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5:12 AM, Thursday September 14th 2023
Hello, and welcome to drawabox. I’d like to congratulate you on completing Lesson 1. Let’s take a look at it, one exercise at a time, shall we?
Your superimposed lines look great. They’re smooth, properly lined up at the start, and of a consistent trajectory. Your ghosted lines look mostly confident, also. I say mostly because they tend to wobble a little as they approach their end points, likely because you’re slowing down, in an effort to not stop short of them, or overshoot. That’s secondary to their confidence, however, and should be treated as such. Also, the ellipses make it hard for me to tell whether you’ve plotted any start/end points for the non-diagonal center lines of your planes, so I’ll simply say that if you haven’t, you should be.
The table of ellipses exercise looks great. You’re quite confident with all manner of ellipse, which is especially impressive considering how small a lot of them are. (We’ll usually discourage students from drawing so small, as it’s hard to engage the shoulder for these marks, and, thus, they end up wobbly.) The ellipses in planes do a good job of maintaining that same level of confidence, despite their more complicated frames. The funnels, too, look good (if a little uniform – I’d have liked to see the degrees of the ellipses increase more dramatically from the center to the edges); their ellipses are confident, as well as snug, and properly cut in half.
The plotted perspective exercise looks good. I’m pleased to see that you’ve experimented with different distances between the vanishing points, though, as to the hatching lines, you should’ve drawn them using a ruler, too. For the rough perspective exercise, the correction lines should extend towards the horizon, not the vanishing point. In other words, they should show how off you were, rather than how the line would’ve looked had it been correct. Still, looking at them it seems like you weren’t far off, anyway, so all is good. Though, again, sloppy hatching is worse than no hatching, since it draws attention towards itself, rather than cleaning things up. Leaving that aside, the rotated boxes exercise looks good (if a little small). Rotation is so-so, which is understandable, but you’ve kept your boxes nice and snug, which is good. We’ll be getting into the nitty gritty of how to draw a rotating box in the challenge, so for now, we’re just trying to get you to ask the right questions, and nothing more. To put it another way, you’re in a good place right now, so don’t stress. Your organic perspective exercise looks nice. Your boxes are well constructed, and their increase in size, and consistent, shallow foreshortening makes them flow quite well, also.
Next Steps:
I’m marking this lesson as complete, so you may continue onto the 250 Box Challenge. Best of luck to you!
Pentel Pocket Brush Pen
This is a remarkable little pen. Technically speaking, any brush pen of reasonable quality will do, but I'm especially fond of this one. It's incredibly difficult to draw with (especially at first) due to how much your stroke varies based on how much pressure you apply, and how you use it - but at the same time despite this frustration, it's also incredibly fun.
Moreover, due to the challenge of its use, it teaches you a lot about the nuances of one's stroke. These are the kinds of skills that one can carry over to standard felt tip pens, as well as to digital media. Really great for doodling and just enjoying yourself.