Lesson 1: Lines, Ellipses and Boxes

4:38 PM, Friday September 25th 2020

Drawabox Lesson 1 – Pigmalion__ - Album on Imgur

Direct Link: https://i.imgur.com/LD7EOvF.jpg

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Hi! I am reposting my homework from Lesson 1 in order to receive an official critique.

https://drawabox.com/community/submission/0NY6JFCN

Thank you!

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6:43 AM, Saturday September 26th 2020

Hey! Let’s take this one exercise at a time~

Starting with your superimposed lines, these are looking great! They’re smooth, properly lined up at the start, and of a consistent trajectory. The ghosted lines/planes look quite confident, too, though I do have a few recommendations. The first, is to plot some start/end points for the non-diagonal center lines of your planes. The second, is to maintain a constant speed throughout, rather than slow down at the end, in an effort to not overshoot the end point.

Moving on to your ellipses, the table of ellipses exercise looks solid. I definitely think you’d benefit from ghosting a little longer, but that’s something you’ll develop a feel for over time. If you can, by the way, see if you can lift your pen off the page at the end of your rotations, rather than flicking it off- it’ll get rid of those tails at the ends of your ellipses. The ellipses in planes exercise looks solid- your ellipses are confident, and still fairly rounded, despite the added challenge of having to touch all 4 sides of the plane. As for the funnels exercise… 3 pages of it is a little overkill, though I understand the reasoning. For the most part, they look good. There’s the occasional misalignment, and the occasional construction issue (fix the former by spend a little longer on the ghosting stage, not forgetting to rotate the page as necessary, and the latter by spending more time planning your construction), but that’s alright.

Finishing up with your boxes, the plotted perspective exercise looks clean. The rough perspective exercise is where you start running into some issues, partly because of all of the automatic reinforcing, and partly because of the convergences. In regards to the former, remember that each line is drawn once, and only once, regardless of how it turns out. As for the latter, try not to get too caught up in what you think a box should look like, and just trust the instructions. Since we’re dealing with 1 point perspective, 2 sets of lines need to be fully parallel to each other, and 1 set needs to converge. Try to pay more attention to your page, too. This is an acceptable mistake for page 1, but at the end of it, it’s pointed out to you, through the correction lines, so there’s no reason why it should be there on page 2, too. The rotated boxes exercise is a bit of a mess, too, what with the fact that some of the boxes haven’t been drawn through, or the spacing issues in regards to their far planes, but, here, this is perfectly acceptable. In fact, mostly, we’re just checking to see whether you’ve seen the exercise through to the end, to the best of your ability. I do notice that 2 of the corner boxes are faaar more sloppy than they should be, but you also took the time to apply line-weight/hatching, so I’ll assume this was an oversight that you tried to fix last second, and let it slide. The next time you attempt this exercise, take it a little slower, if you can, reading the instructions multiple times, if you have to. Finally, the organic perspective exercise looks good. You’ve got a BUNCH of boxes here, of consistent, shallow foreshortening, and a believable increase in size. As a result, they flow quite well. The boxes themselves are occasionally a little off, but that’ll be taken care of in the box challenge.

Next Steps:

Before I let you move on to it, I’d like to see 1 more page of the rough perspective exercise. Take it slow. After you’ve got your front face drawn, ghost each of its points to the VP, and place a point in the path of that imaginary line. Then, DO IT AGAIN, this time to confirm that the point you have down is correct. If it’s not, adjust it. Repeat until you’ve got all 4, remembering that 2 and 3 need to be parallel/perpendicular to 1, and 4 needs to be aligned with 2 and 3, and then, finally, draw lines between them. Ultimately, this exercise is all about the planning. If you take your time with it, you’ll do well. Good luck.

When finished, reply to this critique with your revisions.
10:42 AM, Sunday September 27th 2020

Hi Benj,

thank you for your thorough critique!

I have taken notes at yours suggestions and I'll be sure to remember about them while revisiting Lesson 1 during warmups and doing further lessons.

I must say I have trouble understanding this part of your critique, regarding funnels:

There’s the occasional misalignment, and the occasional construction issue (fix the former by spend a little longer on the ghosting stage, not forgetting to rotate the page as necessary, and the latter by spending more time planning your construction), but that’s alright.

What does it mean to plan the construction of the funnel? Do you mean spacing / degree of the ellipses? I just want to be sure I understood everything.

I have also taken a second attempt at rough perspective. I must say, after three months and looking at Lesson 1 again more throughly, I can't believe I did such a lousy and messy job first time. The second time around went a bit better, but there's still (and I guess always will be) much room for improvement.

Here's a link:

https://imgur.com/gallery/647c9T5

I'd appreciate if you could revise it.

Thank you!

4:28 AM, Monday September 28th 2020

Hi! That’s in regards to the construction of the frame itself. So, are the arcs roughly symmetrical, is the minor axis roughly equidistant from them, and that sort of a thing. If that’s wrong, the ellipses that fit inside of if will be, too, so it helps to spend a little longer planning it, perhaps even placing some points down, to help you out.

As for the re-submission, this is looking better. There’s confidence issues, but you’ve brought them up yourself, so I won’t. I will say, however, that there’s still a few convergence errors here that should be obvious to you. If you look at the left-most box on the bottom frame, for instance (the one on the top half of it), its bottom right corner doesn’t seem to make much of an effort to converge. I see 2 points there, so it’s clear that you spent some time looking at it, but given how close it is to the horizon, I can’t imagine that it would’ve been too difficult to see that it it’s incorrect, so I’m not sure what happened there. That’s alright, though. As with everything else in this course, this sort of thing will improve the more you do it, and, especially, the more you look at what you do critically, and take notes of what to do better next time. Good luck, and feel free to move on to (or submit?) the box challenge!

Next Steps:

250 Box Challenge

This critique marks this lesson as complete.
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