Check Out NMA    Learn More About our Partnership
Close and Enjoy Drawabox Ad-free
View Full Submission View Parent Comment
10:08 PM, Thursday May 13th 2021
edited at 10:11 PM, May 13th 2021

Thanks for being so cool, ScyllaStew! Okay, in the future I’ll just let the work the speak for itself, and wait to commiserate until after the grading. Your encouragement really meant a lot, and I appreciate your substantial critique and respect your veteran wisdom. Also, I’ll definitely implement your method of plotting all the points first, as I always ran into the situation you describe of getting to the invisible corner and having two sets of lines working alright and one way off, but because I had already drawn all the other lines, I just had to go with it.

Please before I begin your follow up assignment could I ask you about three things?

  1. About the line weight, I read somewhere Uncomfortable talking about adding line weight to only “localized” parts of a line, and the example you provided showed the weight not extending the full length of the line. For the silhouette of a box, do we want the extra weight lines to just match the original silhouette lines as much as possible though? And please, am I correct that this procedure of adding weight is similar to the first exercise of Superimposed Lines, but with ghosting of course, and as for the tapering and seamless blending, if I’ve already frayed by the end of the weight line I should just leave it right?

  2. For the hatching, I think I was trying to make it too tight and ghosting that many lines seemed daunting—I think it was in your fineliner review videos where I saw you ghost the first line of hatching and then just continue on after that, but I know I’m not advanced enough to do that. If I have to ghost every single shading line could I make the hatching less dense?

  3. And as for the convergences, I really cherish your hint you gave me about the middle lines appearing close to parallel, and I’ll work to make the other parallel lines not appear parallel but really converge in real 3-point perspective; however, is there any relationship you could describe about where to chart the vanishing points relative to each other? Should they all be at roughly the same distance? I just noticed when I mapped one significantly further or closer than the others, that box appeared more distorted, but I don’t know if an object would actually ever appear like this in reality.

Thank you so much again and I hope I didn’t overwhelm you with my requests and I look forward to getting more practice before moving on to Lesson 2.

P.s. I really love you and Uncomfortable and I feel honored to be one of your students.

Daniel

edited at 10:11 PM, May 13th 2021
11:58 PM, Thursday May 13th 2021

  1. For this one you should lean more towards tapering so that you can blend it back more seamlessly into your original line work. The main point about applying that extra line weight to the silhouette is that you do not want to apply it to the inner corners of your box. If your extra line weight ends up frying, just leave it and move on. Your accuracy will improve with practice.

  2. I probably forgot to ghost. It happens to everyone and it wouldn't be the first time I've been called out for forgetting to follow the steps myself. I think the thing to take away here is that everyone, even TAs will make mistakes from time to time. To the second part of your question, given time and practice you may find that you are capable of making the desired mark without all of the steps of the ghosting method. That is for many people the goal. You are welcome to experiment as part of the 50% rule to discover for yourself which steps you may or may not always need. But when you are doing the lesson homework be sure that you abide by the written material above all else. Even TAs make mistakes and it's perfectly acceptable for you to point those out and ask questions.

  3. For the purposes of this exercise your vanishing points are arbitrary. You can reference this section which talks more about distortion and placing vanishing points. But again, for this lesson your vanishing points are arbitrary.

4:40 PM, Wednesday July 7th 2021
edited at 4:41 PM, Jul 7th 2021

https://www.dropbox.com/s/3rw3crn4hz5075t/15%20Box%20Revision.pdf?dl=0

"15 Box Revision"

Hi, good ScyllaStew,

I reviewed all your material, practiced, and tried to increase the size of the boxes, push the convergences, make the silhouette weight lines taper more, and ghosted every single line including shade hatching.

Thank you very much for your attention and wisdom.

Daniel

edited at 4:41 PM, Jul 7th 2021
2:54 PM, Thursday July 8th 2021

This is a good improvement overall. I can see some good improvement in the quality of your mark making. Your sets of lines are also doing a better job of converging towards their shared vanishing point.

I will go ahead and mark this lesson as complete and you can now move onto lesson two.

Next Steps:

Continue to listen 2!

This critique marks this lesson as complete.
The recommendation below is an advertisement. Most of the links here are part of Amazon's affiliate program (unless otherwise stated), which helps support this website. It's also more than that - it's a hand-picked recommendation of something I've used myself. If you're interested, here is a full list.
Drawabox-Tested Fineliners (Pack of 10, $17.50 USD)

Drawabox-Tested Fineliners (Pack of 10, $17.50 USD)

Let's be real here for a second: fineliners can get pricey. It varies from brand to brand, store to store, and country to country, but good fineliners like the Staedtler Pigment Liner (my personal brand favourite) can cost an arm and a leg. I remember finding them being sold individually at a Michael's for $4-$5 each. That's highway robbery right there.

Now, we're not a big company ourselves or anything, but we have been in a position to periodically import large batches of pens that we've sourced ourselves - using the wholesale route to keep costs down, and then to split the savings between getting pens to you for cheaper, and setting some aside to one day produce our own.

These pens are each hand-tested (on a little card we include in the package) to avoid sending out any duds (another problem with pens sold in stores). We also checked out a handful of different options before settling on this supplier - mainly looking for pens that were as close to the Staedtler Pigment Liner. If I'm being honest, I think these might even perform a little better, at least for our use case in this course.

We've also tested their longevity. We've found that if we're reasonably gentle with them, we can get through all of Lesson 1, and halfway through the box challenge. We actually had ScyllaStew test them while recording realtime videos of her working through the lesson work, which you can check out here, along with a variety of reviews of other brands.

Now, I will say this - we're only really in a position to make this an attractive offer for those in the continental United States (where we can offer shipping for free). We do ship internationally, but between the shipping prices and shipping times, it's probably not the best offer you can find - though this may depend. We also straight up can't ship to the UK, thanks to some fairly new restrictions they've put into place relating to their Brexit transition. I know that's a bummer - I'm Canadian myself - but hopefully one day we can expand things more meaningfully to the rest of the world.

This website uses cookies. You can read more about what we do with them, read our privacy policy.