Lesson 1: Lines, Ellipses and Boxes

1:28 PM, Sunday April 11th 2021

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Hello,

I still seem to have trouble at this point drawing straight lines that connect properly without overshooting (even when using the ghosting method.)

Thanks in advance for checking my homework.

  • Terry
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2:37 PM, Monday April 12th 2021

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/1/13/notaligned This is something you should always start considering when drawing your ellipses. Your ellipses are off to a good start but there's still plenty of room for improvement when it comes to accuracy so keep practicing these during your warmups.

The plotted perspective looks great, nothing to mention here. Your rough perspective exercises turned out pretty good. You are getting a mix of confident linework here along with some wobble creeping back into some of your lines. Once again this is probably happening because you are more concerned with accuracy now that you are constructing boxes and you are slowing down your stroke to compensate. You are 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 straight up and down. This will help you avoid some of the slanting lines you have in your constructions.

Your rotated box exercise turned out pretty well. I like that you drew this nice and big as that really helps when dealing with complex spatial problems. You also 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. https://drawabox.com/lesson/1/16/notrotating This is a great exercise to come back to after a few lessons to see how much your spatial thinking ability has improved. I do want to mention the hatching you did here. Always make sure the marks you are putting on the page are intentional which you did for the most part. You never want to be mindlessly hatching and end up scribbling which I'm noticing in a few spots. Your organic perspective exercises are looking pretty good. You seem to be getting comfortable using the ghosting method and drawing from your shoulder for confident linework which is great. Your box constructions are decent for the most part but there are some wonky ones here and there so the 250 box challenge will be a great next step for you.

Overall this was a solid submission that showed a nice deal of growth. Your line confidence and ellipses are both coming along nicely. Keep practicing those ellipses during your warmups. Otherwise, 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!

Next Steps:

The 250 Box Challenge

This critique marks this lesson as complete.
7:35 PM, Monday April 12th 2021

Thank you for the feedback!

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A lot of my students use these. The last time I used them was when I was in high school, and at the time I felt that they dried out pretty quickly, though I may have simply been mishandling them. As with all pens, make sure you're capping them when they're not in use, and try not to apply too much pressure. You really only need to be touching the page, not mashing your pen into it.

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