4:58 PM, Thursday March 18th 2021
Hey hey; welcome to drawabox, and congrats on completing lesson 1. Let’s go through it one exercise at a time, shall we?
Starting with your superimposed lines, these are looking quite solid – they’re smooth, all lined up at the start, and of a consistent trajectory. The ghosted lines/planes look quite confident, too, though I notice 2 things. First, it seems like you’re not using start/end points for the non-diagonal center lines of the planes; please do. Second, see if you can maintain a consistent speed throughout your lines, rather than slowing down at the end, in an effort to not stop short of, or overshoot your endpoint – it’s causing you to change trajectory, too.
The table of ellipses is mostly good. Your ellipses are smooth, but at times a little pointy. This is generally an indication of a lesser pivot (elbow/wrist) trying to sneak its way in. To fight this, we recommend checking back, every once in a while, to make sure that all of your marks, however small, are originating from the shoulder. Over time, you won’t need to do this nearly as much, but for now, do it often! Second, and even more important as it becomes a bigger and bigger problem in future exercises in this section, you’ve not drawn through your ellipses a full 2 times. You’ll often settle for 1 and a half, and later on, keep it to a single rotation. I don’t know if this is intentional, because you felt that they were good enough to not warrant one, but, for the purposes of this course, always draw through your ellipses the recommended number of times. When you’re done with it, and are in a place where you can get them right in the first pass, then feel free to ditch the extra practice. Moving on to the ellipses in planes exercise, save for the fact that they haven’t been drawn through, these look nice. You’ve got their priorities straight, focusing on their smoothness/roundness first – keep it up. The funnels are a little sloppy, unfortunately. For one, the ellipses are not always aligned to the minor axis. Also, their degrees sometimes decrease as they move away from the center, but they should do the opposite. Finally, of course, they’ve not been drawn through.
The plotted perspective exercise looks good. The back line being crooked, by the way, is as a result of minor errors elsewhere in the box. In cases like that, what you want to do is estimate its location (somewhere between the 2 points).
The rough perspective exercise is a little mixed. Your convergences are mostly good, and they improve throughout the set, but you haven’t been as careful about the 2 sets of lines that need to be parallel/perpendicular to the horizon. Don’t think of these as separate steps, that you do one after the other. In doing so, you sacrifice the former for the latter. Instead, with every move you make, consider both. I’ll also quickly mention that lineweight isn’t needed for this exercise, and even if it was, what you’ve got here is too overt (a single superimposed line will do, usually.)
The rotated boxes exercise looks fairly solid. You’ve seen it through to the end, and even taken the time to apply some of the optional lineweight/hatching. You didn’t need 2 separate instances of hatching, though, and, certainly, you didn’t need to hatch the air between the boxes. The purpose of it here seems to be to hide mistakes, more so than anything else. That aside, I notice 2 issues. 1, the boxes don’t do a great job of rotating, though this is very much expected. 2, and this one is perhaps more avoidable, their back sides aren’t particularly snug. Ultimately, the success rate of this fairly involved, but not necessarily complicated exercise comes down to how much time you spend planning each line, and, perhaps more specifically, how easily are you able to avoid panicking, and rushing. Once you realize that it’s a collection of lines, same as any other, you’re good to go.
The organic perspective exercise is a little strange. It looks like lineweight was used for a clean-up pass here, more than anything else. From now on, please only use lineweight/hatching if absolutely necessary. Ideally, they’d serve a proper purpose (like, for instance, here, lineweight can clarify which forms are closer to us, and which aren’t, if the ones closer to us had it, and the ones further away didn’t). The exercise itself looks fine, though because of the lineweight I’m unable to tell if you actually plotted points, to plan your convergences, or simply extended your lines arbitrarily, so try to think back. The correct answer is, of course, the former.
Next Steps:
Before I have you move on to the box challenge, I’d like to see 1 page of the table of ellipses exercise, and 1 page of the funnels exercise.