Lesson 1: Lines, Ellipses and Boxes

3:17 PM, Wednesday January 25th 2023

Drawabox Lesson 1 2023 - Album on Imgur

Direct Link: https://i.imgur.com/0GcgRW9.jpg

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Apologies - my fine liner was clinging to life in a few of these assignments. Please let me know if there are any issues with the link to the submission.

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5:49 AM, Thursday January 26th 2023

Welcome to drawabox, and congrats on completing Lesson 1. Let’s see how you did.

Starting with your superimposed lines, these look mostly good. They’re smooth, and properly lined up at the start, but not always of a consistent trajectory, so be mindful of that please. Remember that, rather than course-correcting mid-line, in an effort to stick as close to the guideline as possible, it’s more important to keep the trajectory consistent, even if it’s off!

The ghosted lines look solid, if a little unambitious.

The ghosted planes look quite confident, also, though the ellipses make it a little hard to tell if you’ve plotted start/end points for their non-diagonal center lines. If you haven’t, please do, from now on.

Moving on to the ellipse section, the table of ellipses exercise looks good, if a little lacking in variety (looking at the degrees/angles of your ellipses, specifically). I’ll accept the fineliner as-is, since there’s nothing you can do about it, however I will ask that, even if you can barely see the line, you don’t draw over it again. For your ellipses, this means not rotating around them any more than 3 times, no matter what.

The ellipses in planes are nicely done. I appreciate that you’ve even thought about perspective a little, here, but be careful not to take on too many things at once. If focusing on accuracy (something that’s optional) means that your confidence (not optional!) suffers – as it does here from time to time – then it’s best not to.

The ellipses in funnels also suffer from confidence issues, from time to time, though in this case I expect that that’s due to their size. Instead, what I’ll highlight as an issue is that sometimes you’ll add an ellipse even if there’s no (full) minor axis or frame to align it to. That’s an issue, because that’s an ellipse aligned to nothing, or, to put it another way, an ellipse with no goal.

The plotted perspective exercise looks good, if a little bare. You should’ve used a ruler for the hatching lines here, by the way!

I’m glad that, in the rough perspective exercise, you quickly realized that the correction lines should follow the lines, not the point. It’s unfortunate that your last attempt at this exercise (the bottom frame on page 2) has boxes that barely converge. I’ll assume that this was a different day, and not hold it against you, but I will request that you take your time with these. Plot a point, check it, alter it, check it again, and only then, if it’s good, commit to it. Otherwise, continue altering.

The rotated boxes exercise is missing its entire top layer, but judging what’s here, it looks good. Your boxes are big, and snug, and though they don’t rotate as much as we’d like, they do attempt to. This is less the case in the back (your far planes are a little flat, I’m sorry to say), but that’s entirely expected, and not something to stress over. We’ll be going into that in the box challenge, anyway.

Speaking of boxes, the organic perspective exercise is nicely done. I’ll quickly, once again, remind you that if a line stops short (be it because of your pen, or any other reason), you should not continue it in a separate stroke. Beyond that, the only issue is one to do with foreshortening (your lines will sometimes converge more dramatically than they should; other times they’ll diverge), which we’ll get in to in a second, anyway.

Next Steps:

I’ll be marking this lesson as complete, so may head on over to the box challenge. Good luck!

This critique marks this lesson as complete.
11:34 AM, Thursday January 26th 2023

Thank you so much for your time and critiques! I will review before I begin the box challenge. Have a good day!

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Sakura Pigma Microns

Sakura Pigma Microns

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.

In terms of line weight, the sizes are pretty weird. 08 corresponds to 0.5mm, which is what I recommend for the drawabox lessons, whereas 05 corresponds to 0.45mm, which is pretty close and can also be used.

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