Lesson 1: Lines, Ellipses and Boxes

3:04 AM, Saturday April 30th 2022

Lesson 1 Lines, Ellipses and Boxes - Google Drive

Lesson 1 Lines, Ellipses and Boxes - Google Drive: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1bNZ7qGRK4OimUFRfV5e1XEQ7PjtWf3ab?usp=sharing

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For drawabox lesson01

Self Evaluate

-I’m an aspiring artist aiming to improve my art skills. I think my drawing skill is too weak so my goal is to build a strong art foundation here. I was familiar with pencil/charcoal drawing in the past but this is my first time drawing with an ink pen. After the box exercise I learned to execute lines with more confidence, also I had a better understanding of perspective.

Superimposed Lines

-I didn’t draw those arcs correctly because I was fraying both ends. Then I noticed this problem when I was drawing the last page so I tried to fix it. Also for the guideline I wanted to use another color so I can see the margin of error clearly.

-I noticed my rotated boxes feel like they’re not actually rotating because

each edge should be lower than their adjacent edges as they rotate to another side(right now they look flat and they’re almost converging towards the same VP)

-Sometimes I know I drew a line wrong at my first attempt so i tried to draw again(and this will make my drawing messy because there are some overlapped lines in it)

I don't know if this is ok. Should I take multiple attempts for a line if I did it wrong or do I just leave the wrong line and move on to draw the next line?

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5:32 PM, Sunday May 1st 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. 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 This helps with practicing different degrees of ellipses. 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 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. The rotations here are very slight overall and could definitely use improvement but that is perfectly normal given the difficulty of this exercise and this was a good effort overall. Your added line weight here is a bit much. Try and be more subtle with it and only go over a line one more time. When you go over the line multiple times like this it buries your initially confident line work and just makes things messier looking. 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. Once again the line weight here is a little concerning as I mention previously it should be much more subtle. Just keep that in mind as you work through the 250 box challenge. Your box constructions are pretty solid for the most part and you seem to have a good understanding of how box lines need to converge to vp's. The 250 box challenge will be a great next step in improving those convergences even more.

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. In regards to your question with redrawing lines you are much better off trying to work with a confident line you put down in error than to just keep putting down more lines to correct it. Keep up the good work!

Next Steps:

The 250 Box Challenge

This critique marks this lesson as complete.
1:46 PM, Friday May 13th 2022

This is super helpful! Thank you so much for your feedback!!!

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