Lesson 1: Lines, Ellipses and Boxes

3:47 AM, Tuesday March 8th 2022

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2nt time doing this, as I've done lesson 1 and 250 boxes independently. Definitely need a lot more practice, but I believe that this is good enough for now. Well I say believe more like hope.

Thanks for reviewing.

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4:33 AM, Tuesday March 8th 2022

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. 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 having some issues with tilting off the minor axis. https://drawabox.com/lesson/1/14/notaligned This is something you should always start considering when drawing your ellipses. Your ellipses are off to a great start but there's still room for improvement when it comes to accuracy 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. I am noticing that you are redrawing lines on occasion and this is a habit you should try and get out of. Try and stick with the initial line you put down even if it's a bit off. Adding more lines just makes things messier and harder to read. 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 decently. Although you drew at a decent size a good tip I have for an exercise like this is to simply draw it bigger overall as that really helps when dealing with complex spatial problems. You did a good job drawing through your boxes and keeping your gaps narrow and consistent. You are running into a pretty common issue of not actually rotating your boxes in some cases but instead simply drawing them moving back in perspective. Obviously you are still struggling a bit with some of the rotations for this exercise which is perfectly fine given the difficulty. You are really only very slightly rotating some of the boxes and in some cases like the top you are almost not rotating them at all but are just moving them back in perspective. 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 really good. You seem to be comfortable using the ghosting method and drawing from your shoulder for confident linework which is great. Although you are redrawing lines here to add line weight it seems I think your work would look much cleaner overall just by putting down a single confident line and sticking with it. I can see that the work you put in doing the 250 box challenge previously has paid off quite a bit as your boxes here are very solid for the most part.

Overall this was a really solid submission that showed a nice 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

This critique marks this lesson as complete.
5:45 AM, Wednesday March 9th 2022

Thank you for the detailed review Rob! Very solid advice that fits with what I felt when going over my own work.

I would like to ask a question about moving forward. As I stated in my submission, I did the 250 box challenge independetly. Should I submit the work I have already done, or should I redo it? I understand the benefit that it could bring me, but it was hard enough the first time.

4:16 PM, Wednesday March 9th 2022

Just submit what you already did. The TA will let you know if you need to do revisions.

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