Lesson 1: Lines, Ellipses and Boxes

6:30 AM, Thursday February 27th 2025

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Hello, While doing the exercises a couple of questions popped in my head some of them I found the solution for with time and some are not the questions are

1- when plotting points for lines I noticed that I have more accuracy when ghosting with my elbow or godforbid my wrist to estimate points distance and placement but when it comes to drawing the line I always do it from the shoulders so should I plot points using my shoulders too going forward?

2- when ghosting for circles or ovals I usually pause for a quick second and then place the pen on paper because when lowering my pen into the paper while doing the ghosting motion a lot of times it seems I misjudge the distance between the tip of the pen and the paper and the ink touches the paper when i'm not ready catching me off guard. Again should I do it my way or should I follow the rules and methods strictly?

3:26 AM, Friday February 28th 2025
edited at 3:29 AM, Feb 28th 2025

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 looking fine. I'm not seeing any real issues here. 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. Your rough perspective exercises turned out pretty well. You are getting a mix of confident linework here along with some wobble creeping back into some of your lines. https://drawabox.com/lesson/1/14/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. The other possibility is that you have reverted back to drawing from your wrist for some of these lines. Just something to keep an eye on. You should be drawing from your shoulder for basically every line you draw, even shorter ones. The wrist should be reserved for detail work only. 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 is a decent start but it's unfinished. 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 narrow and consistent. The problem is that you gave up about halfway through on this exercise and didn't finish the outer rows and corners. A big part of learning how to draw is getting comfortable working outside of your comfort zone and getting more used to failing and learning from your mistakes. Unfortunately in cases like this we can't analyze your mistakes because you didn't finish the exercise. So as a revision I'd like you to either finish this exercise to the best of your ability or try another and make sure to finish the entire thing. I would recommend revisiting the video and written lesson for this material for a review and to see the outer rows and corners attempted. I'm not expecting it to be done well or even correctly but the attempt must be made in order to learn. Your organic perspective exercises are looking pretty good. You seem to be getting comfortable using the ghosting method and drawing from your shoulder for confident linework which is great. Your box constructions are improving as you work through this exercise and I can see you are developing a sense for how box lines converge to vps. There are still some wonky convergences here and there so the 250 box challenge will be a great next step for you.

Overall this was a really solid submission that showed a good deal of growth. Your line confidence and ellipses are both coming along nicely. 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.

To answer your questions you should definitely be ghosting with your shoulder just to build up more muscle memory with that part of your body. For the ghosting ellipses I'm not really sure what to say but if the material says to ghost a certain way I would follow what the lesson plan advises.

Next Steps:

Finish the outer rows and corners of your rotated box exercise or do another one and make sure to complete the entire thing

When finished, reply to this critique with your revisions.
edited at 3:29 AM, Feb 28th 2025
10:36 PM, Sunday March 2nd 2025

Hello Rob, I honestly didn't know that I gave up on the rotated boxes exercise because from my perspective I thought it was done with how every box is getting really close to the 4 edges, but I did as you instructed and did it again https://imgur.com/a/NWTcYjR

and even made it smaller to fit more boxes hopefully now it's finished or am I supposed to fill more corners?

11:07 PM, Sunday March 2nd 2025

Comparing your page with the example from the instructions, I see that you have added an extra row across the top, but otherwise left out 8 of the boxes that are part of the exercise, as shown here. Per the instructions/example, the exercise involves drawing a 5x5 grid of boxes, meaning that you should have 25 in total all centered symetrically across the horizontal and vertical axes.

Please complete the exercise once more, taking care to follow the instructions to the letter, and then submit it again in response to Rob's original feedback.

8:37 PM, Friday March 7th 2025

I did the rotated boxes exercise again trying my best to follow the video and made extra sure to have exactly 25 boxes in the end nothing less nothing more https://imgur.com/a/kOpQYej

4:38 AM, Tuesday March 11th 2025

Good job completing the exercise. While I can see you still struggled with the rotations I can see you still pushed through. My only critique is that I think you are slowing down mid stroke for the sake of accuracy on some of these lines as I'm seeing a bit of wobble here and there. Remember to focus on confident linework with every line. Otherwise, I'm going to mark this as complete and good luck with the 250 box challenge!

Next Steps:

The 250 Box Challenge

This critique marks this lesson as complete.
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Framed Ink

Framed Ink

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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