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1:19 PM, Monday October 9th 2023
Hi Spacehatbilly, congrats on finishing lesson 1!
I'm Miu and i'll do my best at giving a community critique. If you feel like my critique is lacking/unfair, feel free to head over to discord and ask for someone else to look over it as well.
Lines:
Your "Superimposed Lines" came out great. Nice, confident lines with a well defined starting point and only fraying on one end.
On your "Ghosted Lines" you have a variety of confident, straight lines and some where you seemed to have prioritized accuracy over confidence which resulted in some slight waving. Don't be afraid to miss the second dot by a lot, especially in the beginning, and remember that we want to focus on confidence first.
Overall your "Ghosted Planes" look decent. You placed dots for every line and played with a variety of planes. However, you seem to subconciously correct a lot of your lines for accuracy, which is noticable in a sharp kink/sudden change of direction. So here as well, focus on confidence and it's perfectly fine and normal to miss the dots.
Elipses:
The "Table Of Ellipses" look neat. Your ellipses are followed trough twice, while aiming to keep them within the borders and slightly touching each other. You also experimented with a wide range of sizes and tilts, without sacrificing your confidence and follow-through.
Same for the "Ellipses in Planes" your confidence shines and most of your ellipses are super smooth, while also touching the borders of the planes. Nice!
The "Funnels" are really solid as well. All ellipses are smooth, touch each other and the funnel edges. You varried the width of the ellipses towards bigger on the outside. To be a little nit-picky: Some ellipses tilt of the minor axis, most tilts are really subtle, which is a good step in the right direction, i'd say it's especially noticable on the outmost ellipses in the two funnels at the bottom of the page, so that is something to pay attention to, if you use this exercise as a warm-up in the future.
Boxes
"Plotted Perspective" looks great with clean hatching.
In the "Rough Perspective" you kept in mind that the horizontal lines should be parallel to the horizon and the vertical lines perpendicular to that. You extended the lines back to the horizon to check and played with a wide variety of box shapes. Good! For the line quality refer to the line section above.
Now for the "Rotated Boxes", i think you did a great job rotating the boxes, actually you rotated them quiet extreme, which is why you probably didn't put in any corner boxes. You kept the distance between the boxes consistent, which helped with the rotation. I see some wobbly lines, so try not to get baited by the dots into accuracy over confidence, but overall sold job, on this though exercise and nice hatching!
For the future, try to go for a more subtle rotation so you can fit those corner boxes without making a mess.
And finally "Organic Perspective". Overall nice range of sizes and orientations that make the overarching perspective believable. The perspective on the individual boxes looks super solid as well, really good job! In the second frame on the first page it looks like you went over some lines multiple times either to hide some wobbling or to add some lineweight, both isn't really part of this lesson yet.
The stuff about lineweight gets explained in the 250 Box Challenge.
All in all, you did a really good job with these exercises. Maybe try to pay attention to that subconcious shift in direction i talked about in the "Line"-section, but you are good to go.
Good luck on the 250 box challenge and keep up the good work!
Next Steps:
The 250 Box Challenge is waiting!
Do a 10-15 minute warm-up with any of the Lesson 1 exercises before constructing those infamous boxes.
The Art of Blizzard Entertainment
While I have a massive library of non-instructional art books I've collected over the years, there's only a handful that are actually important to me. This is one of them - so much so that I jammed my copy into my overstuffed backpack when flying back from my parents' house just so I could have it at my apartment. My back's been sore for a week.
The reason I hold this book in such high esteem is because of how it puts the relatively new field of game art into perspective, showing how concept art really just started off as crude sketches intended to communicate ideas to storytellers, designers and 3D modelers. How all of this focus on beautiful illustrations is really secondary to the core of a concept artist's job. A real eye-opener.