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1:16 PM, Monday April 10th 2023
Welcome to drawabox, and congrats on completing Lesson 1. I’ll be taking a look at it for you.
Starting off, your superimposed lines are a little mixed. I suspect that you’re drawing these with your elbow (since you seem to run out of the range of it near the end, and wobble), but it could also be that you’re having difficulty adjusting to the shoulder, which, given that this is the first exercise, is understandable. We’ll see how this develops throughout the submission, to know if you need to work on it any! The ghosted lines/planes look mostly good. I do notice some wobbles here, too, and they’re consistent throughout the entire length of the line, here, so I’ll definitely recommend that you spend a bit longer on the ghosting stage. I think you’re committing to your line before you’re ready, and that’s what’s causing it.
Moving on to the ellipse section, the table of ellipses exercise looks good, if a little lacking in variety (referring to their degrees/angles). Your marks here seem confident, but you’ve not been too consistent with your rotations, it seems. Be sure to aim for a minimum of 2 (this is to say, not 1 and change, but 2!) Also, here, too, be careful that you’re not letting a lesser pivot handling one of the marks. Looking at some of the pointy edges, I’d wager that a wrist is getting involved, here and there. Always check back, to make sure that that’s not happening. The ellipses in planes look good. I’m happy to see them overshoot their frames by so much – it tells me that you’re not at all stressed about their accuracy, and are instead entirely focused on their confidence (as you should be!) The funnels are okay. It seems like in a few cases you’ve chosen to prioritize the minor axis over the arcing lines, but, obviously, we’re aiming to satisfy both.
Onto the box section, the plotted perspective exercise looks good, but it seems like you’ve chosen to apply the lineweight freehand, for some reason. As a result, the boxes look a little scratchy. The rough perspective exercise starts off a little lacking, and, I’m sorry to say, doesn’t improve as much as we’d like, even by the end. It seems like you’re still drawing boxes as you think you should look (having 3 sets of 4 parallel lines), rather than how they, in fact, do, in this exercise, with 1 set converging. This is most apparent from looking at the center box in your last frame. It’s very close to the vanishing point, so the convergences here should’ve been easy, but the lines on the left don’t seem to make much of an effort to converge. The rotated boxes exercise seems to have been a struggle for sure. I’m not sure if you tried to do this from memory, or something, but it’s definitely the sort of exercise that we do while constantly looking back to the original. We’ll talk a bit more about this (and the rough perspective exercise) in a second. The organic perspective exercise looks alright. There’s some issues with the boxes, obviously, but nothing beyond what we expect from a student at this stage, so you can be satisfied with your boxes as-is, and look forward to them improving as you progress through the box challenge.
Next Steps:
Before that, however, we need to work on a few things here, that I think will end up being valuable to you then. Namely, your ability to correctly follow step by step instructions. You’ll find that, both here, and in the challenge, it’s extremely valuable to draw a box or two exactly as someone else does it, as that’ll end up being muscle memory you draw from, when constructing your own. I understand that it’s probably a little hard to do this when you look at a finished product, however, so I’ll instead direct you to Scylla’s (a fellow TA) videos of the rough perspective exercise and rotated boxes exercise. I’d like you to follow along with her, and for 1 frame of rough perspective, and 1 quadrant (so 1/4th) of rotated boxes (and for this latter one, you can feel free to rest when she’s working on things that aren’t part of that quadrant). To clarify, what I’m asking you to do is to do what she’s doing, following line after line. Which is to say, your submission should look identical to hers in terms of its composition when you turn it in. Take your time with this, and you’ll find it to have been time well spent, when you move on to more complicated things.
11:51 AM, Wednesday May 10th 2023
12:03 PM, Wednesday May 10th 2023
Good on both counts! Your work could stand to be a bit cleaner, for sure, but that's something to put on top of an understanding of the concepts present in the exercise - which you've got here. To put it another way, it's something to keep in mind for your next attempt. This can come at your own convenience, though, since as far as I'm concerned, you're good to move on.
Next Steps:
Onto the box challenge! GL!
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