Lesson 1: Lines, Ellipses and Boxes
10:40 PM, Thursday August 18th 2022
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5:03 AM, Saturday August 20th 2022
Hello and congrats on completing lesson one. My name is Rob and I'm a teaching assistant for Drawabox who will be handling your lesson one critique. Starting with your superimposed lines these are off to a fine start. You are keeping a clearly defined starting point with all of your wavering at the opposite end. Your ghosted lines and planes turned out well. You are using the ghosting method to good effect to get confident linework with a pretty decent deal of accuracy that will get better and better with practice.
Your tables of ellipses are coming along pretty good. You are doing a good job drawing through your ellipses and focusing on consistent smooth ellipse shapes. This is carried over nicely into your ellipses in planes. It's great that you aren't overly concerned with accuracy and are instead focused on getting smooth ellipse shapes. Although accuracy is our end goal it can't really be forced and tends to come with mileage and consistent practice more than anything else. Your ellipses in funnels are having some slight issues with tilting off the minor axis. https://drawabox.com/lesson/1/14/notaligned Not a big problem but this is something you should always start considering when drawing your ellipses. Your ellipses are off to a great start but there's still room for improvement so keep practicing them during your warmups.
The plotted perspective looks great, nothing to mention here. Your rough perspective exercises turned out pretty well. You are getting mostly confident linework here along with some wobble creeping back into some of your lines. https://drawabox.com/lesson/1/9/wobbling This is probably happening because you are more concerned with accuracy now that you are constructing boxes and you are slowing down your stroke to compensate. That hesitation because of your concern for accuracy while making your mark is what is reintroducing the wobble into your lines. Try and rely a bit more on the muscle memory you build up while ghosting your mark and almost make your mark without thinking. This will be less accurate at first but will give you consistently smooth and confident linework which is our first priority. Accuracy will come with mileage and can't really be forced. You are doing a good job extending the lines back on your boxes to check your work. As you can see some of your perspective estimations were quite off but that will become more intuitive with practice. One thing that can help you a bit when doing a one point perspective exercise like this is to realize that all of your horizontal lines should be parallel to the horizon line and all of your verticals should be perpendicular(straight up and down in this case) to the horizon line. This will help you avoid some of the slanting lines you have in your constructions.
Your rotated box exercise turned out pretty well. I like that you drew this nice and big as that really helps when dealing with complex spatial problems. You also did a good job drawing through your boxes and keeping your gaps narrow and consistent. Some of the rotations here are very slight overall which is perfectly fine given the difficulty of this exercise. These rotations become easier to handle the more your draw and develop your spatial thinking ability. This is a great exercise to come back to after a few lessons to see how much your spatial thinking ability has improved. Your organic perspective exercises are looking pretty good. You seem to be getting comfortable using the ghosting method and drawing from your shoulder for confident linework which is great. Your box constructions are fairly solid for the most part and you are developing a good sense for how box lines converge to vps. The 250 box challenge will strenghten this even further. Nice work.
Overall this was a really solid submission that showed a nice deal of growth. Your line confidence and ellipses are both coming along nicely. I think you are understanding most of the concepts these lessons are trying to convey quite well. I'm going to mark this as complete and good luck with the 250 box challenge. Keep up the good work!
Next Steps:
The 250 Box Challenge
11:29 PM, Monday August 22nd 2022
Thanks so much for all your feedback! Indeed I have been struggling with my pen slowing down and thus wobbling in an attempt to finish a line at a desired endpoint. Will focus on making confident marks and let the accuracy follow. The only question I have is this - for very short lines (1cm or less), should I still strive to draw from the shoulder? It has been very tempting to fall back on wrist drawing for these short lines and I assume that I should push forward with the shoulder, but wasn't sure.
11:37 PM, Monday August 22nd 2022
For marks that are very short like that you can use your wrist but anything bigger you should definitely be trying to use your shoulder. The wrist is reserved for detail work.
2:45 AM, Tuesday August 23rd 2022
Understood. Thanks!
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