Lesson 1: Lines, Ellipses and Boxes
3:12 AM, Friday December 16th 2022
thanks :)
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3:39 AM, Saturday December 17th 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 but are a bit smoother overall. You are 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 plenty of room for improvement when it comes to your ellipses both in terms of overall consistency of shape and smoothness 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 well. You are getting a mix of confident linework here along with some wobble creeping back into some of your lines. https://drawabox.com/lesson/1/9/wobbling This is probably happening because you are more concerned with accuracy now that you are constructing boxes and you are slowing down your stroke to compensate. That hesitation because of your concern for accuracy while making your mark is what is reintroducing the wobble into your lines. Try and rely a bit more on the muscle memory you build up while ghosting your mark and almost make your mark without thinking. This will be less accurate at first but will give you consistently smooth and confident linework which is our first priority. Accuracy will come with mileage and can't really be forced.You are 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 decently. 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. I do have some notes regarding added line weight I'd like to share. If you want to add line weight make sure you don't revert back to using your wrist and are drawing from your shoulder with confidence. Also added line weight should be subtle so try and only go over a line one additional time instead of multiple times. 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 still seem to be getting a mix of confident linework and wobbly lines throughout this exercise although I am seeing improvement overall. I'm not going to assign any revisions but you definitely need to keep working on this. Remember that accuracy is not the current priority. It's okay if your line misses the mark a little your number one concern should be getting a smooth confident line so really commit your mark once you go to make it. Your box constructions are fairly wonky thourhgout and you need to develop a better sense for how box lines converge to vps so the 250 box challenge will be a great next step for you.
Overall this was a solid submission that showed a nice deal of growth. Your line confidence and ellipses both definitely need work so keep practicing them during your warmups. Otherwise, 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
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