Lesson 1: Lines, Ellipses and Boxes

1:41 AM, Thursday June 30th 2022

Homework 1 - Album on Imgur

Direct Link: https://i.imgur.com/e58xadh.jpg

Post with 12 views. Homework 1

Good luck on helping me!! Spatial reasoning-II need guidance!! :)

Reason for submitting during a Promptathon:

Oops. I’m brand new! But no rush. I’ll look closer at what promptathon is about. (I didn’t know this was an unusual “season”)

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1:14 AM, Saturday July 2nd 2022

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. 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. Your ellipses in funnels are having some issues with tilting off the minor axis. https://drawabox.com/lesson/1/14/notaligned This is something you should always start considering when drawing your ellipses. One thing you could have done with these is start with a narrower degree ellipse in the center and then widen the degrees of the ellipses as they move outwards in the funnel. Please check the example here. https://drawabox.com/lesson/1/14/step3 This helps with practicing different degrees of ellipses. Your ellipses are off to a great start but there's still room for improvement when it comes to accuracy so keep practicing them during your warmups.

The plotted perspective looks great, nothing to mention here. Your rough perspective exercises have a few issues. 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. I am noticing that you are redrawing lines on occasion and this is a habit you should try and get out of. Try and stick with the initial line you put down even if it's a bit off. Adding more lines just makes things messier and harder to read. The biggest issue I'm see here though is the constant scribbling you have on one of your pages. Every line you put down for these homework pages should be carefully planned and thought out. You should never be scribbliing mindlessly or crossing things out on your submissions. So as a revision I'd like you to do one more page of this exercise. Make sure you ghost all of your lines and then draw from your shoulder with confidence. No redrawing lines or scribbling to shade the front plane of a box. Just put down a confident line and stick with it. If you want to use hatch marks on the front plane of a box make sure you treat each hatch mark the same as any other line you would draw and ghost it multiple times and draw from your shoulder with confidence. 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.

The rotated box exercise is simply unfinished and also done partially in pencil. All of the pages you submit for these lessons need to be done in ink and pencil is not allowed at all. https://drawabox.com/article/ink So this will need to be redone as well. I know that this exercise is difficulty and might be outside of your current skill level but you need to give it a full attempt and complete. If you need further guidance than the lesson material you can watch Scyllas video doing the exercise in real time. https://youtu.be/J7s6TvvlZmo The organic perspective exercise turned out okay. You're still struggling quite a bit with confident linework on these box exercises. You are getting wobbly lines throughout likely because of the reason I mentioned with with your rough perspective boxes where you are getting too wrapped up in accuracy while making your mark and are slowing down your stroke to compensate. You box constructions are decent but you definitely need to develop a better understanding of how box lines need to converge to vps so the 250 box challenge will be a great next step for you. However I still think you need to work on confident linework while drawing boxes a bit before moving on so as a revision I'd like you to do one more page of this exercise as well. This time focus on confident linework. Make sure you are ghosting your lines multiple times and then drawing from your shoulder with confidence. Don't get too hung up on accuracy.

Overall this was a pretty good submission and your ellipse are coming along quite well although you started running into issues with the box exercises. We need to work on you getting more confident linework while drawing boxes before moving on. So take care of those revisions and I'll take a look and you can most likely move on to the 250 box challenge after that.

Next Steps:

One page of the rough perspective exercise - Make sure you ghost all of your lines and then draw from your shoulder with confidence. No redrawing lines or scribbling to shade the front plane of a box. Just put down a confident line and stick with it. If you want to use hatch marks on the front plane of a box make sure you treat each hatch mark the same as any other line you would draw and ghost it multiple times and draw from your shoulder with confidence.

One page of the rotated box exercise - This must be done entirely in ink no pencil allowed. Also please do the entire exercise partial submissions are not accepted

One page of the organic perspective exercise - Focus on confident linework.

When finished, reply to this critique with your revisions.
10:36 PM, Monday July 4th 2022

Here’s another try. I am having a really hard time visualizing where to place my “confident” lines? ESPECIALLY with rotated boxes and the attempts at roatation for organic perspective. I know you’re suppose to commit to the line you choose but when my planes don’t even close it’s distracting? Anyway, definitely open to more coaching feedback. Thanks for doing this!!!

https://imgur.com/a/YrtnUZb

11:36 PM, Monday July 4th 2022

Okay so your rough persepective and organic perspective are definitely looking better. You are still getting a mix of confident linework along with wobbly linework. I know I harped on this a lot with the initial critique but the problem is simply that you are too wrapped up with worrying about accuracy while making your mark. Your main priority right now should be getting a smooth confident line and looking at your work I can see that you seem to be more concerned with your mark perfectly connecting between the dots you place prior to ghosting. The reason we place dots and then ghost our marks is to seperate the drawing process into planning for accuracy and then confident execution. All of your thinking about accuracy needs to be handled in the planning stage while place your dots and then while ghosting your mark. Once you commit to putting your pen down on the page to make the mark accuracy shouldn't even be a concern at that point. Just to be clear using this method your marks WILL NOT BE ACCURATE especially at first. Your lines will end up undershooting or overshooting or veering to the left and right of your dot placement. Accuracy is not our current priority but our main concern is getting a smooth confident mark on the paper. Accuracy can't really be forced and really tends to come from consistent practice over a long period of time as you develop better and better hand and eye coordiation.

Kudos to finishing the rotated box exercise even if it was clearly a bit of struggle. My number one piece of advice here would be that you needed to keep the gaps between your boxes more narrow and consistent which really would have helped a lot with inferring information about neighboring boxes. https://drawabox.com/lesson/1/17/guessing So you're clearly struggling with the spatial thinking for this exercise which is perfectly fine given the difficulty and this is a great exercise to revisit after a few lessons to see how much your spatial thinking has developed.

So you did show some good improvement with your line confidence but there is a lot of work to be done here. I'm not going to assign any more revisions for lesson one but confident linework is definitely something you need to work on during the 250 box challenge and during your warmups. Remember accuracy is not important right now. It doesn't matter if your line misses its mark slightly. It's way more important to be able to consistently get smooth confident linework. So keep using the dot method, ghosting your lines, and drawing from your shoulder. Just remember to not be too hung up on accuracy at this point as this is the real issue I'm seeing with your work. Good luck with the 250 box challenge.

Next Steps:

The 250 Box Challenge

This critique marks this lesson as complete.
12:36 AM, Tuesday July 5th 2022

Thanks Rob! I appreciate the feedback and tips!!! :)

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