Lesson 1: Lines, Ellipses and Boxes

11:31 PM, Tuesday February 25th 2020

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There is an odd page with planes without ellipses. This happed because after doing one page of Ellipses in Planes, I decided that my planes are too skewed and remade the second page.

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8:46 AM, Thursday February 27th 2020

Hey there, TA Meta here to look over your work, so let's get started!

Beginning with your superimposed lines, these are looking fantastic, you've kept a confident pace throughout the length of the lines, accepting the trajectory of the line as it is. You've also taken the time to line your pen up with the starting point, which has limited fraying to one end of the line.

Next, your ghosted lines and planes are looking pretty straight and confident. You do have a tendency to arc your lines which is pretty natural and normal, as our arms have a habit of doing this. As noted in the link above, you can try compensating for this by arcing slightly in the opposite direction.

To your tables of ellipses and again, these are full of confidence have a great flow to them. You've packed the ellipses in there nice and tight. Next, your ellipses in planes are looking good, you've nearly got the ellipses touching all four sides of the plane. That said, you've not sacrificed confidence for accuracy here, which is what we like to see in this exercise, with accuracy coming with time and practice.

Finally, your funnels are off to a good start with the majority of your ellipses well aligned to the minor axis. There's only the occasional one that is slightly skewed off, which is good to see. There are one or two ellipses in here that are a little less well-shapen than some of your earlier once, so make sure you're keeping up that confident flow we saw earlier.

Next, you're keeping your horizontals parallel and verticals perpendicular to the horizon line in your rough perspective, which is great to see, this is exactly what we want to happen when we draw in one point perspective. One thing I will note is that while it's okay to apply line weight to your boxes, make sure you're doing so with a confident stroke as in your superimposed lines. Again, if doesn't matter if you don't hit the mark entirely accurately, as line weight is something that should be used subtly and if the line is close enough, it will lend a heavier weight to the area anyway.

Onto your rotated boxes and you've done a good job keeping the gaps between your boxes tight and consistent. Just keep an eye on your line confidence as I noticed things got a little scratchy on the outer boxes. You've managed to rotate the bottom diagonal boxes rather nicely, while the cardinal points have more of a tendency to follow the vanishing points of your previously drawn boxes rather than rotating and causing their vanishing point to slide along the axis (horizon line). All we ask of students at this stage is to take their best shot at these last two exercises, in order to introduce them to new concepts that they can leverage in the box challenge.

Finally, your organic perspective compositions are off to a good start. You've varied up the size of your boxes in order to convey a sense of scale in each of the scenes, though it would have been good to have seen more boxes packed in there, possibly with some overlapping - don't be afraid to do this, as being able to deal with that kind of visual noise is really useful in later lessons. I also notice a little bit of automatic correction going on, which we strongly discourage students from doing as it's a bad habit and tends to draw more attention to the original mistake - not to mention it can undermine the solidity of your drawing.

Next Steps:

Overall, your work is quite strong, try not to get too overwhelmed by boxes and take your time to plan out each of your lines. Feel free to move onto the 250 box challenge.

This critique marks this lesson as complete.
8:09 PM, Saturday February 29th 2020

Thank you for the review! I will try my best to improve on those points you highlighted.

Also could you please explain what is automatic correction you were talking about in the last paragraph?

9:18 PM, Saturday February 29th 2020

Sorry about that, I really didn't explain myself very well there!

So automatic correction is when you make a mistake in drawing a line, then you realise and go "Oh no, that's wrong" and then try to draw the correct line instead. I've marked on your organic perspective where I was seeing this happen in this picture.

We discourage this because it tends to be a kneejerk (automatic) reaction to being wrong and it draws more attention to the mistake - not to mention these kinds of reactions create lines that aren't planned like all our lines in Drawabox should be.

6:55 AM, Sunday March 1st 2020

Thank you for the explanation!

6:57 AM, Sunday March 1st 2020

Thank you for the explanation!

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