Lesson 1: Lines, Ellipses and Boxes

2:34 PM, Sunday September 13th 2020

Draw a Box homework from BoxFoxSox - Album on Imgur

Direct Link: https://i.imgur.com/M3AijTe.jpg

Discover the magic of the internet at Imgur, a community powered enterta...

I was under the impression from the instructions that the ghosted planes assignment was to be used for the ellipses in planes, hence there is no seperate pages of those. Hope that was correct. Thanks for your critique and lessons!

0 users agree
5:05 PM, Sunday September 13th 2020

Hello and congrats on completing lesson one. I'll be taking a look at your submission today. Starting with your superimposed lines these are looking pretty good. You are keeping a clearly defined starting point on these and are only getting significant wavering on longer lines and curves which is normal. Your ghosted lines and planes turned out very well. You are doing a great job with the ghosting method and are getting some very smooth confident linework. Your accuracy isn't quite there yet but that will get better with practice.

The table of ellipses exercise is looking pretty decent. You are doing really well with drawing through all of your ellipses but you are running into some issues with deformed ellipses and I'm seeing it with your ellipses in planes as well. https://drawabox.com/lesson/1/12/deformed The typical reason I see this happen in most students work is that they are thinking about accuracy while making their mark. One of the reasons we use the ghosting method is to build up the muscle memory of making the mark before we actually execute it. This allows us to make our mark almost without thought and tends to lead to a smoother confident line or shape overall. You are probably getting these slightly deformed ellipses because you are still too concerned with accuracy mid stroke. Try and ghost your ellipses multiple times and then almost execute them without thought. I think you are doing this for some ellipses pretty well but for others you are still getting a little too caught up with accuracy. While accuracy is the end goal it's something you build towards once you can nail smooth ellipse shapes consistently. Your ellipses in funnels are having some issues with tilting off the minor axis that you want to be more concious of. https://drawabox.com/lesson/1/13/notaligned One of the most important things you always want to think about when drawing the ellipses is how it aligns to the minor axis. These ellipses are a good start but there's still plenty of room for improvement here so keep practicing these during your warmups.

Plotted perspective looks fine nothing to mention here. You rough perspective box exercise turned out okay. You are running into a common problem I see a lot here which is that you are starting to get wobbly lines. This usually happens a lot with this exercise because this is the first one that requires spatial thinking and students tend to get so wrapped up in that they either skip steps in the ghosting method or revert to drawing from their wrist. So I just want to remind you that you should always be ghosting your lines and then drawing from the shoulder with confidence. Even on short lines like these. Your wrist should be reserved for detail work only. Other than that you did a good job extending the lines back on your boxes to check your work. As you can see some of your perspective estimations were a bit off but that will get better with practice.

Nice job with the rotated box exercise! This is a tough exercise and you did a great job drawing through your boxes and keeping your gaps narrow and consistent. So you did run into a very common problem of not actually rotating some of your boxes though. Please check the lesson notes here. https://drawabox.com/lesson/1/16/notrotating The other thing I want to address here is your added line weight. Your wobbly lines are very present here again and I suspect it's because you are using your wrist to draw again. So if you want to add line weight you should treat it the same as every other line you draw for these lessons and ghost it multiple times and draw from the shoulder with confidence. Your organic perspective exercise is a bit of a mixed bag. Looking at it I feel like you were ghosting some of your lines and they look very confident and with other lines you reverted back to not ghosting and possibly drawing from your wrist which is making them look wobbly. So once again I really want to stress that you should always be ghosting your lines and drawing from the shoulder. Your box constructions could also use quite a bit of work which you will be getting a lot of practice with during the 250 box challenge.

Overall this was a pretty good submission. I think you showed a decent amount of growth working through these exercises and you are understaning most of the concepts these lessons are trying to teach pretty well. I think you just need to do a little better with getting into the habit of always ghosting your lines and drawing from the shoulder. I'm going to mark this lesson as complete and good luck with the 250 box challenge.

This critique marks this lesson as complete.
10:04 PM, Sunday September 13th 2020

Thank you so much for the detailed attention you gave and explaining issues you identified! I'll make a better habbit of ghosting my lines and drawing from the shoulder.

I've actually completed the 250 box challenge. It took weeks!

Best regards,

Dave

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.
Color and Light by James Gurney

Color and Light by James Gurney

Some of you may remember James Gurney's breathtaking work in the Dinotopia series. This is easily my favourite book on the topic of colour and light, and comes highly recommended by any artist worth their salt. While it speaks from the perspective of a traditional painter, the information in this book is invaluable for work in any medium.

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