Lesson 1: Lines, Ellipses and Boxes
2:35 AM, Monday January 10th 2022
I did my best :)
Hi Strawberryj_, I see you've submitted your homework over 2 months ago, I hope my critique can be still useful to you. I've divided the critique into three sections: Lines, Ellipses & Boxes, similarly structured to the lesson itself.
Lines: Good job on the Superimposed Lines, the fraying stays on one end, which is what we want. I do see some wobbling going on in the straight lines, next time I'd suggest to draw even faster. This gets rid of any possibility of wobbling. Of course, always draw from the shoulder. Ghosted Lines looks pretty good, some arcing lines but nothing too extreme. The accuracy is pretty high, but remember: high accuracy is only relevant if your lines are executed confidently, meaning no wobbling & no arcing. The Ghosted Planes, on the other hand, sees a huge improvement in terms of line confidence. Almost every line looks as straight as if drawn with a ruler, nicely done!
Ellipses: I see you're drawing a full 2-3 times in the Tables of Ellipses, noice. The way they're drawn looks confidently as well, and they look quite uniform. Great job! I'd only suggest to have more variation with the degree (width) of the ellipses, most of your ellipses look around the 30-ish degree, I'd try to spice it up with some thicker (60 degree) and thinner (10-15 degree) as well. The Ellipses in Planes looks solid as well, some of them look a little egg-shaped but that'll improve with practice. I'd also try to hit all 4 edges, but of course put most of your effort into keeping the ellipse uniform - something that you mostly already succeed at. I see that, in the Funnels, you've achieved keeping the ellipses snugly between the borders, and they're generally pretty uniform. There does seem to be some misalignment with the minor axis, so I'd suggest to ghost a little bit more, but this will also generally improve as you put some of these exercises in your warm up routine :]
Boxes: now onto the boxes! The Plotted Perspective looks perfect, got nothing to add or nitpick on. Rough Perspective however... I'm missing the checking of convergences! After doing a full page you should extend your depth lines (the ones that aren't horizontal or vertical) with a different colour to where they intersect with the horizon line. This way you can see how accurate your estimations were. It's one thing to eyeball your perspective, but it doesn't mean much if you don't reflect on the mistakes you frequently tend to make. Basically; by checking your work you discover pitfalls that otherwise would've slipped through your radar, and you can now focus on consciously avoiding these pitfalls. Other than that, your boxes look good. I see that your horizontal lines are mostly parallel to the horizon line, and your vertical lines are mostly perpendicular to the horizon line, awesome! It's really difficult to eyeball that correctly, so great job on achieving it! There are some arcing lines, but overall you've kept your lines really straight :) I'm seeing a good deal of rotation in the Rotated Boxes exercise, noice! I don't see the rectangles that represent the middle box being rotated 90 degrees, but considering you already have a nice amount of rotation, that's no big deal. Considering the difficulty of this exercise, I must say I'm impressed with your execution! If you ever choose to attempt this again as part of your warmup I'd suggest to start off with the middle box (the squary one) being slightly bigger, so you have more room to make those difficult corner boxes work. And finally, the Organic Boxes. Nice difference in size. Good overlaps, though I'd suggest to increase the lineweighting of the silhouette a little bit to make the overlapping boxes read a little bit better. As they are right now, it's a little confusing at first glance. The biggest box in the bottom frame of the first page (in imgur upload order at least), there seems to be a line missing. Don't forget to double-check your work once you're done, since a missing line can immediately break the illusion of solid form that we're creating. Also try to keep in mind that lines, that go off to the same vanishing point, must never diverge. I know (from experience) that it's hard, but try to keep it in mind when you place your points and ghost towards them. On that note, if you place your point and see that it'd make a diverging line rather than a converging line, you don't actually have to ghost exactly towards that point. You can just use that point as an indication of where you want your line to generally go, and then ghost slightly towards it.
Woah. That was a lengthy one. I figured that, especially since you've submitted this a long time ago, a rather in depth critique is well worth the wait, although I suspect you may have already moved on to other exercises & lessons. Anyway, I hope this essay has still managed to help you out, and I wish you the best on the rest of your journey =]
Next Steps:
Pick 2-3 exercises to use as a warm up session of 10-15 minutes before every DAB session
Venture on to the 250 Box Challenge. It'll be hard to keep at it, but you got this! Remember: it's a marathon, not a sprint. This challenge will not only get you more mileage with drawing straight, confident, non-wobbly lines, but it'll also give you a more thorough understanding of 3D-space. Good luck, and try to enjoy it as well =]
Michael Hampton is one of my favourite figure drawing teachers, specifically because of how he approaches things from a basis of structure, which as you have probably noted from Drawabox, is a big priority for me. Gesture however is the opposite of structure however - they both exist at opposite ends of a spectrum, where structure promotes solidity and structure (and can on its own result in stiffness and rigidity), gesture focuses on motion and fluidity, which can result in things that are ephemeral, not quite feeling solid and stable.
With structure and spatial reasoning in his very bones, he still provides an excellent exploration of gesture, but in a visual language in something that we here appreciate greatly, and that's not something you can find everywhere.
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