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Lesson 1: Lines, Ellipses and Boxes

11:46 PM, Wednesday January 20th 2021

PopotoMopoto's Lesson 1 - Album on Imgur

Direct Link: https://i.imgur.com/kwIx8sg.jpg

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I started DrawaBox as something casual to help me improve my drawing abilities, but after doing the first lesson I realize that I want to take this a little more seriously, as I've learnt that my drawing abilities are quite dismal.

Thus, my first lesson submission:

I started lesson 1 with the Pigma Sakura Micron 08 fineliners, but they felt so weird with the first couple lines I thought I got the wrong kind of pen, so switched to a ballpoint. It was only on exercise 2 that I was informed that is how they are meant to be (I thought there was something wrong since drawing at a 45 degree angle was hard). So, I apologize for the orange ball point, I considered redoing it but I thought it wouldn't be representative of my first attempts.

Furthermore, I realized when it was already too late that I should've taken a picture of the ghosted planes before drawing ellipses in them. :| I'll be more considerate in the future...

All in all, things were going pretty well (felt like I was getting better) until the Exercise 9(rotated boxes), 10 (organic perspective). Despite the warnings, these took me by surprise and gave me a really hard time. With lesson 9 I got that you could draw the diagonal lines parallel to each other but could not for the life of me figure out how to draw the other lines so that there seems to be a gradual rotation. With Lesson 10 I had a similar problem with trying to figure out how to display different perspectives, occasionally I'd draw one in a way that breaks the cube.

I'm kinda excited for Lesson two and the 250 box challenge.

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1:56 AM, Friday January 22nd 2021

Hello and congrats on completing lesson one. I'll be taking a look at your submission today. Ballpoint is fine for lesson one but make sure you are using those fineliners for everything onwards. 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. Your ellipses in funnels are having some issues with tilting off the minor axis. https://drawabox.com/lesson/1/13/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/1/13/step3 Your ellipses are off to a nice start and I'm not seeing any really bad habits forming. There's still plenty of room for improvement when it comes to accuracy so keep practicing these during your warmups.

I'm guessing you did both the Plotted Perspective and Rough Perspective homework pages but you just forgot to upload them to this album.

https://drawabox.com/lesson/1/plottedperspective

https://drawabox.com/lesson/1/roughperspective

I'm going to need to see those pages so I can critique them and I can't mark this lesson as complete until then.

The rotated box exercise is clearly a bit of a struggle for you as you don't have the required spatial thinking skills to handle this exercise. This is perfectly fine given the difficulty and the important thing is that you gave it your best shot(two shots even). You did a good job drawing through all of your boxes but this started to fall apart on you because you didn't keep the gaps between your boxes narrow and consistent. https://drawabox.com/lesson/1/16/guessing You are running into a pretty common issue of not actually rotating your boxes in some cases but instead simply drawing them moving back in perspective. https://drawabox.com/lesson/1/16/notrotating 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 for the most part. I am seeing a bit of wobble on some of your shorter lines and this could be happening for one of two reasons. You are maybe reverting back to using your wrist to draw some of these short lines or you are too concerned with accuracy and you are slowing down your stroke to compensate which is causing the wobble. I can't be sure which is happening. Your box constructions are decent but there are some wonky ones throughout so the 250 box challenge will be a great next step for you.

Before that though I need to see those missing pages before you can move on.

Next Steps:

Missing One Page Plotted Perspective Boxes

Missing Two Pages Rough Perspective Boxes

When finished, reply to this critique with your revisions.
2:26 AM, Friday January 22nd 2021

Whoops! I apologize for forgetting to upload the 3 pages. Somehow they slipped by me when double checking. I've uploaded them to the same link, they should be at the very end of the album.

And yes, I am guilty of using my wrist for drawing the shorter lines... I thought it was overkill to use the shoulder for the small ones.

2:29 AM, Friday January 22nd 2021

The plotted perspective looks great, nothing to mention here. Your rough perspectives 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 and I already saw good improvement through this set.

Overall this was a solid submission that showed a nice 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!

You should be using your shoulder for everything but detail work like textures for the most part. Even short lines.

Next Steps:

The 250 Box Challenge

This critique marks this lesson as complete.
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