5:18 PM, Friday May 14th 2021
Hi! So, definitely not the case regarding the planes. If that argument worked, you’d never stop drawing planes, because at the end of the page you’d be better off than you were at the beginning. That’s alright, though, just for future reference.
The superimposed lines look solid. They’re smooth, properly lined up at the start, and of a consistent trajectory. They tend to hook a little at the end, though. This usually happens when the student pulls the pen back to the starting point before it’s fully off the page, so see if you can be a little more conscious of the start/end of the motion from now on. The ghosted lines are mostly good. 2 things. First, I notice that you’ll sometimes hesitate a little at the beginning of your line. Don’t. Easier said than done, of course, but go about this by spending a little less time lining up your pen. It doesn’t need to be perfect; it does need to be straight. Also, there’s only one instance of this, but you’ve continued a line that stopped short in a different stroke. As you might expect, that’s incorrect. The ghosted planes look good, as expected, but there’s a bit of overshooting to them, which is present in the very last exercise, too. Though this is fine for this lesson, see if you can consciously work to reduce it during the box challenge.
The ellipses in planes exercise is mostly good. 2, very minor things. First, draw through your ellipses a full 2 times, not 1 and change. Second, see if you can lift your pen off the page at the end of said rotations, rather than flicking it off, as a way to get rid of those tails at the end. Save for the previous advice, the ellipses in planes exercise looks great. You’re clearly prioritizing their smoothness/roundness, and their accuracy is quite good, too. Funnels are a little small, though this hasn’t necessarily hindered you in any way (generally, though, we recommend our students draw big; small motions, especially small ellipses, are really difficult from the yet-unfamiliar shoulder pivot).
The hatching on the plotted perspective exercise looks fine, actually. The face you’ve hatched, I mean – either of them works, because they’re both at the ‘front’ of the box. The quality, on the other hand, is another issue. It seems like you did this free-hand? You should’ve used a ruler for it.
The rough perspective exercise is good as a start. Line quality is confident, and convergences improve throughout the set, though not as much as we’d like, and at the cost of the back lines. Let me explain. Regarding the first point, the issue is that though they make an effort to converge, the depth lines don’t get quite as close to the VP as we’d like them to. Looking at your points, it seems like you’re going with a lot of your first guesses. This is not necessary, though. After you’ve got a point down, you’re meant to check it (by ghosting it to the horizon), and if you find it to be unsatisfactory, it’s perfectly fine to re-do it. As for the second issue, the back lines being parallel/perpendicular to the horizon is not something to think about in one step, and then forget – in doing so, you make it so that the convergence by itself determines the location of the point, but it’s in fact a combination of the two. Though this seems to complicate things, it actually does just the opposite, as it narrows down the correct answers by quite a lot.
The rotated boxes exercise is really well done. The hatching seems to have been done freehand, and the far planes of your boxes are at times a little flat, but that’s minimal. Your boxes are big, confident, snug, and do a decent job of rotating. Next, you’re to apply what you’ll learn in the box challenge to these boxes, and have it override a lot of the guesswork. Until then, though, this is more than satisfactory.
Save for the overshooting issue I mentioned earlier, and (one case of) automatic reinforcing, the organic perspective exercise looks good. The increase in size, and consistent foreshortening of your boxes do a good job of suggesting their flow, and their errors regarding convergence are ones we’ll get to in just a second.
Next Steps:
Solid work on this lesson. Consider it complete, and head on over to the box challenge.