Lesson 1: Lines, Ellipses and Boxes

5:39 AM, Saturday October 2nd 2021

Drawabox Lesson 1 - Google Photos

0: https://photos.app.goo.gl/PE4SwRke75ndhSobA

Hello,

Looking forward to hearing your feedback.

Thanks!

-CarrionCaw

0 users agree
7:32 PM, Sunday October 3rd 2021

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 looking fine. I'm not seeing any real issues here. One thing you could have done with these is start with a narrower degree ellipse in the center and then widen the degrees of the ellipses as they move outwards in the funnel. Please check the example here. https://drawabox.com/lesson/1/14/step3 Your ellipses are off to a great start but there's still room for improvement when it comes to accuracy so keep practicing them during your warmups.

The plotted perspective looks great, nothing to mention here. Your rough perspective exercises turned out pretty good. It's great that you are keeping up with the confident linework on these. You are also 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 decently. The best piece of advice that would have helped you here would have been to just draw this bigger. Drawing bigger really helps when dealing with complex spatial problems. You did a good job drawing through your boxes and keeping your gaps narrow and consistent. You are running into a pretty common issue of not actually rotating your boxes in some cases but instead simply drawing them moving back in perspective. https://drawabox.com/lesson/1/17/notrotating 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 a bit of a mixed bag with some solid constructions and quite a few wonky ones as well so the 250 box challenge will be a great next step for you.

Overall this was a 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. My biggest tip going forward would be just make sure you draw bigger. 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

This critique marks this lesson as complete.
3:18 PM, Monday October 4th 2021

Thanks for the prompt critique, Rob. I greatly appreciate it.

It was brutal for me to not re-do some of the portions, in search of better accuracy, but I really want to work on that confidence and consistency first and thinking I could just do it again if I was unhappy would have been detrimental to that I believe. I just make sure I include in my warmups the areas that I feel I'm weakest on, and I believe you and I are in agreement on what those areas are.

As for the rotated box exercise - the one I submitted my was my third approach and first attempt at the full sphere. I had done the two major axises twice as a warm up in an attempt to get a feel for the scale and rotation. Funny enough, these were my largest boxes for this exercise, as well. I kept feeling like I was making them far too large and was only slowly increasing the scale. Once I have the 250 boxes, and maybe lesson 2, complete I'll jump back to revisit this exercise and see how I can do then.

Thanks again, Rob, and stay well.

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.
The Art of Brom

The Art of Brom

Here we're getting into the subjective - Gerald Brom is one of my favourite artists (and a pretty fantastic novelist!). That said, if I recommended art books just for the beautiful images contained therein, my list of recommendations would be miles long.

The reason this book is close to my heart is because of its introduction, where Brom goes explains in detail just how he went from being an army brat to one of the most highly respected dark fantasy artists in the world today. I believe that one's work is flavoured by their life's experiences, and discovering the roots from which other artists hail can help give one perspective on their own beginnings, and perhaps their eventual destination as well.

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