Lesson 1: Lines, Ellipses and Boxes
8:45 PM, Wednesday July 31st 2024
Lesson 1 Assignments. Thank you for your critique.
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4:10 AM, Thursday August 1st 2024
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 although you didn't fully bisect your planes. https://drawabox.com/lesson/1/15/step4 Please make sure to fully follow the directions for these exercises as you may be assigned revisions for not doing so. 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/1/18/step3 This helps with practicing different degrees of 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 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. While the rotations here aren't perfect this was a good effort overall. The more you draw and develop your spatial thinking ability the easier these rotations are to handle. 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. I do have some notes regarding added line weight I'd like to share. If you want to add line weight make sure you don't revert back to using your wrist and are drawing from your shoulder with confidence. Also added line weight should be subtle so try and only go over a line one additional time instead of multiple times. Your box constructions are improving as you work through this exercise and I can see you are developing a good sense for how box lines converge to vps. There are still a few wonky convergences here and there so the 250 box challenge will be a great next step for you.
Overall this was a really solid submission that showed a good 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
4:58 AM, Thursday August 1st 2024
Hi Rob. Thank you for the expedient critique.
For clarification on the ghosted planes, when you say I didn't fully bisect them are you referring to the actual ghosted planes pages, or are you referring to the elipses with planes pages? If you are referring to the actual ghosted planes pages, can I get a bit more clarification on which bisection I'm missing? If you're referring to the planes in the elispses in planes pages, then I understand what you're referring to here.
Points noted on the funnels and line weight remarks. For the funnels I did want to try to add different degrees. But as I went through the exercise, just getting the accuracy and smooth line work seemed to be meeting/surpassing my capabilities so I refrained. I guess I should have went for it anyway? (I have since tried it in warmups).
And for the line weight, I'll try to be more subtle. I will note that a lot of my thick lines weren't me intending to add line weight, but resulted from me missing on my initial attempts with the line and then deciding to try to redraw it more accurately. I found that on the assignments like the rotated boxes, and organic perspective, which rely on relating your subsequent lines to line that are already drawn, leaving a line at an angle I didn't intend, made it much harder to visualize where I had to go with the next one. So I started redrawing missed lines instead of just leaving the errors for my own sake.
Do you think its better if I refrain from doing so in future exercises and just deal with the additional challenge in terms of visualizing my next lines? Or is it better to have a thicker line than intended if it helps me to visualize the form properly in 3D space? (In terms of practice, I mean. Obviously I know I won't want to have unintended thick lines in my art in general).
Thanks again for the critique. I'll move to the 250 box challenge now.
4:48 PM, Friday August 2nd 2024
My mistake I didn't realize you had pages without the ellispes that were fully bisected. Most people just the finished page of ghosted planes for those ellipses. You're good there.
Whether or not to redraw a line is a tough call. If it's wildy inaccurate it's better to redraw but if it's nearly accurate you're better off just leaving it otherwise it will look like you are trying to add line weight but messed up.
8:58 PM, Friday August 2nd 2024
Sounds good. I'll try to find a good balance than depending on the situation. Thanks Rob.
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