Lesson 1: Lines, Ellipses and Boxes
8:46 PM, Thursday December 22nd 2022
I misplaced my original second page of rough perspective, so I redid another one.
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 for the most part. 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. That said I'm seeing a little wobble in some of your ellipse shapes in these exercises. This is likely happening because you are slowing down your stroke for accuracy. Remember to only really worry about accuracy while you are planning your mark. Once you've ghosted your ellipses it's time to just commit to making your ellipses once you put the pen down on the page. Hesitation leads to wobble. Your ellipses in funnels are definitely having that issue with wobbly linework in places and you are also tilting some of your ellipses off the minor axis. https://drawabox.com/lesson/1/14/notaligned This is something you should always start considering 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. 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. 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 seem to be getting comfortable using the ghosting method and drawing from your shoulder for confident linework which is great and a solid improvement. Your box constructions are a bit of a mixed bag. I can see some solid constructions here where you are develop a sense for how box lines converge to vps. I'm also seeing quite a few wonky convergences and constructions so the 250 box challenge will be a great next step for you to keep working on this.
Overall this was a solid submission that showed a nice deal of growth. Your line confidence is coming along nicely but make sure you keep practicing ellipses during your warmups as there is plenty of room for improvement there and focus a bit more on getting smoother ellipse shapes. 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
Some of you will have noticed that Drawabox doesn't teach shading at all. Rather, we focus on the understanding of the spatial relationships between the form we're drawing, which feeds into how one might go about applying shading. When it comes time to learn about shading though, you're going to want to learn it from Steven Zapata, hands down.
Take a look at his portfolio, and you'll immediately see why.
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