Welcome to drawabox, and a big congrats on making it past Lesson 1. I’m TA Benj, and I’ll be taking a look at how you did.
Starting off, your superimposed lines look good. They’re smooth, properly lined up at the start, and mostly of a consistent trajectory. I say mostly because the longer ones tend to fray a bit too quickly for my liking (which usually means that you’re drawing them a little too quickly!), but it’s not huge concern, either way. The ghosted lines/planes look quite confident, but it seems – correct me if I’m wrong – that you’ve forgotten to plot start/end points for the non-diagonal center lines of your planes. Please do, moving forward.
Onto the ellipse section, the table of ellipses exercise is not great, I’m sorry to say. Overall, I think you’ve drawn through these a little fast, and that’s led to them being a little more squished than they would normally. It also doesn’t help that you’re drawing through these more than the recommended maximum of 3 times, which is making things look very crowded. The ellipses in planes suffer from the same issues, unfortunately, as do your funnels. The funnels are especially bad, because that speed has led to a lot of your ellipses being a little misaligned. It has helped with the smaller ones, as they’re not as insecure as we might expect from that size ellipse, but normally we combat that by drawing bigger, not faster.
The plotted perspective exercise is nicely done. Your boxes here would’ve benefitted from being a little bigger, but they’re good as they are, too. For the rough perspective exercise, you should not have used a ruler for the front faces of your boxes – these are all done freehand. As for the boxes themselves, they do show some improvement throughout the set, but even by the end, you’ve yet to construct a perfect box. I notice that you’ll, more often than not, struggle with the back faces. I wonder if what’s happening is that you’re relying entirely on your convergences to determine them, when in fact, you should be marking sure that your lines add up to a box that’s of the same exact shape as the one it mirrors, in addition to that. The rotated boxes exercise seems to have been a struggle, for sure. We don’t usually fault the student if the box doesn’t hold together, as yours here, but even looking at the boxes on the axes, it seems like you’ve pasted the same box 8 times, rather than drawing them such that they rotate. The fact that this has happened in every quadrant, rather than in only one, tells me that you didn’t stop to consider whether you were doing the work correctly, by comparing it to the example homework, but rather pressed on. That is not a good attitude to have, especially in an exercise where we tell you upfront that it’s too difficult. The organic perspective exercise looks good. The boxes are well constructed, and flow well, as a result of their size and foreshortening. Nice work, here.
Next Steps:
Before I send you off to the challenge, I’d like to see a few things. First, with regards to your ellipses, I’d like to see half a page of the table of ellipses exercise, and another half of either ellipses in planes, or funnels – your choice. I’d also like to see one quadrant (this is to say, one fourth) of the rotated boxes exercise. Take your time with these please. GL!
Hey there Benj,
thanks for looking over my homework. I'll try my best to implement the points you brought up in my future submissions.
Where can I upload the things you told me to re-do?
Edit: I'm a dummy. I'll just send you the Imgur link in this text window of course. Haha, sorry!
I'm really struggling with the rotated boxes. English isn't my first language, I'm having trouble understanding this sentence completely: "I wonder if what’s happening is that you’re relying entirely on your convergences to determine them, when in fact, you should be marking sure that your lines add up to a box that’s of the same exact shape as the one it mirrors, in addition to that."
I don't understand the mirror part to be exact.
I did a whole page of the ellipses on purpose, hope that's fine.
Thank you for looking over it, I really appreciate it.
The re-do looks good. There's still the occasional issue, but you're on the right track; you're free to move on. Let me also address your confusion, though.
So. In the rough perspective exercise, you have one box that is the front face, the lines that head to the vanishing point, and another box that's your back face. You start by drawing the front face arbitrarily, then you extend the lines to the vanishing point, and then you draw the back face. However, when you draw the back face, you need to make sure that its shape is identical to the front face. This is to say, if the front face is a square, the back face needs to be a square, also. If it's a rectangle, a rectangle, and so on. What a lot of students do (and what I said I suspect that you're doing, in my original comment) is that they extend the lines, and then just connect the points to form that back face, without caring about how it looks. However, the bare minimum is to confirm that the lines that are formed when you connect those points are parallel/perpendicular to the horizon. And then, ideally, that they form the same shape of box, too. Let me illustrate it very quickly!
https://imgur.com/a/GF6jK9s does this help?
Next Steps:
250 box challenge
Thank you for the illustration. I now get what you mean I think. I'll look out for these mistakes when I'm trying to complete the 250 Box challenge.
While I have a massive library of non-instructional art books I've collected over the years, there's only a handful that are actually important to me. This is one of them - so much so that I jammed my copy into my overstuffed backpack when flying back from my parents' house just so I could have it at my apartment. My back's been sore for a week.
The reason I hold this book in such high esteem is because of how it puts the relatively new field of game art into perspective, showing how concept art really just started off as crude sketches intended to communicate ideas to storytellers, designers and 3D modelers. How all of this focus on beautiful illustrations is really secondary to the core of a concept artist's job. A real eye-opener.
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