Lesson 1: Lines, Ellipses and Boxes

10:20 PM, Tuesday April 7th 2020

Drawabox - Lesson 1 Homework - Album on Imgur

Direct Link: https://i.imgur.com/vweeKwW.jpg

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I'm not certain I posted on imgur correctly so, if I didn't, please let me know and I will get it figured out. Thanks and hope you have a great day! :)

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9:33 AM, Saturday April 11th 2020

Let's start with your superimposed lines. You've done a good job lining your pen up with the starting point which has minimised fraying however you have focused far too much on accuracy here, resulting in a significant amount of wobbling. We prioritise confidence over accuracy in the lessons as it is far easier to work with an inaccurate, confident line than it is a wobbly but accurate one. This is something I noticed quite a lot throughout your work, so I will mention it briefly as we go through.

Next your ghosted lines are showing quite a lot of both wobbling and arcing. There seems to be a mix of different thicknesses to your lines, which suggests some of these may have been drawn slower or even with your wrist. The big takeaway from this though is that ghosting should prepare your muscles to execute a line and once you're done ghosting, to execute it confidently, not allowing your brain to micromanage the movements. Now, while confidence is not the same thing as speed, it may help to begin with, to draw the slightly faster so that you don't have time to overthink your lines.

Your ghosted planes are actually a significant improvement on the confidence front, so you can definitely execute straight, confident lines, it's just a matter of mindset.

The larger ellipses in your tables of ellipses are fairly confident, with the smaller ones being much less so. This is pretty normal - it takes finer control over your shoulder to be able to draw the smaller ellipses, so keep practicing. Again, your ellipses in planes are confident for the most part and hit the four sides of the plane more often than not. This is in line with what I observed earlier about your larger ellipses.

Finally, your funnels are lacking the confidence I saw earlier in your ellipses. Additionally, because your ellipses are a little oddly shaped, this has made them difficult to align to the minor axis.

Next your plotted perspective, I noticed you seem to have used pencil or similar to plot your vanishing points - this exercise is to be done entirely with a single pen. Additionally, you have given each box two different sets of vanishing points where all your boxes should have shared the same two vanishing points. Now, I won't have you redo this exercise, but make sure you're reading the instructions carefully - multiple times if needed.

You made a similar error on your rough perspective, with all your boxes converging towards their own vanishing points, rather than a single shared one. This has resulted in a lot of guessing where none was necessary. Finally, make sure you're making a conscious effort to keep your horizontals parallel and verticals perpendicular to the horizon line.

The gaps between your boxes on the rotated boxes exercise are quite tight and consistent, but you stopped drawing the rear planes of your boxes beyond the horizontals and vertical boxes, which has again, resulted in unnecessary guesswork. In terms of the rotation of the boxes, you haven't managed to rotate the boxes very much. This exercise is designed to be beyond the student's grasp at this point, instead intended to introduce them to a new kind of spatial problem they may not have otherwise considered.

Finally, you're off to a good start with your organic perspective boxes, with your line confidence actually a little better here. There's a good amount of variation in the size of your boxes but it does seem to be a bit random in places, increasing and decreasing in size. Remember that objects further away in perspective will be smaller while those closer will be larger. Finally, there's a lot of redrawing/reinforcement of your lines. While it's okay to apply line weight to clarify overlaps, you should be subtle with it, execute it with confidence, and not reinforce the interior lines of the box. We don't want students automatically "correcting" their mistakes however, as this can often undermine the solidity of your constructions and is a bad habit to get into, as working with your mistakes is a good skill to have.

Next Steps:

I can see you're capable of executing confident lines, however it seems that you are inconsistently applying this, so before you move on I would like to see:

  • One more page of superimposed lines with a mix of straight and curved lines

  • One more page of funnels

  • Two more pages of rough perspective

When finished, reply to this critique with your revisions.
7:03 PM, Sunday April 12th 2020

Hi, Thank you very much for the critiques and detailed post. Not always great to hear but great if you're trying to get better - which I am. I've included a link to my imgur were I've posted the revisions. I was getting frustrated with myself for some of the wavy lines, my challenges with acurracy of my lines either being too long or too short, as well as my lack of variation of sizes on my ellipses. I was going to to start over but remember the rules and guildlines for doing this so I just kept moving toward to finish them. Thank you again for the help and feedback and I hope you have a great rest of your day.

Lesson 1 - HW REvisions

Thank You,

Chris Austin

10:07 PM, Sunday April 12th 2020

Let's start with your superimposed lines. These are much much better. You loosened up and let yourself draw a more confident line and your accuracy really didn't suffer that much for it! You're still occasionally trying to drag your arm back into line with the guideline so try to accept the trajectory of your line even if it means it frays like crazy on one end.

The ellipses in your funnels are looking better, they're still a bit stiff, so make sure you keep practicing these in warm-ups even if you won't use them in the box challenge. As for the alignment, this is much better, you were generally more successful on the funnels that were larger, which is hardly surprising since large ellipses are much easier to draw. The smaller ones definitely need a bit of practice to get the hang of.

Your rough perspective! Seriously, this is worlds away better than your original submission! These lines are looking great and most of your horizontals are parallel and verticals perpendicular to the horizon - there's a few cases where they stray a bit, particularly on the rear planes so just remember that one point perspective applies there as well.

We assign revisions because there might be something we can see students aren't quite grasping, so when they manage nail it down even just a little more in the revisions, it makes it worthwhile.

Next Steps:

Feel free to move onto the 250 box challenge. Make sure you read the notes and take your time to plan and execute each line of your box.

This critique marks this lesson as complete.
10:41 PM, Sunday April 12th 2020

Thank you so much for this, i really do appreciate it bi decinirely felt the stiffness when doing the funnels Its interesting because when i draw them not in the context of an assignment, I feel less stiff. Ill keep practing on iit :)

Thanks again and have a great rest of your day!

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