Lesson 1: Lines, Ellipses and Boxes

12:28 AM, Thursday October 13th 2022

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  1. my images are out of order and I don't know how to change them, sorry about that.

  2. i have trouble with my posture and find myself hunched over my page, but it aslo hurts when I actively try to sit up straight.

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12:43 AM, Friday October 14th 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 well. You are doing a good job drawing through your ellipses and focusing on a consistent smooth ellipse shape. This is carried over nicely into your ellipses in planes although you are deforming some of your ellipses at times. https://drawabox.com/lesson/1/13/deformed You are compromising your overall ellipse shape by adjusting for accuracy midstroke. Try and rely a bit more on the muscle memory of the motion you build up while ghosting and almost make your mark without thinking. This will be less accurate at first. Although accuracy is our end goal it can't really be forced and tends to come through mileage and consistent practice more than anything. Your ellipses in funnels are looking a bit smoother but you are having some issues with tilting your ellipses off the minor axis at times. https://drawabox.com/lesson/1/14/notaligned This is something you should always consider when drawing your ellipses. There is a lot of room for improvement when it comes to your ellipses of overall consistency of shape so make sure you keep practicing these in your warmups as they can take a while to get used to.

The plotted perspective looks great, nothing to mention here. Your rough perspective exercises turned out pretty good. 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. 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 pretty well. I like that you drew this nice and big as that 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. You are running into a pretty common issue of not actually rotating your boxes in some cases(mainly see that on the bottom you are getting a very slight rotation on the other sides) but instead simply drawing them moving back in perspective. https://drawabox.com/lesson/1/17/notrotating Your rotations here are very slight throughout, which is perfectly fine given the difficulty of this exercise. 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 a bit wonky throughout and you are relying somewhat heavily on parallel lines for your box constructions which is leading to divergences in some cases and is also making some of your boxes look like they are growing in size as they move back in space. The 250 box challenge will be a great next step for you in order to develop a better understanding of how box lines need to converge to vp's.

Overall this was a solid submission that showed a nice deal of growth. Your line confidence and ellipses are both coming along nicely. I think you are understanding most of the concepts these lessons are trying to convey quite well. I'm going to mark this as complete and good luck with the 250 box challenge. Keep up the good work! In regards to your posture I would recommend getting a board you can prop up on your lap and angle against your desk and to try drawing on that.

Next Steps:

The 250 Box Challenge

This critique marks this lesson as complete.
6:46 PM, Friday October 14th 2022

thanks for taking a look.

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