Lesson 1: Lines, Ellipses and Boxes

8:37 AM, Sunday January 21st 2024

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I started with some old dying pigment markers, but had new ones a few pages in.

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12:29 AM, Monday January 22nd 2024

Hello and congrats on completing lesson one. My name is Rob and I'm a teaching assistant for Drawabox who will be handling your lesson one critique. 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 looking fine. I'm not seeing any real issues here. Your ellipses are off to a great start but there's still room for improvement so keep practicing them during your warmups.

The plotted perspective looks great, nothing to mention here. The first page of your rough perspective exercises turned out pretty good but then for some reason on the second page you decided not to draw through your boxes like the instructions said to do. Please make sure to fully follow all of the directions for these exercises as you will be assigned revisions for not doing so. https://drawabox.com/lesson/1/20/step7 So as a revision I'd like you to either take your page where the boxes are't drawn through completely and then do that and extend the rest of your depth lines or you can just make a new page. 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. One thing that can help you a bit when doing a one point perspective exercise like this is to realize that all of your horizontal lines should be parallel to the horizon line and all of your verticals should be perpendicular(straight up and down in this case) to the horizon line. This will help you avoid some of the slanting lines you have in your constructions.

Your rotated box exercise turned out pretty well. I like that you drew this nice and big as that really helps when dealing with complex spatial problems. You did a good job drawing through your boxes but one of the reasons this exercise started to fall apart on you is because you didn't keep the gaps between your boxes narrow and consistent. https://drawabox.com/lesson/1/21/guessing Keeping the gaps narrow and consistent really helps with inferring information about neighboring boxes rotation and proportion. While the rotations here aren't perfect this was a good effort overall. The more you draw and develop your spatial thinking ability the easier these rotations are to handle. 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 which is great. While you have a few solid boxes here these ones tend to just be relying on using parallel lines for their constructions and you need to develop a better sense for how box lines need to converge to vps so the 250 box challenge will be a great next step for you.

Overall this was a solid submission that showed a good 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. Once you get that revision submitted and I take a look you can most likely move on to the 250 box challenge.

Next Steps:

One page of the rough perspective box exercise - as a revision I'd like you to either take your page where the boxes are't drawn through completely and then do that and extend the rest of your depth lines or you can just make a new page

When finished, reply to this critique with your revisions.
6:29 AM, Monday January 22nd 2024
edited at 7:27 AM, Jan 22nd 2024

Hi Rob! I appreciate your thoughtful notes.

I did a whole new page of the rough perspective, as I really enjoyed the gamelike nature of that exercise. Here's the new one: https://imgur.com/a/53oBSjV

The bottom box went so well, I suspect I should have warmed up a little more. Is there any generalized guidance on warming up? I recall Uncomfortable mentioning it on some pages (in the context of: use this exercise as you do), and maybe he talked at length about it early on, but I can't find a specific approach of how much / how to decide which exercises to use.

I have a question about the organic perspective ones. The directions say to build a box with the y-method, and then build more boxes, so that's what I did, sticking with the provided method. When I looked at the sample homeworks, a lot of the boxes seemed more rotated than mine were. Is that what you mean about them relying too much on parallel lines? I wasn't sure how else to approach them, but I did like that in the example they seem to be tumbling through space, while mine feel more locked onto rails or something.

Thank you!

edited at 7:27 AM, Jan 22nd 2024
6:06 PM, Monday January 22nd 2024

Okay, this looks much better. When I say you rely on parallel lines what I mean is that the box legs aren't really showing any convergences towards vanishing points which all boxes have when viewed in perspective. If the viewing angle is very far the convergences can "look" parallel but they would still be converging by at least a very slight amount because truly parallel lines would mean the box is growing in size as it moves back in space. The 250 box challenge will go into these ideas in more depth and have a more thorough explanation. Good luck with 250 box challenge!

Next Steps:

The 250 Box Challenge

This critique marks this lesson as complete.
5:26 AM, Tuesday January 23rd 2024

That makes sense.

Thank you!

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