Lesson 1: Lines, Ellipses and Boxes

9:19 AM, Sunday March 23rd 2025

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something i did not find clear, is how i should do the hatching for the boxes. i tried doing them from my arm, but im not sure if i should have 2 points for each hatching line and if i should ghost each individual line

1:50 AM, Wednesday March 26th 2025

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. A few of your ellipses in funnels are having some slight issues with tilting off the minor axis. https://drawabox.com/lesson/1/18/notaligned This is something you should always start considering when drawing your ellipses. One thing you could have done with these is start with a narrower degree ellipse in the center and then widen the degrees of the ellipses as they move outwards in the funnel. Please check the example here. https://drawabox.com/lesson/1/18/step3 This helps with practicing different degrees of ellipses. Your ellipses are off to a great start but there's still room for improvement so keep practicing them during your warmups.

The plotted perspective looks great, nothing to mention here. Your rough perspective exercises turned out pretty good. It's great that you are keeping up with the confident linework on these. You are also 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 notice that all of your horizontal lines should be parallel to the horizon line and all of your verticals should be perpendicular(straight up and down in this case) to the horizon line. This will help you avoid some of the slanting lines you have in your boxes.

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. While the rotations here aren't perfect this was a good effort overall. The more you draw and develop your spatial thinking ability the easier these rotations are to handle. This is a great exercise to come back to after a few lessons to see how much your spatial thinking ability has improved. 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 fairly solid for the most part and I can see you are developing a sense for how box lines converge to vps. Nice work. To answer your questions if you want to add hatching to the face of a box treat it the same as any other line you would draw for these lessons and try and make sure it connects from end to end of the plane and isn't just floating in the middle.

Overall this was a really solid submission that showed a good deal of growth. Your line confidence and ellipses are both coming along nicely. 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. Keep up the good work!

Next Steps:

The 250 Box Challenge

This critique marks this lesson as complete.
12:16 PM, Wednesday March 26th 2025
edited at 12:20 PM, Mar 26th 2025

thanks for the insightful critique. just to clarify, so i should plan a start and end point for each hatching line, then ghost each line, then draw the line, do that 500 times just for one box? That seems like a lot :(

edited at 12:20 PM, Mar 26th 2025
5:22 PM, Wednesday March 26th 2025

When it comes to hatching, you're essentially repeating the same line over and over - so if you can maintain a rhythm, you can carry over the preparation of the previous mark into the next. But if your rhythm breaks, you should go through the ghosting method process again from the start for the next one.

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