Lesson 1: Lines, Ellipses and Boxes
6:00 PM, Sunday March 10th 2024
What creative ways do you exercise while warming up?
Your work looks good, but I did notice a few things that you could continue to work on. Firstly, your lines wobble quite a bit across lessons. It looks like you are ghosting but then may be not following though on the final pass of the pen with the same motion, trying to mentally keep the line straight instead of relying on short-term muscle memory.
Also, I noticed on the ellipses you're often making more than two passes around each ellipse. I think the two passes are to practince quickly honing the shape you want, with one practice pass and one final pass. Three or four passes may not be as helpful as just two. (The first table of ellipse page has ellipses spaced a little far apart too, but that was solved in the second page.)
It's clear you know what you're doing and have taken your time on lesson one, so I don't think you need any revisions. Your grasp on perspective seems pretty good already!Next Steps:
On to the 250 box challenge :)
Thanks for the helpful feedback!
You're welcome!
The only point I have to make is that you are not using your shoulder confidently when performing your strokes. The lines are shaky, a consequence of the way you plan the lines while executing them, instead of planning before and executing after in a single confident movement. I suggest you review and redo the exercises on overlapping lines, ghost method and ellipses in tables.
Next Steps:
I suggest you review and redo the exercises on overlapping lines, ghost method and ellipses in tables.
Thanks for the feedback. I appreciate the observation regarding lines/shoulder/confidence and
will continue practicing.
This recommendation is really just for those of you who've reached lesson 6 and onwards.
I haven't found the actual brand you buy to matter much, so you may want to shop around. This one is a "master" template, which will give you a broad range of ellipse degrees and sizes (this one ranges between 0.25 inches and 1.5 inches), and is a good place to start. You may end up finding that this range limits the kinds of ellipses you draw, forcing you to work within those bounds, but it may still be worth it as full sets of ellipse guides can run you quite a bit more, simply due to the sizes and degrees that need to be covered.
No matter which brand of ellipse guide you decide to pick up, make sure they have little markings for the minor axes.
We use cookies in conjunction with Google Analytics to anonymously track how our website is used.
This data is not shared with any other parties or sold to anyone. They are also disabled until consent is provided by clicking the button below, and this consent can be revoked at any time by clicking the "Revoke Analytics Cookie Consent" link in our website footer.
Note that we also use cookies internally to help reduce abuse by bots - these cannot be disabled, but are not used in any way that violate users' privacy and are not shared with any others - they are simply used to confirm that you are indeed a human user.
You can read more about what we do with them, read our privacy policy.