9:35 AM, Thursday July 8th 2021
Hey; welcome to drawabox, and congrats on completing lesson 1. I’ll be looking over it.
Starting off, your superimposed lines look good. They’re smooth, properly lined up at the start, and of a consistent trajectory. I do notice that you’ll come to a hard stop at the end, and at times waver, however; I’ll recommend lifting your pen off the page instead. The ghosted lines/planes suffer from this issue too – in an effort to not overshoot the end point, you’ll slow down as you approach it. Maintain a consistent speed, instead; accuracy isn’t as important to us as confidence. Also, plot some start/end points for the non-diagonal lines of the planes, too.
Moving on to the table of ellipses exercise, your ellipses look quite a lot better in their second page, though they’re still occasionally a little stiff at the start. Be sure to continue ghosting them until you’re ready, then commit. As for the ellipses in planes, remember that our #1 priority is confidence – this is to say, the smoothness and roundness of your ellipses - not accuracy, so rather than worry about whether the ellipse is properly fitting inside of the plane as you draw it, simply worry about whether you’re drawing confidently. If you are, it’s correct by default. The funnels, particularly the smaller ones, are the worst offenders of this. It’s one of the many reasons we recommend that our students draw big. I’ll assign you some ellipses at the end of this critique, but if you find yourself struggling with them still, draw some free-form ones beforehand; this is to say, ellipses that don’t have a frame, and are simply drawn anywhere on the page – that’ll make it so that you can focus all of your efforts on them coming out smooth.
The plotted perspective exercise looks solid.
The rough perspective exercise looks a little strange. There’s quite a bit of overshooting in it, and I don’t notice any points, to suggest to me that these lines were planned in any way. The convergences themselves look good, but that’s irrelevant to the fact, so, as you submit your revised ellipses, I’d also like you to tell me whether your process of drawing your boxes in this exercise is in any way different from the one used in this video
The rotated boxes exercise doesn’t demonstrate much in the way of rotation, and the boxes, particularly at the back, aren’t especially snug, but this is entirely expected from this stage in the course, and something that’ll improve as you progress through the box challenge. The only thing to be wary of is how much time you spend on each box; you don’t want to be rushing through this exercise, just because it consists of so many lines, but rather spending the appropriate amount of time on every single one.
The organic perspective exercise looks good, but here, too, it seems like you’ve not plotted any start/end points for your lines. It’s important to do so, so that you don’t have to think about multiple things at once – first plan, then execute; splitting things into chunks, that we tackle one at a time is one of our core philosophies, after all. Leaving that aside, however, the exercise itself looks good, as per the size, and foreshortening of your boxes.
Next Steps:
1 page of an ellipse exercise of your choosing, and the answer regarding the rough perspective exercise.