Lesson 1: Lines, Ellipses and Boxes
10:12 PM, Thursday May 2nd 2024
Here's my lesson 1 submission.
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. Some of your ellipses in funnels are having some issues with tilting off the minor axis. https://drawabox.com/lesson/1/18/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/1/18/step3 This helps with practicing different degrees of ellipses. Your ellipses are off to a great start but there's still room for improvement so keep practicing them during your warmups.
The plotted perspective looks great, nothing to mention here. I do have some notes regarding added line weight I'd like to share. If you want to add line weight make sure you don't revert back to using your wrist and are drawing from your shoulder with confidence. Also added line weight should be subtle so try and only go over a line one additional time instead of multiple times. Your rough perspective exercises turned out pretty well. You are getting mostly confident linework here along with some slight wobble creeping back into some of your lines. https://drawabox.com/lesson/1/14/wobblinglines 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. 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.
Your rotated box exercise turned out pretty well. I like that you drew this nice and big as that really helps when dealing with complex spatial problems. You also did a good job drawing through your boxes and keeping your gaps fairly consistent. You are running into a pretty common issue of not actually rotating your boxes in some cases but instead simply drawing them moving back in perspective. https://drawabox.com/lesson/1/21/notrotating I do have some notes regarding added line weight I'd like to share. If you want to add line weight make sure you don't revert back to using your wrist and are drawing from your shoulder with confidence. Also added line weight should be subtle so try and only go over a line one additional time instead of multiple times. You are getting a "hairy" line effect on quite a bit of your added line weight which means you are likely adding it in small chunks instead of a smooth continuous stroke. Also I can't be sure of this but seems as though you may have done some of this exercise in pencil first and then drew pen lines over it which is not allowed. I'm not going to have you do a revision because I'm not sure but if this is done for any future assignments you will be asked to redo it. 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 a little concerning regarding line confidence and quality and I'd like you to do one more page of exercise to get your line confidence a bit better. Make sure you are plotting your points, ghosting, then drawing from your shoulder with confidence for every line you draw. Also no redrawing lines or adding line weight. Your box constructions are fairly wonky throughout this exercise and you need to develop a better sense for how box lines converge to vps so the 250 box challenge will be a great next step for you.
Overall this was a solid submission that showed a good deal of growth. Your line confidence took a bit of a dip with the last few box exercise and I'd like to deal with that before you move to the 250 box challenge. Other than that, I think you are understanding most of the concepts these lessons are trying to convey quite well. Once you get that revision submitted and I take a look you can most likely move on to the 250 box challenge.
Next Steps:
One page of the organic perspective box exercises - Focus on Confident Linework. Make sure you are plotting your points, ghosting, then drawing from your shoulder with confidence for every line you draw. Also no redrawing lines or adding line weight.
Okay, this look is looking a lot better. Your box constructions are still a bit wonky but working through the 250 box challenge will definitely help with that. I'm going to mark this as complete and good luck with the 250 box challenge!
Next Steps:
The 250 Box Challenge
I'd been drawing as a hobby for a solid 10 years at least before I finally had the concept of composition explained to me by a friend.
Unlike the spatial reasoning we delve into here, where it's all about understanding the relationships between things in three dimensions, composition is all about understanding what you're drawing as it exists in two dimensions. It's about the silhouettes that are used to represent objects, without concern for what those objects are. It's all just shapes, how those shapes balance against one another, and how their arrangement encourages the viewer's eye to follow a specific path. When it comes to illustration, composition is extremely important, and coming to understand it fundamentally changed how I approached my own work.
Marcos Mateu-Mestre's Framed Ink is among the best books out there on explaining composition, and how to think through the way in which you lay out your work.
Illustration is, at its core, storytelling, and understanding composition will arm you with the tools you'll need to tell stories that occur across a span of time, within the confines of a single frame.
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