In the future – since I predict your box challenge will have lots of images – imgur lets you rearrange your album. It’s one of the options on the right. It’s fine for now however, so let’s take a look at these.
Starting off, your superimposed lines look great. You’ve not tried any arcing lines, which is a shame, but the straight ones are smooth, properly lined up at the start, and of a consistent trajectory. The ghosted lines look quite confident, as do your planes, but, correct me if I’m wrong, it doesn’t look as if you’ve plotted any start/end points for the non-diagonal center lines of your planes. If that’s indeed the case, please be sure to, from now on.
Onto the ellipse section, the table of ellipses exercise looks great. There’s not a great deal of variety to your ellipses (as far as their degrees are concerned), but what’s here is smooth, rounded, and properly drawn through. Given your level, I’ll recommend sticking to 2 rotations from now on. This’ll make your mistakes easier to spot, and you’ll be able to improve even further as a result! The ellipses in planes are nicely done, if a little simplistic, but that’s a critique of your planes more so than your ellipses, so no stress. The funnels look good, but definitely spend a little longer lining up each ellipse to its minor axis – resist the urge to just go on auto-pilot.
As for the box section, the plotted perspective exercise is nicely done. For the record crooked back lines happen because of an accumulation of small errors. In those cases, rather than respect what the points are telling you, it’s best to just estimate the back line, such that it falls in-between your points, and is perpendicular to the horizon. The rough perspective exercise shows some nice improvement over the set, but even by the end it’s not quite there. The reason for this is simple: you’re prioritizing the convergence of your lines, over them needing to be parallel/perpendicular to the horizon. However, we’re not meant to prioritize one over the other; we’re meant to make both work. Which, oftentimes, is not as hard as you might think. The rotated boxes exercise looks good. Its lineweight is a little overt, and you shouldn’t have applied any to the back lines, but it’s not a huge issue. Your boxes here are big, snug (less so at the back, but that’s expected), and make a decent, if ultimately subtle, attempt to rotate. The organic perspective exercise looks great. The increase in size of your boxes is a little subtle, but their size and foreshortening are enough to convey the illusion we’re after. Nice work, all around.
Next Steps:
Consider this lesson as complete, and head on over to the box challenge. Best of luck!
Thank you for the feedback!
I have a question to ask, specially related to the rough perspective exercise. At the start of the course it's implied (or at least that's what I interpreted) that we should commit to the lines and to not try to correct mistakes. In that sense, when I was doing the converging lines of the box, some of them would end up being too short or long compared to the others, leading to the issue of not prioritizing parallel and perpendicular lines enough.
In that case, should I try to correct the length of the converging line to facilitate making correctly the perpendicular and parallel ones?
Thanks again!
Popping in here to answer on Benj's behalf - you are correct that mistakes should not be corrected, as it can lead to some poor habits of automatically redrawing marks without thinking. At the end of the day, everything we do here is an exercise - meaning, it'll never be the last time we do it. After you're done, identify your mistakes, reflect on why they occurred, and keep it in mind for the next time you attempt the exercise.
Understood, thank you!
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.
This website uses cookies. You can read more about what we do with them, read our privacy policy.
