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