Lesson 1: Lines, Ellipses and Boxes
4:51 PM, Monday July 13th 2020
Please let me know if this quality is not acceptable, I will try to scan and re-submit.
Thank you again for doing this!
Hello and congrats on completing lesson 1! I'll be looking at your submission today. Your superimposed lines are looking very well done. You are keeping a clearly defined starting point on these and are only getting tapering on more challenging lines and curves which is completely normal. Great work on these. Your ghosted lines and planes are both looking excellent as well. You are doing a great job with the ghosting method and are achieving very smooth and confident linework along with a good degree of accuracy. Keep it up.
Your tables of ellipses turned out pretty good. You are doing a great job drawing through all of your ellipses but really the one more notable issue I'm seeing is that you might be drawing through one too many times on these. For ellipses you typically want to keep your drawthroughs to 2 - 3 times max. I'm seeing 3 - 4 times on a lot of these and it's starting to clutter the picture a bit. Other than that you are doing a nice job getting a smooth ellipse shape overall while still being fairly accurate. Now your attempt at accuracy started to compromise the integrity of your ellipse shapes a bit while you were working on the ellipses in planes. https://drawabox.com/lesson/1/12/deformed I'm noticing it in a few places so it's something you should be aware of. Right now maintaining a smooth ellipse is the priority and while accuracy is important it's something that is built up with consistent practice. Still the biggest issue I'm seeing with these is that you are drawing through too many times on some. You ellipses in funnels are looking pretty good but you might want to try increasing the degrees of the ellipses as they move outwards in the funnel like the example here. https://drawabox.com/lesson/1/13/step3
Plotted perspective looks great nothing to say here. Your rough perspective boxes turned out quite well. You are still using the ghosting method to excellent effect here and your linework is quite good. You did a great job extending back your boxes as well to check your work. Some of your perspective estimations were off but that will get better with practice. You are having a slight tendecy to "redraw" some of your lines that you feel are wrong. Typically it's better to just go with your initial line that is slight off instead of redrawing a correct line as that tends to just add more information that makes the image more confusing.
Your rotated box exercise is probably the weak point of this submission and that is pretty normal considering the difficulty of the exercise. You did a great job drawing through your boxes and keeping your gaps narrow and consistent on these. However, you are running into the common mistake of not actually rotating your boxes but simply moving them back in perspective. Please check the lesson notes here. https://drawabox.com/lesson/1/16/notrotating Your line quality here has also taken a bit of a dive because of your attempt to add lineweight. When you add lineweight you should treat it the same as every other line you draw and ghost it multiple times and then draw it confidently from your shoulder. You appeared to probably have reverted to drawing from the wrist while adding lineweight and it's adding a bit of a chicken scratchy quality to your lines that we want to avoid. Your organic boxes are looking very nice overall. You wrote a little note apologizing for drawing through some of your boxes but don't! There's no rule stating you couldn't do that and if that helps you with constructing your box then do it! These are just exercises after all. You are running into some covergence problems with your boxes but these are looking pretty decent overall.
This was a great submission was a lot of hard work put into it. You showed a good deal of growth working through these pages. I'm going to mark this as complete and good luck with the 250 box challenge. Keep up the excellent work!
This recommendation is really just for those of you who've reached lesson 6 and onwards.
I haven't found the actual brand you buy to matter much, so you may want to shop around. This one is a "master" template, which will give you a broad range of ellipse degrees and sizes (this one ranges between 0.25 inches and 1.5 inches), and is a good place to start. You may end up finding that this range limits the kinds of ellipses you draw, forcing you to work within those bounds, but it may still be worth it as full sets of ellipse guides can run you quite a bit more, simply due to the sizes and degrees that need to be covered.
No matter which brand of ellipse guide you decide to pick up, make sure they have little markings for the minor axes.
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