Lesson 1: Lines, Ellipses and Boxes

2:55 PM, Saturday September 11th 2021

Drawabox Lesson 1 - Album on Imgur

Direct Link: https://i.imgur.com/BDEeai7.jpg

Post with 21 views. Drawabox Lesson 1

Hi, thank you for taking your time to review the submission!

I did about a page a day (sometimes two) with about half a page of warming up beforehand with previous excercises.

I panicked a bit around the Rotated Boxes excercise, so some parts will look way messier than others.

Around the Organic Perspective excercises I feel like I started "getting" how good lines feel like, slowly feeling better about my ability.

Have a wonderful day

2 users agree
9:26 AM, Sunday September 12th 2021

Hey man, I saw your submission and it looks you have had improvement in your work. You have followed the rules well and it seems like generally there is not something that I would say to be gone completely in the opposite direction, so good job there.

These exercises were supposed to be hard and throw you towards the deep end. There are few things I want to point out.

1) Your lines are a little wobbly, I assume that you were going for accuracy to hit the point you've laid down. What you can do here is practice more, be patient with it, and use ghosting (never lay a line without ghosting first, you'll see the confidence for yourself). And don't be afraid to over shoot the point you've laid down. Accuracy is not the first thing you want here, its the straight and confident line you are going for.

2) With ghosted planes, try not to jam them too close to each other and also experiment with bigger planes.

3) Ellipse are nice and confident, even accurate which isn't expected at this stage (so heavily appreciated). You might going over the elipses too many times, I would suggest you try to draw more ellipses as a part of your warm up routines even in future.

4) I might have to ask a revision for the funnel exercise because you've got that wrong, the centre line must act as minor axis which should cut the ellipse in two equal part (you must go and read the exercise description in the website), I do not see the case with your ellipses inside the funnel.

5) Boxes exercises are fine, I guess they just make you learn stuff you are not ready for and at the end you get the point, but don't take it lightly as these basics should be understood properly. Lines are wobbly here as well. You ended up doing the rotated boxes nicely. Organic perspective is also good, I hope you understand the Y technique well to construct the boxes.

6) I will ask for one page revsion of Rough perspective.

Overall great job man, you did things consistently, there's much more to learn and I can clearly see the potential you have.

One point to keep in mind, don't think that you are done with this and are not going to have to do these again, practice these exercises, add them to your warm up routines, revisit them from time to time, you will only get better.

Next Steps:

One page of Funnels and One page of Rough perspective.

After submitting this, you can move on to 250 box challenge. Good Job :)

When finished, reply to this critique with your revisions.
7:22 PM, Sunday September 12th 2021
edited at 7:23 PM, Sep 12th 2021

Hi, thank you so much for your critique!

Here are the revised exercises: https://imgur.com/a/ZFnQ22L

When warming up for the revisions (and drawing some planes after the revisions just to confirm), I started noticing that a lot of my line arching/wobble happens due to overthinking mid-stroke, and I often fail to notice it because I do very fast strokes. The best strokes I had on these pages are the ones I actually did slightly slower, so I'll try practicing that more.

Funnily enough I also noticed that my worst lines are short ones, where the ends are positioned relatively close to one another (I was comparing my warm-up with planes exercise, which I did today with very long lines and my boxes revision.) I'll practice both more.

After your comment, I looked at my Funnels exercise and noticed what you were talking about - I really didn't focus on aligning them to the minor axis and instead worried about having them be parallel to one another. When I did the revision for this exercise, I actually noticed how difficult it is for me to align the ellipses with the minor axis, and my tendency to rotate the ellipses so they get really out of sync.

I think both revisions are better than the original material, however they still show signs of the same mistakes I've done before, so I'll start using rough perspective boxes and ellipses in funnels as my primary warm-up exercises.

Thank you so much for your help!

edited at 7:23 PM, Sep 12th 2021
6:00 PM, Wednesday September 15th 2021

That's great, the point isn't to make it perfect but just to know what are the steps and right techniques to attain that level, so it is a very good thing that you are intentional with whatever you do. I can see the improvement in funnels and the line quality gets better with practice, there's no other way to get around it somehow, but thats why we are here. And by making such small mistakes and noticing them we will get better surely.

Once again, great job.

Next Steps:

Onto the 250 box challenge. Best of luck :)

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