Lesson 1: Lines, Ellipses and Boxes

12:49 PM, Monday May 2nd 2022

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Hey,

Thanks for looking at my homework from lesson 1. This is my second attempt at the course. A couple of months ago I got to the Pitcher Plant exercise, but because of life stuff I let it slide.

I Feel fairly comfortable with most of these exercises, trying to understand the take home message, rather than worrying about whether I was any good at it or not. Holding the pen at 90 degrees has really helped steady my strokes, and mark making from my shoulder feels a lot more comfortable.

Like most people, the one I struggled on the most was the rotated boxes. I'm actually quite pleased with the way it turned out, in comparison to previous attempts.

Any feedback would be greatly appreciated.

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11:07 PM, Monday May 2nd 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 pretty good. You are doing a good job drawing through your ellipses and focusing on consistent smooth ellipse shapes. This is carried over nicely into your ellipses in planes. It's great that you aren't overly concerned with accuracy and are instead focused on getting smooth ellipse shapes. Although accuracy is our end goal it can't really be forced and tends to come with mileage and consistent practice more than anything else. Your ellipses in funnels are looking fine. I'm not seeing any real issues here. One thing you could have done with these is start with a narrower degree ellipse in the center and then widen the degrees of the ellipses as they move outwards in the funnel. Please check the example here. https://drawabox.com/lesson/1/14/step3 This helps with practicing different degrees of ellipses.Your ellipses are off to a great start but there's still room for improvement when it comes to accuracy so keep practicing them during your warmups.

The plotted perspective looks great, nothing to mention here. Your rough perspective exercises turned out pretty good. 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. The other possibility is that you have reverted back to drawing from your wrist for some of these lines. Just something to keep an eye on. You should be drawing from your shoulder for basically every line you draw, even shorter ones. The wrist should be reserved for detail work only. 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. Although you drew this at a decent size one thing that would have helped you here would have been to just draw this a bit bigger. Drawing bigger 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 want to discuss your added line weight here and in the next exercise for a moment. First off added line weight needs to be subtle and not a hammer to the face like you are doing here. Secondly, adding line weight is fine for some of the exercises in this course but you need to use the same fineliner and not a thicker marker like you are doing now. Right now all you are doing is putting down a really thick line that is obscuring the inital line you put down making it impossible for me to judge it. Lastly, if you do want to put down added line weight you need to treat it the same as any other line you would draw for these lessons and ghost it multiple times and then draw from your shoulder with confidence. Also only go over a line one additional time. Moving on the the boxes themselves you are running into a pretty common issue of not actually rotating your boxes in some cases but instead simply drawing them moving back in perspective. https://drawabox.com/lesson/1/17/notrotating 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 a bit of an issue because of the lineweight problem I mentioned previously. Outside of that though I can see some wobbly line issues that I addressed in your rough perspective exercises. So as a revision I'd like you to do one more page of this exercise. This time no adding line weight or redrawing lines. Just put down a confident line and stick with it. While you have some solid box constructions here the convergences could definitely be improved so the 250 box challenge will be a great next step for you.

Before moving on though I'd like you to be a bit more confident in your linework while constructing boxes so get that revision submitted and I'll take a look and then you can most likely move on to the 250 box challenge.

Next Steps:

One page of the organic perspective exercise - No adding line weight or redrawing lines. Focus on confident linework.

When finished, reply to this critique with your revisions.
8:58 AM, Thursday May 5th 2022

Hey,

Thanks for looking at my work.

With the Organic Perspective should I have the boxes overlapping?

9:10 PM, Thursday May 5th 2022

It's fine if they overlap.

8:47 PM, Friday May 6th 2022
edited at 8:49 PM, May 6th 2022

Hey Rob,

Here is my second attempt at the Organic Perspective exercise.

https://i.imgur.com/4i1zNEg.jpg

Thanks

edited at 8:49 PM, May 6th 2022
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