Lesson 1: Lines, Ellipses and Boxes
6:04 PM, Monday December 27th 2021
Hello!
Here's my submission for lesson 1.
Thanks for your input.
Happy New Year!
Hello, and welcome to drawabox. I’ll be taking a look at your Lesson 1 submission today.
Starting with your superimposed lines, these are looking solid. They’re smooth, properly lined up at the start, and of a consistent trajectory. Your ghosted lines look quite confident, also, though a little less so in the planes exercise, it seems. Try to remind yourself that, though the big picture has changed, what you’re doing (drawing a single line, from point A to point B) has not.
Moving on to the ellipse section, the table of ellipses exercise shows a good start. Your ellipses are smooth, and properly drawn through, but at times a little stiff/bumpy/pointy. These all have different causes, so let’s tackle them one by one. A stiff ellipse is indicative of a lack of ghosting (or a lack of confidence in said ghosting). A bumpy ellipse usually means that you’re a little too concerned with the frame, not enough with the smoothness/roundness of your ellipse. Finally, a pointy ellipse is more often than not indication that a lesser pivot (elbow/wrist) is making its way in, so always check back, to make sure that that’s not happening. By the way, see if you can lift, not flick, your pen off the page at the end of your rotations – it’ll get rid of those tails. The ellipses in planes exercise looks solid, save for some minor issues in those earlier respects; keeping the same quality, and even improving it, in some cases, is praiseworthy – this being a more difficult exercise; keep up the good work. The funnels, too, look solid, but from the weight of your marks I’d wager that you’re pressing down a little harder, here. Don’t stress, and see if you can draw a little bigger – should help.
The plotted perspective exercise looks good, if the boxes a little small.
The rough perspective exercise is a little weak; though improvement comes, it comes too slowly, and there’s too little off it. Let’s start with linework: it’s wobbly, though there’s no need for it to be (refer to the linked section in body paragraph 1), and scratchy. Remember that each line is drawn once, and only once, regardless of how it turns out. Adding more ink to a mistake doesn’t fix it, it just draws the viewer’s attention to it, so it’s something to avoid. As for the depth lines, though it’s clear that they’re making an effort to converge, they’re not particularly good at it. I wonder if you’re forcing yourself to stick to your initial guesses. If so, know that that’s not necessary. In fact, what we encourage you to do is plot a point, and then check it (by ghosting it to the horizon), and alter it as needed, as many times as is needed. Then you commit to it.
The rotated boxes exercise is tiny. This is an exercise where, even when it’s bigger than this, we ask for it to be even bigger - after all, drawing big is a great way to give your brain some room to breathe, not to mention that it helps with exercises where you’ve got a mess of lines to keep track of. Nonetheless, from what I can tell, what you’ve got here is good; your boxes are snug, and properly rotating.
Save for the automatic reinforcing (correcting an incorrect line) comment from earlier, that I’d echo here too, the organic perspective exercise looks good. I do wonder if you’re plotting start/end points for your lines here, though. If you’re not, be sure to. Other than that, however, things look fine; the size and foreshortening of your boxes doing a solid job of conveying the illusion we’re after. Nicely done.
Next Steps:
I’ll be marking this lesson as complete, and moving you on to the box challenge. Do be sure to take note of the critique, however, so as to effectively practice these concepts moving forwards, and improve. Happy Holidays!
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When starting on a project, I'll often open it up and start dragging reference images off the internet onto the board. When I'm done, I'll save out a '.pur' file, which embeds all the images. They can get pretty big, but are way more convenient than hauling around folders full of separate images.
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