Welcome to drawabox, and congrats on completing Lesson 1. Let’s take this one exercise at a time, shall we?
Starting off, your superimposed lines are well done. They’re smooth and properly lined up at the start, and of a consistent trajectory. I’m pleased to see that you’ve experimented with some arcing lines, too – these look good! Your ghosted lines/planes look mostly good, also. I notice, however, that these will sometimes arc a little near the ends. Likely what’s happening is that you’re giving your brain a chance to have a say in how the line looks (course correct, as it were), but this is not something we want! What we want is for our lines to behave as we instructed them during ghosting. I notice that this is particularly an issue with the non-diagonal center lines of your planes, so perhaps the fact that you haven’t plotted start/end points for these is the culprit. After all, that would mean that you’re not simply drawing a line from point A to point B (as with the others), but rather also having to think about its length and direction.
Onto the ellipse section, the table of ellipses exercise looks great! I love how big your ellipses are here, and they’re all of them smooth, rounded, and properly drawn through. There’s not as much variety as we’d like when it comes to their degrees/angles, which is unfortunate, but not a huge deal, anyway. Your ellipses in planes are very well done, too. There’s a few instances where you’ll miss the plane by quite a lot, and I bring this up to say that that’s completely fine! Accuracy is no concern of ours – all we want is for our ellipses here to be smooth, rounded, and properly drawn through. The funnels are a little complicated. They’re not bad, but the one at the top is so completely wrong, that it makes me wonder whether you just kind of drew what you saw, or if you properly understood what you were supposed to be doing. The minor axis of the funnel is meant to cut each ellipse into equal, symmetrical halves. Unfortunately, you’ve drawn one of the arcing lines in such a way as to make that impossible for you, in that particular funnel. Normally, you’d be allowed to redraw this, since it’s an issue with the frame itself (if the frame is wrong, the exercises will be wrong, too); that you haven’t, or even ignored it and moved on to the next, is a little strange. By the way, the minor axis should extend all the way through a funnel, also. Many of yours stop halfway through, and then you’ll keep adding ellipses that are essentially aligned to nothing.
The plotted perspective exercise starts the box section off well. If you’re worried about the back lines being a little crooked, don’t be – that’s simply a result of small accumulating errors throughout the box. The rough perspective exercise shows some good improvement throughout the set. Be careful, however, as even by the end, there’s the occasional back line that’s not parallel/perpendicular to the horizon. Your back shapes need to be rectangles, not trapezoids! If your points are such that they suggest that they should be, then it’s your points that are wrong. In which case, please take another look at things. Same as with the funnels, there’s no sense in doing something that you know is wrong. Good attempt at the rotated boxes exercise. You’ve certainly struggled, but this is expected. What’s important is to do your best, and see the exercise through to the end, anyway, which you have! Your main issue here – it appears to me – is that you weren’t sure when to respect the neighboring edges, and when to try to fix things yourself, seeing that they had gone wrong, which is an expected problem. As we progress through the box challenge, we’ll gain some knowledge that will make the second issue obsolete (and in the cases when it doesn’t, give us enough knowledge to be able to fix things, anyway), so no stress. For now however, you’re good! Good work with the organic perspective exercise. There’s the occasional diverging line, but for the most part, your boxes are well done. Be careful, however, that a box that overlaps another doesn’t hide it – we’re in the habit of drawing through our forms, when we can. Also, be a little more careful with the size of your boxes; they don’t flow as well as they should, here, since that’s a little inconsistent. A great start, however!
Next Steps:
Everything else looks good, so I suppose I’ll give you the benefit of the doubt when it comes to the funnels, and move you along. Please, however, if you have any doubts about your understanding of that exercise (and what I said), give the text article another read! Otherwise, onto the box challenge. GL!
Hello Benj! Thank you for the critique. I am an absolute beginner when it comes to the more refined drawing techniques. I didn’t even notice the curved ends of the lines on the ghosted lines and ellipses in planes exercises. I suppose from now on, I should take a closer look at my work after finishing an exercise.
As far as the funnels, I don’t think I understood the exercise well enough. But I promise I read the article and watched the videos along with it. As with my table of ellipses and funnels, I didn’t really understand how to change the angles. I think it was one of those “I didn’t know what I didn’t know” moments. But looking at it after reading your critique, I understand what you’re saying now.
Speaking of those types of moments, it also did not occur to me that my back lines should have been parallel with the horizon. But that makes total sense now. Most of the perspective concepts didn’t fully click until the 2nd page of the Organic Perspective exercise.
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.
On the flipside, they tend to be on the cheaper side of things, so if you're just getting started (beginners tend to have poor pressure control), you're probably going to destroy a few pens - going cheaper in that case is not a bad idea.
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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