10:00 AM, Tuesday November 15th 2022
Welcome to drawabox, and congrats on completing Lesson 1. Let’s see how you did, shall we?
Starting with your superimposed lines, these are well done. They’re smooth, properly lined up at the start, and of a consistent trajectory. Your ghosted lines/planes look quite confident, too, and I’m pleased to see that you’ve not forgotten to plot start/end points for the non-diagonal center lines of your planes. That said, I’ll warn you against automatic reinforcing. If a line comes out wrong, you should not correct it in a separate stroke (this includes extending a line that stops short!) It’s fine to leave your mistakes be.
The table of ellipses exercise is mostly well done. Save for some exceptions (for which I’d recommend more ghosting!), your ellipses are smooth, rounded, and properly drawn through. I notice that you’ll sometimes accidentally make contact with your page, as you’re ghosting – try to be a little more deliberate about your movements, to avoid that. Also, in page 2, row 4, column 1 (the bottom half), you’ve got some ellipses floating inside of their frames. Recall that all ellipses need a goal – in other words, they need to touch all available sides of the frame. The ellipses in planes look good. Despite how complicated your planes are (in terms of size), you’ve done a good job of not letting that get to you, and still prioritizing the smoothness/roundness of your ellipses. The funnels, too, look good (though they are missing their major axes), but the next time you do this, I’d like it if you could have the ellipses increase in degree as they move away from the center of the funnel.
The plotted perspective exercise looks clean.
The rough perspective exercise is very scratchy… I’ll, once again, remind you that each line is to be drawn once, and only once, regardless of how it turns out. Beyond that, however, your convergences look solid, so there’s not much more to worry about.
Solid attempt at the rotated boxes exercise. It’s big (huge positive!), and its boxes are snug. Their rotation is, unfortunately, a little subtle, but we’ll be going over how to more clearly get that to work in the box challenge, so no need to stress. I appreciate, by the way, that in the instances where the neighboring edges have gotten away from you a little, you’ve still thought of them as if there, and constructed a box that’s correct, rather than saying ‘well, rules are rules’ and had it stretch to meet them.
I’ve already brought up automatic reinforcing twice, so I wouldn’t a third time normally, but I will here, to tell you exactly why it’s a problem. As you know, the reason we discourage it (beyond the obvious of ‘it doesn’t really ‘fix’ your mistakes’), is that what it does is, in fact, make them stand out more. This is especially problematic in an exercise like this, where a delicate hierarchy between each object needs to be maintained. Here, boxes that are small (and thus, further in the back) read as being closer to us, thus creating a contradiction, and confusing the viewer. Thus, unless you’re being deliberate about its use, it’s best to keep lineweight consistent. Beyond that, however, all is good.
Next Steps:
I’ll be marking this lesson as complete, and sending you off to the box challenge. Good luck!