Lesson 1: Lines, Ellipses and Boxes

1:58 PM, Thursday October 21st 2021

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Here we go with Lesson 1 ! Thanks in advance ! :)

  • C
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6:53 PM, Thursday October 21st 2021

Hey there, I'll be your TA today so let's get to it!

Your super imposed lines are off to a good start but I am seeing some significant wobbling meaning you should be drawing at a more confident and swifter pace with your shoulder. Much of the same can be said for your ghosted lines so keep practicing and that mileage will help you develop more confidence in your mark making.

Your ellipses are off to a really nice start! you are doing a good job at drawing through them the appropriate amount as well as keeping things smooth and confident. With your ellipses in planes, you are doing a good job trying to hit all of the points on the planes to ensure that your ellipse is settled firmly in space. With your tables of ellipses you are staying consistent in orientation and you are keeping things packed tightly to avoid ambiguity. Your ellipses in funnels are looking okay, but there are times when you get a little sloppy and come outside of the bounds of the funnels. For the most part you are doing a good job at keeping your minor axes aligned with the funnel axes.

Now let's look at your rough perspective. You are doing a good job at keeping your horizontal lines parallel to the horizon and your vertical lines perpendicular resulting in properly oriented boxes. I am seeing a hesitance in line confidence which is common for students once they move on from drawing arbitrary exercises to more concrete things. Just remember that a box is made up of 12 lines and each line should be planned for, ghosted, and executed when ready. This process will take you quite a bit of time at first, but with practice, like most things, it will get faster. Your converging lines are on the right track and your accuracy for lines aiming at distant points will improve with time and practice.

Let's take a look now at your rotated boxes. Overall, this was a really good effort. For this exercise all we expect our students to do is try their best and push through to completion. You did that very well aside from missing the far corner boxes. Your line confidence is definitely improving, which is great to see! Keeping all that in mind I do have a list I rundown of all the key concepts of this exercise just to further cement the learning.

Adjacency - Your adjacent lines are drawn nice and close so you can properly utilize them as perspective guides. Good job! This is a really useful technique so I’m glad you're understanding it and can properly leverage it.

Rotation - Your boxes are not rotating much, but rather skewing and shifting over, so give this gif some more attention and try to internalize how the rotation is driven by the vanishing points moving along the horizon.

Scale - You have some more room on the page you could have utilized. A good rule of thumb is to draw as large as you can so that your brain has the most room to work through these spatial problems. It sounds kind of odd, but it really does work.

Finally let's take a look at your organic perspective. Overall you did a really nice job here. You have a lot of good motion in your compositions, you drew lots of boxes to give yourself lots of practice, and you explored three-dimensional space well with scaling down boxes as they recede into the background. while you have a little bit of forms overlapping I would have liked to see more because that overlap is what causes the brain to perceive these forms as occupying a single space on the page. your perspective is off to a good start; I am seeing some divergence ( where near planes are smaller than far planes, opposite of expected), but that will get worked out with the box challenge. One last little nitpick I have is regarding line weight. Whenever you want to add line weight it is an application of the superimposed line exercise so make sure you are ghosting that line and only putting it down when you can confidently do so. There are some lines here when you try and add line weight you end up with a double set of lines which is not what we want.

You have done a good job with this lesson and I will be marking it as complete. Your next step is the 250 box challenge, so keep up the good work and we will see you next time.

Next Steps:

Feel free to move on to the 250 box challenge

This critique marks this lesson as complete.
5:30 PM, Monday October 25th 2021

Hey Svendogee !

Thanks so much for your detailed and helpful feedback!

Scale is a good point with the rotated boxes excersise - I find usually when I am trying to draw I go over the page so I think I was a bit cautious and underdid it size wise on the central box. I'll give it another go at some point (we'll see how I feel after the 250 box challenge!) and try and consciously draw out as big as possible. I appreciate all of the advice, I'll keep going with the ellipses & ghosted lines warm up excersises too, of course.

Thanks again, now onto the 250 !

C

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