Lesson 1: Lines, Ellipses and Boxes

6:16 PM, Friday January 22nd 2021

Drawabox Lesson 1 Homework - Album on Imgur

Imgur: https://imgur.com/gallery/KB7hsKy

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Hello!

I got halfway through lesson 2 before I signed up for Patreon, whoops!

I've re done one page of every exercise for this submission, the second pages are from my community post which I did a month ago. I don't think I've actually got any better over the last month, if anything, my ellipses got worse. (I was really struggling to relax and draw them confidently) Maybe I'm just more aware of my mistakes after critiquing a bunch of L1 community submissions myself.

Anyway, thanks in advance for looking at this.

Ps. Please don't make me redo all 250 boxes. I'll drown in my own tears.

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8:59 PM, Saturday January 23rd 2021

Hello and congrats on completing lesson one. I'll be taking a look at your submission today. 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 is coming along pretty good. You are doing a good job drawing through your ellipses but you did regress a bit on your ellipses and it's really for one reason and that is because you are too worried about accuracy and it's making your marks less confident. The same the issue is happening with your ellipses in planes and it's causing wobbly lines and deformed ellipses on occasion. https://drawabox.com/lesson/1/12/deformed This is likely happening because you are too worried about accuracy and are probably slowing down your stroke to compensate. Try and rely a bit more on the muscle memory of the motion you build up while ghosting and almost make your mark without thinking. This will be less accurate at first. Although accuracy is our end goal it can't really be forced and tends to come through mileage and consistent practice more than anything. The same wobble issue is happening with your ellipses in planes but I'm not seeing any problems otherwise. Your first table of ellipses and ellipses in planes are slightly better which you noticed yourself. It's really just a matter of worrying less about accuracy and going for a confident mark. So make sure you keep practicing these in 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.

The rotated box exercise is excellent. I can see that your spatial awareness has increased a lot from going through the 250 box challenge already. 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. Nice Work. Your organic perspective exercises are looking good. You are getting very comfortable using the ghosting method and drawing from your shoulder for confident linework which is great. Your box constructions are really solid and it's clear that you've gone through the 250 box challenge already from your second page.

Overall this was a really well done submission and you showed noticeable improvements on all of the pages you did after the 250 box challenge besides the ellipses. Ellipses are hard to draw so just keep practicing them during your warmups and don't worry too much. Improvement can come more slowly on certain aspects of drawings so don't get discouraged. I'm going to mark this as complete and you can submit your 250 box challenge in two weeks. Good luck and keep up the good work!

Next Steps:

The 250 Box Challenge

This critique marks this lesson as complete.
9:24 PM, Saturday January 23rd 2021

Hello Rob.

Thank you very much for taking the time to examine my homework and write such a helpful critique. Several valueable points to take away from this, most of all lots of practice with ellipses, focusing on confidence over accuracy.

Just to clarify, do you want me to resubmit my box challenge as it is, after the two week cool-down period? No extra boxes needed to appease the box king?

10:23 PM, Saturday January 23rd 2021

Since you have done them recently you should just be able to submit them after the two week cool down period. Another TA will take a look at it then but I'm guessing you won't get redo's based on what I'm seeing here.

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