Lesson 1: Lines, Ellipses and Boxes
3:39 PM, Sunday October 13th 2024
Hello! This would be my first submission to this website, many thanks to those who would go out of their way to critique this post!
A small number of your boxes in the organic perspective have diverging lines rather than converging towards a vanishing point and some of them have fairly dramatic foreshortening, but over all looks like you understood the concepts. Ellipses look pretty smooth but it looks like you consistently oversized them. Not a problem to have since you know you can address that much easier than if the were super inconsistent. Seems like you lost a little confidence in your lines for the rough perspective exercise and a small number of the infinite vp faces aren’t rectangular so keep in mind that in single point perspective those front and back faces should consist of lines that are only either perpendicular or parallel to the horizon line. But overall your estimation on the vanishing point angle is good. Your rotated boxes look clean but the degree of rotation shifts very slightly and then rapidly right at the back faces of the outer boxes. I’m assuming this is because you felt you needed to cram them in tighter to avoid overlapping the squares at the sides. Also some of your corner boxes aren’t drawn through, as in they are missing the xrayed back lines, but the overall readability of the page is definitely there so I would say you get what you are aiming for.
Next Steps:
Make sure organic perspective makes it into your warmup rotation to address those diverging lines and remember this exercise asks for shallow foreshortening to maintain a sense of scale. Remember the smaller boxes are meant to be further away and dramatic foreshortening suggests an object is either very large or very close.
Move on to the 250 box challenge.
Thank you for your reply!
I'm guessing the rapid shift in rotation for the rotated boxes is why it looks like a cube rather than a sphere? Thanks for pointing out the missing x-ray haha, I still get a bit lost when there are too many lines on screen, maybe you have some advice for that?
You're pretty on point with why its looking like a cube I would say, if you had maintained that same level of rotation per box it would be more spherical but of course take up much more space on the page. Personally, my method of avoiding that is after drawing my first center box, I take a look at the edge squares then ghost out about how large that last box I draw is going to be, visualizing an estimate of its rotation. Then I do the same for the next box until Im ready to start my first actual rotations, if that makes any sense, and I understand its a method that might not work for everyone. But trying to visualize what something will look like on the page before touching it, I think, is a great way to get better with drawing something that has to have a relation to an object near it. Keeping track of a busy page does get tough. typically in my exercises, when I have a set of steps to follow for a box on the page, I try to just focus on that box until its done. Granted you dont want to lose the big picture of your page as a whole, as comparing to other parts can help you better guess vanishing points, but I will often keep the lesson page open on my computer and sort of make a mental check list of the steps before moving on. But It didnt look like you were having a major issue with that, just a slip up here and there, so keep in mind that being able to keep track of it all is a skill that will get better with time simply through regular practice.
I see, thanks for the advice!
While I have a massive library of non-instructional art books I've collected over the years, there's only a handful that are actually important to me. This is one of them - so much so that I jammed my copy into my overstuffed backpack when flying back from my parents' house just so I could have it at my apartment. My back's been sore for a week.
The reason I hold this book in such high esteem is because of how it puts the relatively new field of game art into perspective, showing how concept art really just started off as crude sketches intended to communicate ideas to storytellers, designers and 3D modelers. How all of this focus on beautiful illustrations is really secondary to the core of a concept artist's job. A real eye-opener.
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