Lesson 1: Lines, Ellipses and Boxes

7:47 PM, Monday September 19th 2022

Draw a Box Lesson 1 - Album on Imgur

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Thank you in advance for taking the time to look over my work.

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1:16 AM, Wednesday September 21st 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 having the same issues and you are also 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 both in terms of overall consistency of shape and accuracy 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. 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. While you have some solid boxes here you are relying somewhat heavily on parallel lines for your box constructions which is leading to divergences in some cases and actually makes it 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!

Next Steps:

The 250 Box Challenge

This critique marks this lesson as complete.
3:09 PM, Wednesday September 21st 2022

Hello Rob, thank you for taking the time to go over my work. Your critique is very detailed and Im happy I chose to go with the premium critique!

I often feel like ghosting ellipses is wasted effort because I just end up guesstimating the size ellipse I need. is there any advice you could offer in terms of ghosting ellipse's more accurately. Ive tried ghosting more slowly in an attempt to be more accurate but Im not sure if Im going too slowly. Starting to second guess myself a little.

Once again, thank you for your critique. Im amazed at how thorough you were and discovered all my dirty habits haha! I am completely encouraged by your words and feel I am making progress for the first time in my art journey.

3:30 PM, Wednesday September 21st 2022

The problem with ellipses is that they are an awkward motion that you aren't used to making. The only real advice I can give is that by practicing them more often you will simply become more used to it and build up muscle memory. Some aspects of drawing can take weeks, months, or even years to fully internalize so just keep practicing them on a regular basis.

5:07 PM, Wednesday September 21st 2022

Rob, thats good advice. I'll just keep on keeping on with ellipses. Thanks again!

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