Lesson 1: Lines, Ellipses and Boxes
6:12 PM, Monday April 6th 2020
Well, hope I didn't make any noob mistakes and bring shame to this family.
Wish granted, you happened to be in line when I picked one up.
Let's start with the superimposed lines - they're confident, they're straight, they're fairly accurate. There's a couple of places you pulled back towards the guidelines. Also your pen seems to be dying horribly, so if you've got another, it might be time to replace them.
Your ghosted lines and planes are pretty good. You've got a certain amount of arcing present in some of your longer lines but that's pretty normal. Just make sure you're keeping a nice consistent pace and not letting your brain take over.
Next your tables of ellipses are confident, well packed, and generally well shaped. The smaller ones are a bit of a weird shape, so make sure you're not drawing those from the wrist, because that would be shaming the family. Overlapping your ellipses is an interesting twist on the exercise but not strictly in line with the instructions.
Your ellipses in planes are good. They're confident, well shaped, and hit the four sides of the plane the majority of the time. I wouldn't expect anything less.
The funnels are looking good too, the ellipses are well aligned, there's some very slight skewing to a few of them and your starting (middle) ellipses are a bit floaty compared to the others.
I was somewhat surprised to see your line confidence drop on the rough perspective, there's a lot of arcing and a few of the rear planes are a bit hesitant. You've done a good job keeping the horizontals parallel and verticals perpendicular to the horizon line, though some of your verticals are a bit skewed off. Your estimation of perspective here is pretty good but there are a few that aren't converging properly, particularly towards the outer edges of the frame.
The gaps between your boxes on the rotated boxes are really tight and consistent, which is great to see. You've got a fair amount of rotation but not the full range because you didn't really leave yourself much space to do so with the large starting box/first layer.
Lastly, you've got some good compositions going on in your organic perspective, the smaller boxes tend to get a bit scratchy and while your boxes are fairly well drawn for the most part, there's a few issues here and there. I also noticed a bit of redrawing of your lines, which as you know, is a big no-no.
Next Steps:
Consider this lesson complete again. I'd suggest you move onto the 250 box challenge again, though probably start with 100 boxes and see how you go from there.
This recommendation is really just for those of you who've reached lesson 6 and onwards.
I haven't found the actual brand you buy to matter much, so you may want to shop around. This one is a "master" template, which will give you a broad range of ellipse degrees and sizes (this one ranges between 0.25 inches and 1.5 inches), and is a good place to start. You may end up finding that this range limits the kinds of ellipses you draw, forcing you to work within those bounds, but it may still be worth it as full sets of ellipse guides can run you quite a bit more, simply due to the sizes and degrees that need to be covered.
No matter which brand of ellipse guide you decide to pick up, make sure they have little markings for the minor axes.
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