Lesson 1: Lines, Ellipses and Boxes

11:49 AM, Sunday March 15th 2020

Drawabox Lesson 01 - Album on Imgur

Direct Link: https://i.imgur.com/H29RFQs.jpg

Post with 18 views. Drawabox Lesson 01

Hi I just finished my first attempt at lesson 1. I'm pretty much a beginner at art, having started late 2019. I tried to follow ModernDayJames' tutorials but even the most basic ones left me confused. So far Drawabox seems to have much more manageable steps.

I have a very pronounced tremor and this naturally affects my line quality. I don't want a completely free pass but I think it would be helpful if the assessment erred on the side of being less strict in that regard.

Thanks for any help!

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9:18 AM, Wednesday March 18th 2020

Hey there! Welcome to Drawabox. One of the great things about Drawabox is that it'll give you the foundation you need to fill in those gaps in other tutorials as it deals with the very fundamentals that those resources tend to assume as prior knowledge. Regarding your tremor, I had a quick scroll through your album and there's instances where I can see you're capable of overcoming it, so try not to lean on that too heavily as you can definitely do it.

Starting with your superimposed lines, your straight lines are quite straight and confident. You've done a good job lining your pen up with the starting point and thus reducing the amount of fraying present in your lines. You also went straight for the most difficult kinds of lines - ones that extend across the entirety of the page, so make sure you also practice the smaller ones.

For your curved lines, there's definitely more wobbling present, indicating that you might be executing these a lot slower - one of the things that is pretty much a given for all beginners is that to draw confidently, they'll often need to move their arm faster in order to not give their brains time to micromanage the movement. This is also important if you're suffering from a slight tremor - additionally, it may help you to loosen your grip on your pen as over-tensing your arm can exacerbate this.

Your ghosted lines show significant wobbling however this clears up a lot in your ghosted planes, indicating you're executing much more confidently and focusing less on accuracy.

Onto your tables of ellipses and it's good to see you've crammed as many of them in there as possible. I did notice that you missed this part of the exercise, where you try to fit lots of ellipses into a wave pattern. Your ellipses here are quite misshapen and wobbly - again, make sure you're executing at a confident pace (speed is not confidence, but it helps at this stage) and ghosting them out.

Ellipses do feel really weird to execute with the shoulder at first and I can see you hit a good pace in your first page of ellipses in planes, while your second page focused a lot more on accuracy. Ensure that you are not focusing on accuracy over confidence, as an inaccurate, confident line is workable while an accurate, wobbly line will always be wobbly. Finally, despite the lingering issues with your ellipses, your funnels are pretty well aligned to the minor axis.

Your first pane of plotted perspective is looking a little odd since your second vanishing point is not on the horizon line. With the exception of three point perspective, all your vanishing points will be placed on the horizon line. The others are well done however you might need a new pen, or to hold it more vertical to the page, given the lines are fading quite a lot.

Next, it feels like you got a little overwhelmed with the rough perspective. This is pretty normal, students tend to see their first box exercise and struggle to think about and plan one line at a time because of all the other considerations and as a result their line confidence suffers significantly. Overall though, you've done a good job keeping your horizontals parallel and verticals perpendicular to the horizon line and your estimation of the convergences aren't too far off the mark - and where it does stray, it does so in expected ways, such as the boxes further from the vanishing point being more inaccurate.

You've done a good job keeping the gaps between your boxes consistent in the rotated boxes, particularly on the front planes. Things got a little more uncertain in the back planes, which robbed you of the chance to leverage the lines of your already drawn boxes in order to estimate where the next one should go. Additionally, your lines got a bit scratchy here, so make sure you're always planning and confidently executing your lines even if you're uncertain about what you're doing. You've managed a fair degree of rotation on some sides of the box, while the outer layers on others tend to follow the vanishing point of the previous box. That's okay though, we don't expect students to nail this or the organic perspective exercise as they're designed to introduce students to a new kind of spatial problem they may not have otherwise considered.

Finally, your organic perspective is showing some much improved line confidence over your previous exercises. The variation in the size of your boxes is creating a nice sense of scale in your compositions - don't be afraid to overlap your boxes though, as this can contribute quite nicely to this sense of depth. There are naturally inconsistencies in the convergences of your boxes however this is something that you will be able to work on in the 250 box challenge.

Next Steps:

I'm going to request one more page of ellipses in planes. I believe you learned a lot over the course of the lesson and are very much capable of drawing confident lines. I would like to see if you can make your ellipses more confident, if you can find the right combination of ghosting, confidence, and speed to execute your ellipses.

When finished, reply to this critique with your revisions.
1:38 AM, Sunday March 29th 2020
edited at 1:41 AM, Mar 29th 2020

Thank you very much for the feedback META. I realise I forgot to mention that I'm using A5 paper at the moment not A4, so everything is probably smaller than you thought it was. Hopefully that doesn't affect your assessment.

https://imgur.com/a/bMYLTJl

I think you may be right that I was overly concerned about my tremor. I know from playing the violin that practice does help, but it remains a problem even after multiple decades. That being said, the trouble in mainly comes from slow movements that I'm beginning to realise may not be necessary (or even at all desirable) in drawing. I'm starting to feel more optimistic about how good I can get so thank you for the encouragement.

For the assignment this time I hope you don't mind I included an extra page. There was quite a gap between doing what you asked and uploading the results and I feel my elipses have improved since then, so I wanted to show it. Overall I'm starting to feel like I'm getting the hang of straight lines. Though accuracy and consistency are lacking I at least get something close to what I wanted quite regularly. It was me not the pen that was causing the faint lines. I was going really fast trying to compensate for the tremor, but it doesn't seem to be necessary.

Ellipses and curves still feel very far off, but I do believe I'm seeing improvement,which is what matters.

Edit: I just realised there's a box without an elipses in it! :(

edited at 1:41 AM, Mar 29th 2020
1:58 AM, Sunday March 29th 2020

Your ellipses are definitely improving, particularly on the second page. I didn't realise you were using A5 paper - this may actually be contributing a bit to the wobble because you're drawing smaller to fit more into an A5 page.

Controlling smaller lines and ellipses with your shoulder becomes a bit harder because it requires finer control over those muscles. So I'd definitely recommend you try to get your hands on some A4 printer paper, because we're all about not making things harder than they need to be.

I'd recommend it especially for the box challenge, because drawing your boxes large will give your brain way more space to work through the problems you're presented with. As such, we usually recommend students put no more than 5 or 6 boxes on an A4 page.

Feel free to move onto the 250 box challenge now.

Next Steps:

Move onto the 250 box challenge.

This critique marks this lesson as complete.
3:45 AM, Sunday March 29th 2020

Yatta! :)

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