Welcome to drawabox, and congrats on completing Lesson 1. I will critique your work today, Let’s see how you did!
the ghosted lines/planes suffer from some insecurity but in general solid. It’s more important for a line to be smooth, and straight, than it is for it to hit its start/end points, or even start/stop at them. This could also be getting used to drawing from your shoulder, which I am sure will improve over time with enough mileage.
For the Tables of Ellipses exercise you kind of stray away from the instructions of the exercise.
Start off by taking your piece of paper and dividing it into a table with two columns and a bunch of rows.
The 2 columns with clear sections makes it also easier to critique your work and keep things clear.
Some ellipses are more like tubes or sausages, they’re bordering on wobbly, and look a bit rushed. Be consistent about how many times you rotate, don’t decide as you’re going at it, decide beforehand.
If its still unclear, re-visit this page .
For Ellipses in Planes exercise it's overall looking good, you have some misses here and there but definitely better than the tables of ellipses. For the misses, take your time, ghost as frequent as you can until you feel 100% confident.
Next, Funnels, I would suggest here to draw bigger and make more use of the paper space. Most ellipses are looking pretty good like in your ellipses in planes, some misses but that is okay.
The plotted perspective exercise has been done well.
Next, Rough Perspective okay so they're actually hitting the vanishing point closely, with some errors but that will definitely improve with the 250 box challenge coming up. The boxes aren't looking too hot, I’ll definitely encourage you to ghost more and take your time, you’re committing to a mark before you’re ready to. If it still happens even then, then remind yourself that the time for second guessing is during the ghosting stage only – once you’ve decided to commit, you should do so confidently. Be careful, here, especially, that you’re not drawing from the wrist.
For the Rotated boxes exercise, I am glad you fully committed to it. Good that you already experiment with line weight, however it should be a bit more subtle but that will also be covered in the other lessons. I would suggest re-visiting this exercise once you've completed the 250 box challenge and see how much you improved since it is not bad at all for a first attempt.
The organic perspective exercise looks decent. It does have a lot of the same issues as its predecessors , but nothing new. Your boxes are, more often than not, well constructed, and they flow well, as per their size and foreshortening.
Final thoughts:
It will most likely come down to mileage, keep doing these exercises as warm ups, draw from the shoulder and take your time ghosting. Overall this was a solid submission but I will be asking for some revisions before I can mark it as complete since I am also missing the super imposed lines.
Once you've completed your revisions reply to this critique with a link to them, I'll address anything that needs to be worked on and once you've shown you're ready I'll move you on to the next lesson.
Next Steps:
Half a page of super imposed lines
Half a page of Tables of ellipses.
Thank you so much for your review. It was very insightful. I will take your advice to heart and commit to it while doing further lessons.
Here is the link for the revision exercise:
Well done! I will mark your lesson as complete, don't forget to keep doing these exercises as warm ups!
Next Steps:
Onto the 250 box challenge, you got this!
Thanks a lot! Will do.
Let's be real here for a second: fineliners can get pricey. It varies from brand to brand, store to store, and country to country, but good fineliners like the Staedtler Pigment Liner (my personal brand favourite) can cost an arm and a leg. I remember finding them being sold individually at a Michael's for $4-$5 each. That's highway robbery right there.
Now, we're not a big company ourselves or anything, but we have been in a position to periodically import large batches of pens that we've sourced ourselves - using the wholesale route to keep costs down, and then to split the savings between getting pens to you for cheaper, and setting some aside to one day produce our own.
These pens are each hand-tested (on a little card we include in the package) to avoid sending out any duds (another problem with pens sold in stores). We also checked out a handful of different options before settling on this supplier - mainly looking for pens that were as close to the Staedtler Pigment Liner. If I'm being honest, I think these might even perform a little better, at least for our use case in this course.
We've also tested their longevity. We've found that if we're reasonably gentle with them, we can get through all of Lesson 1, and halfway through the box challenge. We actually had ScyllaStew test them while recording realtime videos of her working through the lesson work, which you can check out here, along with a variety of reviews of other brands.
Now, I will say this - we're only really in a position to make this an attractive offer for those in the continental United States (where we can offer shipping for free). We do ship internationally, but between the shipping prices and shipping times, it's probably not the best offer you can find - though this may depend. We also straight up can't ship to the UK, thanks to some fairly new restrictions they've put into place relating to their Brexit transition. I know that's a bummer - I'm Canadian myself - but hopefully one day we can expand things more meaningfully to the rest of the world.
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