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3:37 PM, Monday October 25th 2021
Hey there, I'll be your TA today so let's get started.
Your superimposed lines are off to a good start. They are confident and drawn from the shoulder. As you continue to practice you can work on reducing the fray at the ends of your groups, but for now this is a good start. Your ghosted lines are looking pretty hesitant in a lot of cases, but the ones where you don't worry so much about hitting the end point are a lot more confident. It's all a numbers game - the more you practice, the more you will improve with it, so just keep doing these exercises for warm ups.
With your ellipses in planes you need to focus a bit more on hitting all 4 sides of the plane so your ellipse is rooted firmly in space and no room to "float around". This principle of anchoring each mark on your last carries through to all of drawabox so it's good to be mindful starting now. Your ellipses in tables are hit and miss. You are drawing through them appropriately but you are getting a little wild with it so keep practicing your ghosting with it and try to tighten up those draw through passes. You are leaving a lot of space in your sections, leaving room for ambiguity so keep on working on anchoring each piece to the previous. With your ellipses in funnels, the big thing I am seeing is you need to slow down. Your minor axes aren't lining up to your funnel axes so make sure to slow down and be more purposeful.
Your rough perspective boxes are on the right track. You are doing your best to keep your horizontal lines parallel to the horizon and verticals perpendicular so your boxes are oriented correctly. Your line confidence is still a bit shaky so keep on practicing ghosting your lines as well as preparing each line so you only are executing your marks when ready. Your converging lines are on the right track and that accuracy will improve with, you guessed it, mileage! One more thing I want to point out is that you are redrawing some of your lines and I want to discourage that. One of the reasons we work in ink is to make sure we are being careful and planning each mark - planning, ghosting, executing and living with the results. Drawing over lines we don't like only draws more attention to the mistake instead of hiding it.
Now let's look at your rotated boxes. First and foremost, our only goal for students here is to try their best at this exercise and finish it to their current abilities. We fully expect students to be over their heads here and this is more about introducing you to new concepts instead of gauging any form of “success or failure”. So the fact that you pushed through and completed these boxes is a success! That being said I do have a list of important concepts I like to reiterate to make sure that you are learning what we need you to at this point.
Adjacency - Your adjacent lines are pretty far apart (in some cases, others are nice and close!) so you can't properly utilize them as perspective guides. This is a really useful technique so make sure you're understanding it and can properly leverage it.
Rotation - Your boxes are not rotating, but rather skewing and shifting over, so give this gif some more attention and try to internalize how the rotation is driven by the vanishing points moving along the horizon.
Scale - You have some more room on the page you could have utilized. A good rule of thumb is to draw as large as you can so that your brain has the most room to work through these spatial problems. It sounds kind of odd, but it really does work.
Overall though, like I said, you pushed through and completed it to the best of your abilities so good job.
Finally, let's take a look at your organic perspective. Although I would have liked you to have drawn more boxes for more mileage, the boxes and compositions you do have are nice to look at. I like how you are exploring depth on the page by scaling down your boxes to make them recede into the background. I also like that you are not hesitant to overlap your forms. Over laughing your forms causes the brain to perceive them as occupying a single space on the page. These two techniques you employed are key to selling the illusion of three-dimensional space on a two-dimensional paper; so great job! Your perspective sense is still young and developing but that is not a concern, as that will be worked out in the 250 Box challenge. You are still having a tendency to redraw some lines so make sure you are planning and ghosting a little more before putting down your marks especially as you move on to the box challenge.
You are definitely on the right track here and I will be marking your lesson one as complete. Make sure to keep practicing line confidence exercises as well as generally lifts mileage in your warm-ups each time you sit down to draw. Keep up the good work and we will see you next time.
Next Steps:
Feel free to move on to the 250 box challenge
Faber Castell PITT Artist Pens
Like the Staedtlers, these also come in a set of multiple weights - the ones we use are F. One useful thing in these sets however (if you can't find the pens individually) is that some of the sets come with a brush pen (the B size). These can be helpful in filling out big black areas.
Still, I'd recommend buying these in person if you can, at a proper art supply store. They'll generally let you buy them individually, and also test them out beforehand to weed out any duds.